Preparing for Your First Appointment with Your Oncologist: Dr. Michael Anderson

Описание: Michael Anderson, MD, talks about his work with cancer patients at Dana-Farber Community Cancer Care, and why four ears are better than two when it comes to first appointments. He describes the progress he's seen in cancer treatment over his career and the benefits of cancer care in the community connected to Dana-Farber in Boston. Learn more at http://www.dana-farber.org/About-Us/S...


Transcription:


My name is Michael Anderson. I am an oncologist and hematologist, and I see patients in Dana-Farber Community Cancer Care office in Weymouth. When you’re referred to us in Weymouth or any of our Dana-Farber Community Cancer Care facilities you would already have had materials sent to us by your primary care physician. We would have digested that and read and looked it over to see if we needed to do anything else in the office. We would have planned many times what we were going to do as seeing, but we still need to spend the hour or so with you in order to examine you and to ask questions ourselves.

Dana-Farber Community Cancer Care is part of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and is within that network. The majority of cases, we will be able to take care of you in the community. There are those cases that do require more specialized care. We have then the depth of resources at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to offer to you, so the research that’s being done that’s being taken from the lab to the bedside is available to you if needed. We care very much about you and your family. We care very much about the result and the care that you receive.

So, when a patient comes the first time especially, we really appreciate another family member or some significant other person being there. Four years, six years, eight years are better than just two. When you hear certain things, it will throw your mind into a certain spin that you may not want and that you may not hear the next things that we’re talking about, so having more people there really helps, and then when you get in the care and get home around the kitchen table, you can further discuss what we have already discussed. There’s a lot of information especially in diagnoses that you've never encountered before, and in that information, it takes awhile to understand it.

I chose oncology as a specialty many years ago, because I knew the science of oncology would catch up to the knowledge of cancer and the meaning of cancer within my lifetime, and it’s turning out to be quite true. Now, we’re getting down to the molecular level—we’re seeing mutations, and we’re actually developing drugs that attack that mutation. So, it’s a very exciting time for oncology and the science of oncology in the fact that we can treat these mutations and find very good results.