New medicines revolutionise treatment of cancer

Muscat: This article, written by Professor Jonathan Waxman, is the third in a series of articles on palliative care. The Oman Cancer Association and the Oncology Department at the Royal Hospital have introduced a number of measures to enhance palliative care.
We all have personal experience in family and friends and perhaps in ourselves of cancer. And we know how cancer changes lives. We all appreciate and understand the existential pain of diagnosis and empathise with those who go through the rigours of treatment.
Care of the cancer patient is generally good through the active phase of cancer treatment. Surgery and radiotherapy are managed well, chemotherapy is administered efficiently and hormonal therapy and immunotherapies prescribed effectively.
And there is hope in cancer treatment. There are new drugs that have been developed that have revolutionised cancer care.
However, what of the people who we are unable to treat successfully? What of the people who are not cured by surgery? What of the people who have gone through chemotherapy and radiotherapy in whom treatment has not worked? They cannot wait for a glorious future.
They have immediate needs and these needs are defined by pain and weight loss, by loss of mobility and lack of control of body functions, by jaundice, by renal failure, by depression and misery.
What of that poor patient who does not have time to wait for that miracle cure arriving sometime in the next decade? Where is his white knight? The horse is a long way off over the horizon and will not get to him in time for his salvation. And whilst we wait for that white knight, whilst we wait for that white knight to dismount by the bed of the sick, the sick need to be cared for. They cannot be left in hushed and darkened homes looked after by relatives who dare not speak the name of the disease that is killing their loved ones.
Civilised societies have ways of caring for cancer patients who are suffering. That way is called palliative care.
Palliative care works in the community, works outside of hospitals, caring for people in their home so that they do not have to face dying in the cold custody of a hospital bed.
These palliative care teams are considered to be an essential part of the medical group that manages the cancer patient. Sometimes in some parts of the world there is a degree of shame associated with a cancer diagnosis and cancer must be hidden. So come on, let’s move forward to a modern cancer service that funds hospices and ambulatory community terminal care programmes. Palliative care for the dying is of outstanding importance.