How Can Head and Neck Cancer Patients Benefit From Palliative Care?
How Can Head and Neck Cancer Patients Benefit From Palliative Care? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What is palliative care and how could it benefit head and neck cancer patients? Expert Dr. Ari Rosenberg defines this care approach and explains how it can improve quality of life.
Dr. Ari Rosenberg is a medical oncologist and assistant professor of medicine at The University of Chicago Medicine. Learn more about Dr. Rosenberg.
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Transcript:
Katherine:
What about palliative care? How can it help people with head and neck cancer?
Dr. Rosenberg:
Yeah, so, I’ll start by defining palliative care, which I sort of would suggest is either a treatment team, or strategies to help palliate, or relieve, the symptoms associated with cancer, or with cancer-related treatment, which unfortunately for head and neck cancer can be quite substantial. The location of cancers in the head and neck space can have a very large impact on pain, quality of life, speech, swallowing function, and man, many more. And the treatments as well, chemoradiation, surgery, things like that in the head and neck space can also have major impacts on quality of life, and some of those symptoms that patients can experience.
So, oftentimes, management of those treatments – whether with appropriate pain medicines, medicines to help with some of the other side effects of treatment – even support for speech therapies, swallowing therapy, physical therapy, therapy to help with lymphedema, or some of the swelling that can occur with treatment – can all be very, very, very important.
So, when patients come to my clinic, we spend much of the time discussing the treatment, and making sure that the treatment against the cancer is the right thing. But also, quite a bit of time focusing on what other things do we have to do to optimize that patient’s outcome, both in terms of survival, as well as function and quality of life.
