Lung cancer specialist Dr. Thomas Marron explains why it’s critical for patients to speak up about any symptoms or side effects they experience—no matter how minor they may seem. From newer treatments like immunotherapy to traditional therapies, side effects can appear in different ways and at unexpected times. Learn how regular communication with your care team can help prevent complications, keep treatment on track, and ensure you get the care you need as quickly as possible.
Dr. Thomas Marron is Director of the Early Phase Trials Unit and Associate Director for Translational Research at the Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Center. Dr. Marron is also Professor of Medicine and Professor of Immunology and Immunotherapy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Learn more about Dr. Marron.
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Transcript
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Marron, I’d like to talk about communication. Tell us about the importance of sharing any symptoms or side effects that a patient may be experiencing with their doctor.
Dr. Thomas Marron:
So, it’s super important at the beginning and all throughout the treatment journey that patients really share lots of details about what’s going on in their body with their doctor. Because every time you come in and see us, we’re typically going to draw blood. And that will tell us some things about what’s going on inside of you. But a lot of things like diarrhea or fevers, those are things that are not necessarily going to show up on a blood test.
And so, unless you tell your doctor that something’s happening, your doctor is never going to know. And it’s really important, especially in this new era where we have dozens of new medicines, which is super exciting, they all have very different toxicities. So, if you went and saw a lung cancer doctor back in the ‘80s or ‘90s, you were just getting the exact same chemo from here to China. We knew exactly what the side effects were to expect, and we could tell you and basically predict how you were going to react.
Now the therapies are very different, especially when we’re talking about immunotherapies that use your immune system to recognize and attack cancer.
Those immune therapies can cause side effects anywhere from head to toe. And they can cause side effects anywhere from two days after treatment to two years after treatment. And so, it’s super important, even if you are having some change in how you feel that you don’t think is in anyway related to the cancer, it’s important that you communicate that with your doctor and their teams of nurses and nurse practitioners and physicians assistants so that they can really vet it and tell you if it’s something that maybe we should work up more or if it’s something that there’s nothing to worry about.
It’s super important not to pooh-pooh things. Especially because if I have a patient who comes in or calls me and says, “I’ve been having diarrhea for two days,” potentially suggesting that there’s some inflammation in the intestines, then it’s much easier to treat that patient and treat the inflammation than if they come in and say they’ve been having diarrhea for two weeks. At that point, those patients end up in the hospital eating bad hospital food and getting intravenous immunosuppression. And it’s much more deadly, even, to have those side effects that have been lasting for weeks and weeks. So, it’s super important to let the doctors know ASAP if anything’s going on.