Equity in Cancer Care: Accessing Lifestyle Medicine for All
How can ethical disparities toward equity in cancer survivorship be addressed? Expert Dr. Amy Comander from Massachusetts General Hospital discusses lifestyle medicine and methods and resources to help close disparities in optimal cancer care.
Related Resources:
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Survivorship Care: Screening and Lifestyle Strategies to Reduce the Risk of Secondary Cancers |
What Are the Benefits of Early Integration of Lifestyle Medicine? |
Transcript:
Lisa Hatfield:
Addressing ethical disparities in cancer survivorship is crucial for ensuring everyone has access to the best care possible. Is this a much bigger task than experts may realize? I’m getting to the bottom of it with a respected oncologist in this Patient Empowerment Network RESTORE program.
Dr. Comander, how do you approach the ethical disparities in cancer survivorship interventions, and what steps do you advocate to ensure equitable access to lifestyle medicine and resources?
Dr. Amy Comander:
This is such an excellent question and definitely at top of mind all the time when I’m thinking about our lifestyle medicine program and the various offerings that we have at our hospital. How can we reach out to other communities that may not have access to these tools? For example, two summers ago, I collaborated with a colleague at a hospital in downtown Boston where they don’t really have as many survivorship resources for their patient population.
And we did some group education programs about lifestyle medicine. And I’ll just give you an example. We talked about exercise. And one of the women raised her hand and said, “In my neighborhood, I don’t feel comfortable going outside for a walk. So how am I really going to get this exercise in? I just can’t really walk around in my neighborhood.”
And I think learning from our patients about these concerns is so important. I will say that in that group setting, another woman raised her hand and said, “Well, I went to Target and bought these stretchy bands, and I learned how to do some of these exercises at home. And that’s what I do.” And that led to a really great conversation amongst the participants in the room.
So I do think this is really important. We do need to think about how can we bring these tools from lifestyle medicine to help all individuals facing a diagnosis of cancer. And certainly through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, the organization that I’m very involved in, we do have an initiative called HEAL. Which is really focused on healthcare disparities and bringing tools from lifestyle medicine to all communities. So thank you so much for asking this important question.
Lisa Hatfield:
Okay. Thank you. You heard it here from Dr. Amy Comander. Thanks for joining this RESTORE Program. I’m your host, Lisa Hatfield.
