Get The Best Myeloma Care NOW: A Physician’s View from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Advocating for yourself is critical when diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Dr. Peter Forsberg details the value of collaborating with your healthcare team on treatment decisions.
Dr. Peter Forsberg is assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and is a specialist in multiple myeloma. More about Dr. Forsberg here.
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Transcript:
Patient education and self-advocacy I think are critical in multiple myeloma. Myeloma is a complicated disease. Getting your head around it can be challenging. Beyond that we have more and more treatments. Treatments are fairly complex. Our goals can be pretty different patient to patient. So really, patient education can be a key to understanding that and removing layers of complexity from something that can be a little challenging to get into.
I think self-advocacy is also really important in that, sometimes you can feel swept up into a wave of what the next treatments are gonna be, what the next steps are. So, making sure you’re taking time to voice your opinions or concerns for yourself, to make sure that you’re not leaving stones unturned in terms of what your best options are, what the best next steps are, what treatments or testing might be available.
I think myeloma, maybe more so than even some other diseases because it’s such a unique type of cancer, one where patients are often dealing with it for many years… Making sure that there’s a good level of education that evolves over time can help make sure that the patients get the best out of their treatments; to make sure that they’re able to have the most fulfilling experience dealing with their cancer and with their cancer team, and making sure that they’re advocating to get all options available to them in the mix potentially.
I think patients are often very thoughtful about knowing that providers are busy and that clinic can be kind of fast-paced, but I want to make sure that they know that the last thing that they’re ever doing is bothering me or other members of my team when they ask questions. I think one of the keys to making sure that everybody is comfortable with the steps we’re taking with their myeloma is to recognize that it’s a team. And the patients and myself and other members of my team, you know I think that the goal is for all of us to be on the same page and to understand what we’re working towards.
So, I think that my philosophy about how best to take care of patients tis to try to make it as collaborative as possible. To make sure people understand what we’re doing and why. And to be all on the same page I think you have to feel comfortable to take a moment to say, “Why are we doing this?” or to voice concerns about what’s going on or what the next steps might be.
