What Are the Advantages of Seeking Care With a Lung Cancer Specialist?
What Are the Advantages of Seeking Care With a Lung Cancer Specialist? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What are the benefits of seeing a lung cancer specialist? Dr. Thomas Marron discusses the key advantages of specialty care, the value of a second opinion, and options for seeing a lung cancer specialist via telemedicine.
Dr. Thomas Marron is Director of the Early Phase Trials Unit at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital. 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:
What’s the advantage then of seeking care with a lung cancer specialist?
Dr. Thomas Marron:
So, I think it’s extremely important. Unfortunately, a lot of the country, there are not lung cancer specialists available around the corner. But in large cities, there’s typically many lung cancer specialists, but I think it’s extremely important, at least as a second opinion, even if you’re not going to be treated locally by a lung cancer specialist, to seek out expertise.
And often times, I’ll have patients that come from more rural areas outside of New York and they’ll come, and they’ll see me and then I’ll work with their local provider to come up with a treatment plan. Because the fact of the matter is, is that in every cancer type, but particularly in lung cancer, the field is moving so quickly. So, the treatment options that we have available today were not available in 2022.
And we’re going to have probably five to 10 drugs that’re going to be FDA-approved in the next year. And it’s typically the lung cancer specialist where it’s all that we do, we eat, breathe and live lung cancer, we’re the ones that really are up to date on everything. While if you’re seeing a general hematology, oncology provider who I’m always in awe of, they have to stay up to date on lung cancer, breast cancer, lymphoma, leukemia, everything under the sun.
And when you have so much development in the research that’s happening, you really want to be talking to somebody, at least as a second opinion that knows exactly what the most latest data is and what the best options are available. And also, those lung cancer providers are usually the ones that will know exactly where you can go to get access to certain clinical trials.
Katherine Banwell:
In seeking a second opinion, can somebody do a tele-visit, or do you have to actually, physically go to see the specialist?
Dr. Thomas Marron:
So, it depends on the specialist that you’re trying to see.
There are certain institutions that will allow you to do televisits. Oftentimes doctors, at least for their first encounter with a patient really want to see somebody in person, just so that we can really evaluate how functional somebody is. There’s a lot that I cannot tell through my computer screen, through my Zoom call with a patient.
And so, it can be a little bit difficult, but there are many centers, including our own that will offer patients televisits as a second opinion, for us to get a chance to talk to them about their medical history, review, the treatment decisions that they’ve had in the past or the current treatment decision that they’re dealing with and give our own opinion on what they should do.
