Reading time: 5 minutes Patty Spears The applause was thunderous and traveled like a wave across the large auditorium at the end of a 2022 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting Plenary Session talk. It did not stop. The audience stood and kept applauding and reveling in the positive results of a clinical... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Patty Spears There are many barriers keeping patients out of clinical trials, even if they want to join the clinical trial. There are multiple steps along the way and each step is a hurdle for patients. A patient must first have physical access to the trial (structural barrier). For example, I... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Patty Spears There are many issues with tissue; that is, tissue donated by patients for cancer research. Patients are often asked to donate tissue when joining a research study. Research on patient tissue is an important step to bring new discoveries from the laboratory to the clinic, which will improve the... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Patty Spears When talking to, or about patients, words matter. Words can hurt and make patients feel blame or guilt about having cancer. It’s not usually done on purpose, so with increased awareness of what words mean to patients, everyone can be a bit more conscientious about what they say and... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 7 minutes Patty Spears There is a lot of effort to find new drugs to treat cancer. When a new drug works well, we all cheer when it is approved and then use the new drug the same way in all patients. Then we move to the next new drug. But, should we... Continue Reading →
When patients volunteer to participate in a clinical trial, their voices should be heard. Reading time: 7 minutes Patty Spears A recent study (Nyrop et. al. 2019) looked at how clinicians and patients reported numbness and tingling in the patient’s hands and feet (peripheral neuropathy) after getting chemotherapy for breast cancer. They call this chemotherapy... Continue Reading →
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