CANCER treament MANAGEMENT
THE BIG SIX
After I brought patients to my office and described the options for treatment, and then the details of that treatment by using my dry erase board and numerous visual aids and models, I would ultimately get to the question of “what's essential to do during
treatment?". As always to help people remember things without a bunch of work, I use the acronym BIG SIX to deliver the answer and would write it on the board with explanations so they can use their cell phone and photograph it upon leaving. Now I pass it to you on this website so you can bookmark this page for easy access.
How Many Steps Do I Need?
Many of the common cancers treated daily in the United States are highly curable with manageable or low toxicities. These favorable ones include the early favorable breast cancers, prostate cancers, and first stage one tumors of other sites of the body such as colorectal, uterine, bladder and so on.
-
In these favorable cases, I would suggest using step one, two and three as a hedge during therapy but also going forward to prevent new additional cancers in the future.
-
On the other hand, if someone is faced with high-risk cancer that has a less than 50% five year survival by predicted outcome, I would then consider all baby steps even up to seven.
I was thrilled to see some presentations recently at the Metabolic Therapeutics Conference in Long Beach California 2/2019 where families found a way to execute the keto-genic diet and use hyperbaric therapies during standard treatments with remarkable outcomes in pediatric brain tumors. Pediatric gliomas universally carry a poor prognosis measured in months, and three presentations of individual results using the above principals were truly remarkable and encouraging.