Recently Diagnosed or Relapsed? Stop Looking For a Miracle Cure, and Use Evidence-Based Therapies To Enhance Your Treatment and Prolong Your Remission
Multiple Myeloma an incurable disease, but I have spent the last 25 years in remission using a blend of conventional oncology and evidence-based nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle therapies from peer-reviewed studies that your oncologist probably hasn't told you about.
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Myeloma = Palliative
Myeloma = Palliative. Let me elaborate.
The current standard-of-care (SOC) for newly diagnosed myeloma patients is usually “potentially curative.” By its nature, potentially curative therapy is aggressive. Even though myeloma is an incurable blood cancer, oncology prescribes aggressive, high dose chemotherapy regimens.
On the other hand, palliative therapy is designed to manage symptoms and maximize quality of life. According to the second study linked below, myeloma survivors experience a fair amount of chemotherapy (toxicity) as well as:
- chronic pain,
- neuropathy,
- or asthenia,
- and may also develop psychological symptoms such as depression and anxiety [2–6]…
I’m just asking a question. If you are a newly diagnosed myeloma patient facing an incurable cancer and documented pain, neuropathy, etc. do you want your therapy approach to be potentially curative and aggressive, high dose therapies or do you want to pursue a palliative, low dose approach?
Just asking. Your call.
Thank you.
David Emerson
- MM Survivor
- MM Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer’
- What Do Multiple Myeloma Patients Die From?
- Myeloma Diagnosis, Prognosis, Cured?
- Multiple Myeloma- End-Stage Diagnosis
A Guide to Curative Care Medical Treatment
“Curative care refers to treatment and therapies provided to a patient with the main intent of fully resolving an illness and the goal of bringing the patient—ideally—to their status of health before the illness presented itself…
Curative or Aggressive Care
Curative care may take many different forms, but all have the same goals. Aggressive care is a form of curative care and represents a proactive approach to medical treatment. This care aggressively aims to eliminate medical issues, rather than simply minimizing their impact…
When It’s Appropriate
With curative care comes hope. Typically, when a patient receives curative care, it is an indication that there is a belief that the patient may potentially recover, or will at least be able to continue living with a reasonable quality of life…
Palliative Care
The term curative care is often used in contrast with “palliative care,” which is a treatment or therapy that does not directly aim to cure the patient. Rather, palliative care aims to provide comfort for the patient in the moment.
Palliative care is a specialized form of health care that aims to reduce suffering and improve the overall quality of life of patients and the families of patients who are faced with life-threatening illness and medical issues.2
Patients with multiple myeloma referred for palliative care consultation: from retrospective analysis to future directions to improve clinical outcomes
“New treatments have improved the overall survival of patients with multiple myeloma (MM). At diagnosis and during the course of the disease, patients often report pain and other symptoms. Given the long disease trajectory, psychological and social issues are also frequent. Recently, the potential usefulness of early palliative care (EPC) was hypothesized in the area of hematology…
More than two-thirds of patients at diagnosis and nearly all during the course of the disease have myeloma bone damage and experience pain from osteolytic bone lesions, but different types of pain occur at different stages of the disease.
In fact, if bone pain is more frequent at diagnosis and relapse, pain from chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy develops during MM treatment (especially bortezomib, thalidomide, lenalidomide, and vinca alkaloids) and can worsen over time from the prolonged use of these drugs.
Oropharyngeal mucositis and somatic pain caused by the use of growth factors are frequent during stem cell transplantation, after which post-herpetic neuralgia is often diagnosed.
Furthermore, long survivors may experience late effects of treatments such as
- chronic pain,
- neuropathy,
- or asthenia,
- and may also develop psychological symptoms such as depression and anxiety [2–6]…
In recent years, although new drugs and treatment strategies have substantially improved the median survival (5–8 years) of patients with MMs, the disease remains incurable [9]. In its long trajectory, pain is a frequent occurrence, but there are many other issues to contend with such as cumulative toxicities from the multiple lines of therapy and the physical, psychological, and social aspects of the disease. Thus, the symptom burden is often high and negatively affects quality of life [10–15]…
Nursing-Led Palliative Cancer Care May Improve Advanced Care Planning
“Investigators reported that nursing-led palliative care may sufficiently improve advanced care planning uptake, defined as an end-of-life conversation with an oncologist or completion of advanced directive, in patients with advanced cancer, according to findings from a secondary analysis of the CONNECT study (NCT02712229)…
“[The study] showed that advanced care planning could be enhanced by having nurses talk about this. This is part of [including] nurses in holistic cancer care, and not just relegating them to be the people who give the chemotherapy or take the vital signs…”
“If we [could, we should avoid] making this a conversation for the very end of life or when cancer becomes very advanced and dire, but instead part of a discussion of having advanced stage cancer,” Rosenzweig explained. “These days, there are so many different treatments, and it is certainly not an automatic death sentence to have an advanced stage cancer. But even more important for patients to think about, if there would be an emergency or a gradual progression towards death, who is going to be helping to make these decisions if the patient is incapable? Does the person who is your proxy decision maker know what you would like and what your preferences are in the context of this illness…?”
Starting Palliative Care Early Can Improve QoL in Family Caregivers of Cancer Patients
“The involvement of palliative care early on in the process of treating patients with cancer led to an improvement in depressive symptoms and quality of life among family caregivers…