Controlling and Managing your disease

Your cancer treatment may last for just a few months but for some people it may last for many months or even years. This may at first hearing sound ominous, but it could actually be positive news. That very fact is at the heart of the major advances in cancer treatment in recent years. It is not too fanciful to say that for many types of cancer, it is gradually being transformed from a terminal disease into a chronic, manageable one. For many tumours, that point may still be some way off, but that is a major goal of much cancer research. The universal ‘cure for cancer’ touted in newspaper headlines will probably not be a miracle silver-bullet drug, which taken in one bout of treatment will cure the patient once and for all. Instead, it is more likely to be a combination of the fine-targeting of treatments to make them as tailored as possible to the tumour type and to the patient’s own genetic make-up. The aim is to keep the patient’s cancer ‘under control’, or manageable, on a long term basis. Think of the advances in treating other chronic conditions, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or even HIV. Of course, making cancer manageable needs to be achieved at the same time as maintaining a high quality of life for the patient. 

Throughout your cancer treatments, constant monitoring will be needed to track progress and effectiveness, so tests, tests and more tests could well become a feature of your life. Many patients eventually come to welcome this as a confirmation of continuing recovery and tumour control.