How can a palliative care doctor help me during my AML treatment?

How can a palliative care doctor help me during my AML? So palliative care can be integrated into AML care around any number of problems or needs and issues that patients and families may face around diagnosis or treatment or even survivorship or transplant care. So we have studied palliative care integration in AML specifically in patients receiving high dose intensive induction chemotherapy admitted to the hospital for that treatment. Not everybody gets that kind of treatment for AML. It's a bit less common these days now that we have more effective low intensity regimens, but we still do use it quite a bit in certain patients and situations. And in that instance, there's a very high symptom burden. There's a lot of distress, anxiety, depression, even post-traumatic stress resulting from that month or so or more in the hospital. So the area where we have the most high quality evidence showing benefit would be at time of admission for high dose chemotherapy for AML to call a palliative care specialist and have them see and follow that patient and family throughout their month in the hospital with at least two visits per week to focus on those symptoms, distress and quality of life issues that we know were impactful in our clinical trial. We know less about the role of integrated palliative care in AML in low intensity contexts, and that's something that we need to study more. There are some studies ongoing, but most likely palliative care will be effective at helping with those same kinds of issues in the outpatient context. So the symptom burden may not be as severe, but some of the other challenges may be more significant around getting back and forth to the clinic and caregiver challenges and issues and some of the kind of chronic burdensome symptoms related to treatments. So a palliative care specialist can see a patient and family with AML in the clinic and follow them through their diagnosis, treatment and even into maybe survivorship or transplant and help them with bothersome symptoms and quality of life impairment kinds of issues and provide an extra layer of support to augment the high quality cancer care that folks are already receiving.