BETA - Who is the best person to treat my chronic lymphocytic leukemia?

Definitely, CLL patients should be seeing an oncologist, hematologist-oncologist. It's a blood cancer, so they should be seeing their hematologist-oncologist. Now, if you see the general hematology-oncology practices in the community, they're very busy. The bulk of the patients that they see are solid tumors, breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, gut GI cancer. So they see a lot of that. And CLL, which forms less than 1% of all the cancers, is a very small percentage of their practice. So I would strongly suggest, yes, it's absolutely fine to see the hematologist-oncologist in the community, but if there is more specialized care the patient needs, they can seek out specialized centers. There are several factors that go into the choice of who can treat your CLL. First, I think that an important factor is finding a doctor who you can trust, who understands you and can answer your questions. The other important factor is seeing a doctor who is familiar with CLL and takes care of CLL frequently in their clinic and in the hospital. And they have experience with the disease and with the drugs that are used to treat it and understands what kind of expected responses are and what the toxicities could be. I also think that it's quite important to go to a center that is well known for treating hematological malignancies, particularly CLL, because you're going to see experts who are familiar with the diagnosis, are also working in experts in pathology and radiology, and also have clinical trials available. Clinical trials and research is really why we have made so much progress in CLL treatment so far and why we have all the current available therapies for CLL. And so I think it's quite important for you to see a provider or a doctor who may present you with some standard of care options of treatment, but also clinical trial options.