A New Way to View Past Myeloma Round Tables

You may have noticed a change in past Myeloma Round Table website pages, one that is designed to provide a quick overview to allow you to do anything from going directly to presentations with notes to binge-watching entire sessions.

If you haven’t viewed the pages before, you’ve been missing out on great resources that provide context and overviews of myeloma topics.  And they’re always there for you review again.

Check out the recently posted final three MRT webpage summaries of 2022, Buffalo, Salt Lake City, and Southern California, to get a better idea of how to use them for your purposes.  One of the few good lessons to come out of the pandemic was the realization that we could share Myeloma Round Tables with a wider audience, both live online and annotated on our website.  (During the pandemic, we had more than twenty webcasts on specific topics that are quite relevant today and posted on the Past Events page.)

On the other hand, “As much as attending this type of event online is helpful, it is BETTER in-person,” according to an Myeloma Round Table attendee last year.  But since everyone can’t make it, we made it available to everybody.

Providing Context

Each Myeloma Round Table features two sessions, generally one directed more to newly diagnosed and moderately experienced audiences, one geared more to highlight a particular subject in detail. We changed that a little for the three Myeloma Round Tables just posted.

Perhaps the most important goal of Myeloma Round Tables is to provide attendees and viewers context so that they can better communicate with each other and their healthcare teams. We don’t try to make you experts in the disease, even though it may feel that way sometimes.

It is to provide context that grows and becomes second nature the longer you live with myeloma. And as a former middle and high school teacher, I don’t mind a certain amount of repetition, especially since our audiences are not medical school students.

Some people learn by studying, others by being around something a lot, all of us learn with varying levels of both. That’s a lesson that’s never left me as a former middle and high school teacher.

Here at HealthTree for Multiple Myeloma, in addition to Myeloma Round Tables, we have HealthTree University, Community Chapters, HealthTree CureHub, Podcasts and Coaches; a way for everyone to learn, with a myriad of levels of learning for beginners through the most obsessed, educated patients.  Give as many of them a spin, kick the tires around, so to speak, to find enduring programs that will help lead you to more information about the things the matter to and interest you.

One of the hidden strengths of attending Myeloma Round Tables is the nuance one gets when experiencing an event live.  There may be times it’s hard to understand, but the narrative often pulls you through to understand the main points.

For many, the best parts of Myeloma Round Tables are usually the moderated discussions and audience questions.

Repetition Legitimizes

Although there is predictable overlap among some to the Myeloma Round Table themes and presentations, we try to make each one its own event, focused around the strengths, interests, and opinions of the faculty of each one.

To address the complexity of some of the information, we don’t shy away from repetition in our agendas.  The more one hears differing views or explanations of the same thing, the likelier the information is retained.

That’s why we try as hard as we can to make each session coherent and logical.  Sometimes we do overviews, sometimes into the nitty-gritty details, but we always hope to teach a lot about a little rather than a little about a lot.

• Drs. Morie Gertz, Philip McCarthy and Hillengass laid out how myeloma therapy has developed and the critical roles of stem cell transplant and diagnostics in today’s treatment options in Buffalo.
• How to become engaged with your care was covered by Drs. Douglas Sborov, Craig Hofmeister and Natalie Callander, who were followed by Dr. Manni Mohyuddin about what treatments might be on the way in Salt Lake City.
• Examples of advances in treatment that have upended “three-to-five years” myth was discussed by Drs. Ajai Chari, Krina Patel, Jesus Berdeja, and Amrita Krishnan in Southern California.

Watching some or all of these programs, even the ones that might seem too basic, gives meaning to the phrase “Repetition Legitimizes,” coined by a music blogger.  Think, for example, of that song you can still know the words to after not hearing if for decades.

Living, Not Just Surviving

After the overwhelming interest generated by presentations of Drs. Jens Hillengass and Urvi Shah at the HealthTree Coaches Summit last summer and the importance of their findings and continued research on the impact exercise and nutrition on cancer patients, we felt it was important to delve as deeply into the topic to motivate patients to adopt as many of the good habits as soon as possible.

In Buffalo, Drs. Hillengass and Shah updated the data and findings of their research and Dr. Kirsten Moysich explained how patients can support researchers by providing verified disease-monitoring data for a variety of studies, even some we can’t envision today.

Dr. Krisstina Gowin discussed how treatment and other lifestyle issues impact her research on integrative medicine in Salt Lake City.  Dr. Richard Lee introduced how integrative medicine is being practiced at City of Hope and his colleague Dr. Jessica Cheng described how a new field she is pioneering, physiatry, is adding to the scientific foundation to understand how exercise can improve heath in Southern California.

Join us for the three upcoming Myeloma Round Tables in Austin, Indianapolis and Raleigh/Durham this spring.

Myeloma treatment is entering a new age for the vast majority of newly diagnosed patients.  Living is the focus now.