Should I share my survivorship care plan with others? I think it's really important for you to share it with your family or your caregivers, folks that are involved in the sort of day-to-day management of you and helping you out with things. We also really encourage people to share it with their primary care providers. This is an area in cancer care where I think we need to do a lot better work because a lot of times, and this is a little different for myeloma patients because you guys are never finished with treatment, but say you finish treatment with your active oncology practice, and then you transition back to your primary care provider. Well, primary care providers are awesome, but not necessarily burst in all of the up-to-the-minute cancer care and cancer treatments that are available. We like to encourage patients to share with their primary care providers as well, and I do think that's actually really important for myeloma patients as well because you're also accessing primary care for other potential medical issues that you may have, whether it's diabetes or high blood pressure or high cholesterol or just general health management outside of the myeloma world. It's really important to be able to share with your health care providers outside of your cancer treatment what kind of things that you've been receiving. For example, we know that some medications can cause a side effect called osteonecrosis of the jaw, and a lot of myeloma patients get that. Well, that might be interesting information for you to share perhaps with your dental provider and your primary care provider so that they can be helping to kind of keep that on their radar and help you identify if you're having that side effect earlier on than when it's become much more complex and hard to treat. We like to encourage people to share that information with as many folks that are providing them with health care outside of the cancer world. It helps take better cancer of that whole patient.
HealthTree • March 27, 2024