Tag: Hospice care

A program that gives special care to people who are near the end of life and have stopped treatment to cure or control their disease. Hospice offers physical, emotional, social, and spiritual support for patients and their families. The main goal of hospice care is to control pain and other symptoms of illness so patients can be as comfortable and alert as possible. It is usually given at home, but may also be given in a hospice centre, hospital, or nursing home.

18Nov 2016 by Ronny Allan 11 Comments

Palliative Care – it might just save your life

Living with Neuroendocrine Cancer, Patient Advocacy, Survivorship, Treatment

When you've been diagnosed with cancer at an incurable stage, certain words start to mean more. Take 'palliative' for example. Before I was diagnosed, I had always associated the word 'palliative' with someone who had a terminal disease, and this type of care was to make the final days/weeks as comfortable as possible. So, it was a bit of a shock to find out in 2010 that my treatment was palliative in nature. However, I'm still not dead and I'm still receiving palliative care. Go figure! The answer is simple - the cancer story is changing. What was once feared as a death sentence is now an illness in which many people survive. As survival rates increase, so too will the number of people who live with the legacy of…

I don’t tend to share some very personal stuff, but this is on the boundary of that rule and there are some important messages to be teased out. For those who follow my blog in detail, you may remember the post entitled “Neuroendocrine Cancer – Signs, Suspicions, Symptoms, Syndromes, Side-Effects, Secondary Illnesses, Comorbidities, and Coincidences” […]

First and only FDA-cleared, fully automated chromogranin A assay

There has been controversy about the utility of Chromogranin A for many years now. Specialists have been critical about its use but to be fair even those less critical still confirm that alone it would not be trusted to formally diagnose Neuroendocrine Cancer. That said, it was still controversial when certain US guidelines were updated […]

Neuroendocrine Cancer: Question, Clarify, Confirm

One of the many observations I make in my private Neuroendocrine Cancer Facebook group is the misunderstandings caused by the use of non-standard terminology combined with a lack of understanding of what is up to date or not. And I don’t always mean a misunderstanding by patients. If I am to believe doctors uttered some […]

Clinical Trial – Lutathera NETTER-2 Important Update

UPDATE – Sep 25th, 2023 – Novartis radioligand therapy Lutathera® demonstrated statistically significant and clinically meaningful progression-free survival in first line advanced gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs) Phase III NETTER-2 trial met primary endpoint of improvement in progression-free survival (PFS) and key secondary endpoint of objective response rate (ORR) in patients with Grade 2 and 3 […]

Lanreotide: Ipsen injection devices vs generic injection devices

Whenever I get a chance to talk to a pharma involved in somatostatin analogue injection devices, I tell them one very important thing …… “To the patient, the injection delivery is almost as important as the drug”. I also add that my opinion is based on thousands of comments about the patient experience in my […]