Articles

Surgery or radiotherapy? How the pandemic provide an opening to gather the evidence that patients need

Head-to-head comparisons of the effectiveness of radiotherapy and surgery are not often – or easily – performed. Yet, for some types and stages of cancer, there is an increasingly apparent need for…

Articles

If the risk is very low, should we still call it ‘cancer’?

'Cancer’ is the weightiest of words. Jacky remembers the impact those two short syllables had when she was given her results after tests for breast cancer. “I went into this little room…

Articles

Ultra-high dose rate radiation: is FLASH the future? 

Radiation that kills only tumour cells and spares healthy tissue? It sounds too good to be true. But if the promise of recent research is fulfilled, the FLASH technique of ultra high…

Articles

Shared decision making: translating our aspirations into clinical practice

Despite growing awareness of the importance of shared decision making in cancer, there is plenty of evidence that it is still not being implemented as it should be. A national survey of…

Articles

Expert cancer surgery: could VR help speed up and standardise training?

Spinal surgeon Bronek Boszczyk has said that training in complex surgery is like having to learn the violin during a full orchestral concert. The training revolves around closely supervised surgery on real…

Articles

What do you say when your patient can’t stop worrying about recurrence? Here’s what you told us

It isn’t over when treatment’s over. Even if, as far as the clinician is concerned, therapy has been successful and the cancer is effectively ‘cured’, cancer patients often experience a nagging –…

Articles

Preventing burnout: are we too focused on personal resilience?

Burnout. That short word barely conveys the dispirited cycle of weariness, negativity and powerlessness health staff experience when high aspirations to help and cure are consumed in an unattainable to-do list. “You're…

Articles

Precision care: supporting our patients starts with asking them what they want and need

Two weeks after receiving a brain tumour diagnosis, Martin was copied into an email from one of his healthcare team telling his GP that Martin was “understandably devastated by his diagnosis”. The…

Articles

Cancer-related fatigue: Might research into long-Covid help find causes and cures?

Long-term emotionally and physically debilitating fatigue is a fact of daily life for many who have had cancer. Awareness is low, causes mysterious, and physicians are often sceptical or plead powerlessness –…

Obituaries

Louis Denis: one of urology’s most influential and patient-facing physicians

20th January 1933 ‒ 28th July 2021 When Louis Denis described himself as a “free thinker”, as he often did, the statement went beyond a vague assertion of independence from dogma and…