Ramy Sedhom: Happy to share our ASCO’s E-Book Chapter
Ramy Sedhom shared a post on X:
“Happy to share our ASCO‘s E-Book Chapter
Each year, the oncology community celebrates many advances in diagnostics, therapeutics, molecular biology, and care delivery. While encouraging, this celebration often feels symbolic of the game musical chairs. While the music is played, all is fun until we realize there is no seat for everyone. Those who typically are ‘chairless’ in the supportive care world are older adults, black patients, and most recently those experiencing prognostic uncertainty (i.e. targeted therapies, immunotherapy etc).
We describe the case of Bessie – a 46 year old woman with stage IV EGFR mutated NSCLC. Advances in therapy have improved ORR + survival; however, many unmet communication needs.
She is likely to suffer from complicated discussions around prognosis, high expectations for benefit for targeted therapy, reality of challenging decision making at the end of life (e.g. those with NSCLC with mutations have worse EOL care compared to those without mutations). We emphasize this is NOT the oncologists fault. It is a care delivery problem. Anyone who has done QI projects knows the concept of a ‘balance measure’.
Any time you improve one part of the system (e.g. in this case ‘long term control / sometimes ‘cure’ and you run into unanticipated problems elsewhere in the system (here it would be communication for example, along with financial toxicity, chronic grade II AEs, etc).
Our profession will always be differentiated by its human side—showing compassion, expressing empathy, telling it like it is, and supporting patients and their caregivers from comfort to cure. We cannot allow the tumor to become the only target.”
Source: Ramy Sedhom/X
Ramy Sedhom holds positions as Assistant Professor of Hematology and Oncology at Perelman School of Medicine and Director of Medical Oncology and Palliative Care at Penn Medicine’s Princeton Medical Center. His work focuses on palliative care integration, geriatric assessment, psycho-oncology, caregiver distress, and remote patient monitoring, with publications in leading journals. Nationally, he contributes to guideline panels and committees, including the NCCN Guideline Panel for Older Adults with Cancer, and leadership roles within ASCO.