Zacharoula Sidiropoulou, Senior Consultant Breast Surgical Oncologist at Hospital São Francisco Xavier, shared on LinkedIn:
“What does this person actually gain from the treatment I’m proposing?
- Not the ‘average patient’, not the patient in the trial.
- I am talking about the specific sibling, parent, friend.
- With this age, this health, this family, this life.
The longer I work with cancer patients, the more I realise that guidelines alone don’t answer that question.
So, this autumn I’m doing something I’m genuinely looking forward to: going back to class.
I’ll be attending CIPOG 2026, the Introductory Course in the Principles of Geriatric Oncology lead by GTOG of Sociedade Portuguesa de Oncologia SPO
Yes. Introductory.
I’ve worked with older patients with cancer for many years, so someone might reasonably ask: why an introductory course now?
Because I believe there is a danger in doing something for a long time.
You get quicker.
You recognise patterns.
You know what usually works.
And sometimes, without even noticing, you stop asking why.
That worries me much more than not knowing something.
So I’m going back to the basics: frailty, function, nutrition, cognition, polypharmacy, toxicity – risk, geriatric – assessment… and how all of that should actually change the decisions we make. The course is designed exactly around that integration of clinical, functional and personal factors in older people with cancer.
I’m also looking forward to the practical part, using tools like G8, CARG, STOPP/START, Mini-Cog, MNA-SF and discussing real cases in an oncogeriatric tumor board.
What I most value in my life is people able to challenge the way I think.
I want to hear and learn how do other colleagues approach the same patient differently and to check if something I’ve been doing for years could be done better.
Sometimes we become a little too comfortable with the word expert.
I prefer something else:
Experienced enough to know what I don’t know.
The famous Socratic: “ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα”
The online part runs through September ( I have already started profs!), followed by the in-person course in Coimbra on 2–3 October.”
Other articles about CIPOG 2026 on OncoDaily.