Multiple Myeloma Awareness
VIDEO: Education, specialist consultation key to better multiple myeloma awareness
Transcript
Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript, which has been slightly edited for clarity. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.
That's a very, very important aspect. I frequently say to my patients that if you are well informed and if you are well educated about your disease, it makes my life much simpler as your doctor because I can talk to you in a way that you can understand the side effects — you can understand the pros and cons.
Just this morning I had a patient who has disease progressing, but the patient came in knowing what the BCMA-targeted therapies were. CAR-T mobility for them or not, because they're not yet a candidate. What are bispecific antibodies? They were talking to me, "Well, how should we sequence these drugs so that I don't burn a bridge," so as to say. It made my life simpler so that I could convey my thoughts to them in a more easy flow of information exchange.
But there are also a lot of work that is being done by large foundations — Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, International Myeloma Foundation, American Cancer Society — that are providing free education. I mean, frankly, even for example, Mayo Clinic, our guidelines are available for anybody for free, and they can view them, download them, education materials on our Mayo Clinic website.
I think all of us are educators at heart, so we love for the patient, their family members, caregivers, the community at large, advocacy groups to learn. I'm a very strong proponent of patients joining support groups. What COVID has taught us is that a lot of these support groups can function remotely, so I think that's a huge information resource for them. There are many, many webinars. At Mayo Clinic, for example, in the Florida site, we do a webinar every January, once a year, and we've been running it for now about 6 years. We have hundreds of patients who join virtually from different countries, different states. IMF does webinars. A lot of these resources are available. I know they can sometimes be confusing because different individuals, different clinicians, different experts can have their own opinion or take on the data, but at least that gives our patients a very good basic starting point.
Similarly, I would say from a physician standpoint, especially community practitioners, there is so much information in myeloma that it can get confusing. It can get confusing in a lot of cancer just because of the amount of data that's coming out. But I would say that's where connecting with a myeloma specialist in your network, in your region, in your area would be important. And also, I'm a huge proponent of every patient trying to seek at least one-time consult with a myeloma expert or a myeloma-treating expert institution because that really brings a different perspective to that patient of how the myeloma care can be actually very tailored, very individualized, depending on all the factors we discussed. So I think all of us collectively coming together with the single sole purpose of patient-centric care, there are many, many resources available. But utilizing those resources to develop those treatment plans for our patients would be extremely important.
