Читать книгу The Cancer Directory - Dr. Daniel Rosy - Страница 69

When you have found out the type, stage and grade of your cancer from your consultant or GP, you may wish to gather more information before making any decisions about medical, complementary and alternative medicine approaches to treatment.

It is best to think a bit about how and where you should look before you embark on this process. Information about cancer is divided into two main categories – what has been written for people with cancer; and what has been written for doctors, nurses or other healthcare professionals.

In the former, the medical and scientific jargon will have been translated into plain English and (hopefully) it will have been written with consideration of your feelings. In contrast, the latter information will have been written for those with an understanding of science who only need to know the facts – and is likely to be very blunt.

It is important now that you do not become overwhelmed with information and, even more essential, that you do not become overly depressed by what you read. Your approach will therefore depend on your personality, and how much information you can take and in what form. A helpful source of information on cancer for those who have cancer is CancerBACUP. As well as a full range of informative leaflets about every type of cancer, they also have a nurse ‘phone-in’ service to answer your specific questions about your situation. For medical and scientific information, there is the Internet and medical libraries. However, people often complain that the Internet can lead to information overload, and that the information gleaned from medical libraries is often non-user friendly.

Other sources of information are the big cancer-research institutes such as:

• Cancer Research UK

• National Cancer Institute USA

• The American Cancer Society

• The Royal Marsden Hospital, London

• Memorial Sloane-Kettering Cancer Hospital, New York

• University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston.