The Importance of Followup in Cancer Care
Interventional pulmonologist Dr. Daniel Nader emphasizes the importance of followup in his patients' care. He details the comprehensive followup program he offers to his lung cancer patients at Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) at Southwestern Regional Medical Center.
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Dr. Daniel Nader: It’s very important that we have good follow up for our patients because we know that cancer is a disease that we may stomp it out temporarily but it will try to raise its ugly head again and so we want to be right on top of it. We don’t want any surprises.
So we have a very comprehensive follow up program for all of our lung cancer patients. I see them on every three-month basis for three years and then intermittently after that until they get to their fifth year anniversary, and that fifth year anniversary is very, very important to me as well as to them.
And so that follow up visit includes diagnostic evaluation, my physical examination of the patient and then assessing them to see how they are doing to make sure that we are not having any evidence of recurrent disease.