Harvard doctor’s startup trains hospitals to rehab cancer survivors

Source: www.bloomberg.com/ Author: John Tozzi Sandra Wade, a Florida social worker, was diagnosed with an incurable form of breast cancer a decade ago. Two surgeries and years of chemotherapy left Wade, 61, with a damaged heart, chronic swelling in her left arm, spinal arthritis, nerve damage and fatigue, among other problems. “They didn’t send me home well,” she says. “They sent me home sicker than I began.” Survivors of strokes, heart attacks and traumatic injuries routinely get rehabilitation to improve their strength, energy and functioning. For cancer patients, it’s a rarity. It wasn’t always this way. “We used to have better cancer rehabilitation than we do now,” says Dr. Catherine Alfano, a program director at the Office of Cancer Survivorship at the National Cancer Institute. Before the 1980s, when most cancer treatment involved long hospital stays, survivors would get rehab before being discharged. As treatments improved and outpatient care became more common, Alfano says, “those programs kind of disappeared to a large extent.” Now the medical world is recognizing that the 12 million cancer survivors in the U.S. can benefit from more comprehensive rehab. Six years ago the Institute of Medicine called for giving every survivor a “care plan” to manage the lasting consequences of treatment, and this year the American College of Surgeons made such post-treatment attention to quality of life a requirement for its 1,500 accredited hospitals. Dr. Julie Silver, a Harvard Medical School rehab physician who survived breast cancer herself, is one of the pioneers trying to [...]