You know, where should someone start?

First of all, if they think they may have cancer, should they go to their primary physician first?

- Usually, getting in to see a primary care provider, whether that's their physician or an advanced practice provider, is a really good start.

And making sure that, you know, you advocate for yourself as a patient.

Letting them know you think something is wrong and asking for tests if you feel like you're not, you know, feeling like yourself.

You know, usually, somebody has a good inkling of something is wrong and making sure that you get in to see somebody soon is really important.

- Mm-hmm.

And cancer care is kind of a wide-ranging term.

Why don't we talk about, with your specialty, what it means to care for someone with cancer?

- Absolutely.

- Where do you start?

- Yeah, great question.

So, there's a whole bunch of different types of cancer care.

So it ranges from surgical treatments to medical treatments, like chemotherapy or hormonal therapy, or radiation-directed treatments.

And because of that, we have to have a pretty multidisciplinary team and work collaboratively to care for somebody with cancer.

So usually it starts with a diagnosis, usually get a biopsy, and then once that biopsy comes back, usually get referred to one of the members of the cancer team.

- And would the patient, you know, gynecological cancer, if they have that, do they usually have options as far as treatment, or is it kind of like this is what you have to do to... - It depends on the type of cancer.

So, a lot of the different treatments, it depends on both the stage of disease and how, you know, healthy the patient is to undergo certain different types of treatments.

And a lot of times, we actually use a multimodal type of therapy.

So it's not just chemotherapy or just surgery, but we use both of those together.

Same thing with radiation.

You know, we might not use surgery alone, but we might follow with radiation or something like that.

- So there's no one-size-fits-all treatments?

- Absolutely not.

Yes.

It's very individualized, definitely need to focus on the patient in front of you rather than, you know, just a cookie-cutter approach to cancer care.

- And how do you weigh the pros and the cons