You can keep a measure of control in your life, and help to gain the best possible outcome from you treatment, if you are proactive in managing and understanding various aspects of your treatment. Some of the things you can do in order to optimize your cancer treatment are:

• Remain organized

• Be well informed

• Talk about how effective your treatment will be

• Work with your physician to select the best treatment for you

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Remember that your fight against cancer is a team effort and not something you have to face alone. The strength provided by your support team (friends, family, and your health care providers) should not be overlooked. Consider the following things to help make sure you get the most from your treatment:

Remain organized: You can keep all the information you gather organized by developing a system to store information like test and laboratory results,consultation and admissions information, as well as any other instructions. Use a three-ring binder to keep all this information in one place.

Being well informed: Being diagnosed with cancer can be shocking. A new diagnosis can make you feel overwhelmed and out of control. However being informed can help ease these feelings. Investigate the options available to treat your stage and type of cancer by looking for a variety of resources to gather information from. The resources used should include books, your healthcare providers, the internet, second opinions and other patients who have had or currently have your disease. Some questions can only be answered by your doctor, as you gather information, identify these specific questions.

It is most important working toward understanding the stage of your disease and your diagnosis, the goals of your therapy, the treatment plan and benefits of the treatment as well as any side effects that may occur. After diagnosing a cancer, the next step is to accurately identify what stage the cancer is in. Stages are used to describe the spread of cancer. Cancers such as leukemia cannot be staged. Different stages of cancer may use different treatment. You need to know the stage of your cancer so you and your healthcare team can evaluate and discuss your treatment options.

Talking about how effective the treatment will be: Evaluating your treatment options with your healthcare providers is very important. You can make informed choices about your treatment if you know how cancers are compared. You can better decide which treatment is best for your situation if you know the goals of of a type of therapy along with it risks and benefits. There are various reasons why patients are given cancer treatment; typically it is to cure the cancer, extend the length of their life, or help ease symptoms which are caused by the cancer thus improving the quality of their life. The risks of treatment must be weighed against these possible benefits. Risks can include unpleasant side effects, time spent away from friends and family, long-term complications, and even death.

Remission is the term commonly used to describe how effective a cancer treatment is. Remission means that a cancer can not be measured using technology that currently exists and it has disappeared. The terms partial remission and complete remission are used by oncologists to describe a cancers disappearance after treatment. If there remission is not obtained a cancer cannot be cured. However, a remission does not guarantee a cancer has been cured. The benefits of a treatment can best be measured by examining the length of survival, remission and survival free of disease (cure). It can often take a number of years to determine if a new treatment is better than the previous treatment; for this reason it might be useful to use remission rates when comparing treatments for patients who have not been evaluated for long enough to know if their chance of survival or cure has improved.

Treating cancer is associated with risk. Evaluating the benefits and risks of a treatment in context of the overall goal of receiving treatment is very important.

Treatment of your cancer might be prolonged, inconvenient, or unavailable near your home. These factors are important when evaluating options for treatment, however they are not usually mentioned in medical journals which report on the benefits and results of new treatments.

Select the best treatment for you: Treatment of cancer varies based on the kind of cancer, the cancers stage, and your overall condition. Also, options for treatment can vary based on if the treatment goal is to cure the cancer, stop the cancer from spreading, or to alleviate symptoms the cancer is causing. These are all factors you and your doctor will take into consideration as you work on choosing the best treatment for you.