CRC UNDRSTD LEUKMA LYMPH MYELM PDF

Preface

This book is intended for a varied informed audience, including patients and their families and friends, non-specialist physicians, junior specialist physicians, medical and nursing students and, indeed, all members of the heath discipline. Members of the general public who would like to learn about blood cancers should also find it helpful. We have therefore had to walk a narrow path, avoiding, on the one hand, confusing medical jargon and unwarranted assumptions about the level of familiarity of the reader and, on the other hand, oversimplification. We have endeavored not to sacrifice scientific accuracy for clarity nor vice versa.

Some patients or their families and friends may find our detailed descriptions of the disease and treatments excessive, cold and clinical, but we sincerely believe that most will benefit from understanding not only what is being done but also why it is being done. This is in keeping with the twenty-first century view that patients and their partners and families should be active participants in their medical care and probably shun the past paternalistic attitude. The internet-led explosion over the past decade has filled much of the vacuum created by specialist physicians (much of it, probably, inadvertently), but this has sadly become a daunting challenge to navigate, even for the specialist.

The Web illustrates much on the disease and treatments, even elegantly with yet more letters in the alphabet cocktail of the combination treatments, and subsequent information detailing even more aggressive attacks on the bone marrow, with or without stem cell support. A senior specialist colleague and friend recently confided that some of the Web-generated information would not encourage him to approach blood cancer, if he acquired it, with anything other than terror. We hope the readers of this book will appreciate our voices and, importantly, we hope to make their journeys easier.