Comment by steveBK123
4 days ago
> if you are within a 2-3 hour drive of a major cancer center, go there instead of your local community hospital
This is possibly bigger than second opinions if it's an option for you. Part of it is just volume, the big national cancer hospitals see so many cases that they have super specialized departments & doctors to deal with much more niche areas of expertise.
Your local hospital might have "the skin cancer doctor" but MSK has ~20 sub categories of skin cancer with different doctors specializing in each. And so on for each area/type.
A relative of mine had a rare form of (very treatable) childhood cancer in the NYC metro area. It was diagnosed eventually by the local oncologist in the local hospital. His parents were ready to use the local hospital/doctors until the conversation turned to "and how many of these have you treated before and how did it go?". Sheepishly the doctor said "once and uhmmm, well.. it went ok".
So they sent the files (back in the physical paper files via mail era) to MSK and saw a super specialized treatment team that dealt with this regularly, successfully.
I'll second this and share my father's experience. He spent most of his adult life in PA, but he and my mom moved to SC partially for finical reasons when COPD forced him into early retirement--his brother and business partner was also moving too.
Anyhow, a few years back he found out while being evaluated for a lung transplant at Duke he had stage 2 lung cancer (I don't recall the type). They had actually missed it six months prior on an earlier scan. Thereby dashing his hopes for a transplant. Long story short my brother convinced him to head to UPENN for a second opinon. Where they were at the time, one of a handfull of places in the country that did proton radiation. His SC team convinced him to do one round of chemo as he couldn't get into PENN for another 5 months. He has been cancer free for a few years now. And they credit the Proton radiation.