Questions Patients with Hodgkin's Disease Should Ask Their Doctor

If you are diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, it is very important that you are comfortable with individual or group of individuals who will be taking care of you. One of the first thing many of my patients want to know is “Are you sure of my diagnosis?”. Oftentimes there are appropriate tests that can be done on the tissue to be absolutely certain that the correct diagnosis has been made and you want to be sure that your tissue has been reviewed by a pathologist with experience in Hodgkin’s disease. Sometimes there are questions that come up with regard to the correct diagnosis and in those situations your doctor may explain to you, we believe this is likely Hodgkin’s disease but we have sent your tissue to a reference laboratory so that we can be absolutely certain that we have the correct diagnosis. Once you are comfortable that the correct diagnosis has been made then you want to know, does my doctor have experience treating this illness, and you should ask the coordinating physician whether or not they have experience and how comfortable they are in treating you. Most community oncologist will treat several patients with Hodgkin’s disease each year and are really quite comfortable with this diagnosis. However, there may be certain features of your illness that might require you to travel to a referral center for proper therapy. People who take treatment for Hodgkin’s disease very often receive chemotherapy as the primary modality of therapy for their cancer. Chemotherapy is given generally intravenously but sometimes orally, and it will result in complete resolution of the Hodgkin’s disease in the majority of patients who are treated. People will want to talk with their doctor about the schedule of their treatment, the side effects to expect, how to manage those side effects, and how they integrate treating their cancer with the rest of their responsibilities. This is something that is oftentimes coordinated through the physician’s office or treatment team, which may include a nurse practitioner and treating chemotherapy nurses. Finally, if radiation treatment is to be a part of your therapy, you will need to understand that that treatment is generally delivered once a day, Monday through Friday, and will require careful scheduling with you responsibilities either at home or through your job. The most important thing to understand is that your physician will be formulating a treatment plan with the goal to cure you of your Hodgkin’s disease.