Patient Handouts : Oncology Times

Oncology Times offers helpful handouts on a wide-range of oncology topics. Print, post, and share with colleagues and patients.​​

• A Healthy Approach to Online Tests: How you learn your test results matters. The fastest way is usually through the patient portal—a secure password-protected internet site where you can see most of your medical chart. Because results are posted automatically, you may be able to see results long before your physicians have an opportunity to contact you. This handout discusses potential benefits and risks of learning your test results online. You'll find tips for managing your expectations and minimizing stress.​
  

• Answering How Are You?​: During and after cancer treatment, a common greeting—How are you? —may stir unpleasant emotions or cause confusion about how to answer. This handout offers insights and tips on responding in ways that help you. The key message is this: In medical settings, answering candidly is essential to optimizing your care.
  

• College & Cancer 101: You are a college student...with cancer. That makes no sense. It's so unfair. We agree! But the fact is that cancer can happen to anyone. Whatever you are feeling right now, remember two things: (1) This is not your fault, and (2) You can take steps to help achieve the best outcomes—both academically and with your health.

• When Your Child in College Is Diagnosed With Cancer​: While adjusting to the news, you want to ensure that your child is making wise decisions. This handout offers insights and tips for helping your child.
  

• Late Effects in Adult Cancer Survivors​: After cancer, understanding late effects enables you to take steps that minimize their negative impact on your life whenever possible.​​

• Coping With Treatment Delays​: You may experience treatment delays, especially if your course is prolonged. That’s normal. This handout reviews common questions and concerns to help you respond in helpful, hopeful ways.​​

• Introduction to Music Therapy: Music therapists are valued members of the medical team. Their expertise helps patients manage physical and emotional challenges at all stages of survivorship. This handout reviews what music therapy is, how it promotes well-being, and what to expect at music therapy sessions

• The Healing Power of the "Survivor" Label: As a cancer patient, you will see and hear the word “survivor” a lot. That label triggers a wide variety of reactions among patients. Whatever your thoughts and feelings about the term, this handout offers insights and tips on helpful, hopeful ways to think about “survivor.”​

• The Power & Limits of Visualization​: Visualization is a supportive therapy that many patients find helpful. Some give it credit as a major factor helping them through treatment and recovery. While it may not be for everyone, we encourage you to read this overview of how it works, its potential benefits, and its limits. This way, you can make an informed decision whether to give it a try.

• The Power & Limits of Visualization​: Visualization is a supportive therapy that many patients find helpful. Some give it credit as a major factor helping them through treatment and recovery. While it may not be for everyone, we encourage you to read this overview of how it works, its potential benefits, and its limits. This way, you can make an informed decision whether to give it a try.​​

• Insights & Tips on Uncertainty: During and after cancer treatment, patients go through times of heightened uncertainty. This handout offers insights and tips for responding in ways that strengthen patients’ confidence and hope.​

• Tips for Contacting Us​: Medical care is a team effort that depends on our patients knowing when and how to contact us.

• Managing Communications With Family & Friends: Whether you share your diagnosis with only one person by phone, the whole world on social media, or anything in-between, here are insights and tips to help you benefit from the best method for you, for now. 

• The Power & Limits of Your Prognosis​: One tool in cancer care is the prognosis (plural = prognoses). This handout discusses how to use your prognosis to help you make wise decisions and look forward with hope.
• Making Wise Decisions During the Pandemic The Covid-19 pandemic affects your daily decisions as a patient. Armed with answers to common questions about Covid-19, you can make the best decisions for getting through this crisis as safely as possible.

• Managing the Stress of the Covid-19 Pandemic: This patient handout may help in your efforts to both calm their anxiety and encourage them to take appropriate precautions. You can update the information as the situation evolves and our understanding of the virus improves.

• Helping Patients Manage the Question, “How Are You?”: This patient handout opens by highlighting the idea that medical professionals ask “How are you?” as part of their evaluation—and not as a social nicety. Patients are urged to candidly report problems and concerns, and not say they’re “fi ne” when they’re not. The rest of the handout discusses how patients can handle “How are you?” when asked outside medical settings. The insights and tips may help minimize their distress and guide them to healthy responses.

• The Healing Power of a New Normal for Now: This handout introduces the updated term new normal for now and discusses the ideas behind it. Helping patients create a new normal for now can help them regain a sense of control and nourish hope for a better tomorrow. 

• Minimizing Delays​: It is important to be proactive and help patients overcome emotional obstacles to reporting symptoms. Here's a handout to supplement your efforts to minimize patient delays.

• Your Genetic Inheritance​​: Help your patients whose cancer maybe hereditary understand what's involved in genetic testing.

• Your Mutation: This handout answers common questions and concerns that may arise when a patient finds out they have a genetic mutation

• Minor Symptoms in Long-Term Survivors​: Long-term survivors may experience distress while deciding what to do about minor symptoms. Help minimize their distress—and the risk of delayed diagnoses—with this patient handout.
  

• Counseling With an Oncology Social Worker:​ Social workers can make a world of difference in the life of a patient.​ If you see a patient in need, this handout can supplement your recommendations to consult a social worker. 

• Healing Hopes​: As a survivor, my life changed for the better after I began focusing my attention on healing hopes—specific hopes that help me get good care and live as fully as possible. This patient handout offers a practical approach to hope.​

• Maximizing Resilience:​ This quality helps patients through and beyond cancer treatment. This handout encourages patients to think about resilience in new ways and take steps to build resilience

• Understanding Promising Unproven Cancer Therapies: ​Help your patients understand what promising-but-unproven therapies​ offer—and don't offer— to determine whether they are options that should be considered.

• Coping With Losing Things: Insights and tips for dealing with the common symptom of losing things more than usual. 

• Decision Making & Palliative Care: A handout to dispel common myths and to reinforce that palliative care helps patients maintain control over the decision making.​

• Palliative Care: A handout that summarizes facts patients and families need to know about palliative care.