Celia Bandman from the Center for Communication in Medicine wrote to me several months ago saying “As a writer I am haunted by Mark Twain’s words: ‘The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning’.
This quote from Mark Twain resonated with me last week as we hosted physicians, nurses, and research staff from various community oncology practices throughout the United States who team up with our M.D. Anderson Community Clinical Oncology Program (CCOP) Research Base. We discussed clinical trials that we conduct together, and the passion for helping patients and improving care was palpable from beginning to end. It is important to know that these studies are not just focused on cancer treatment, but also on issues for cancer survivors. For example, we are planning an acupuncture study to relieve dry mouth issues for survivors of head and neck cancer treated with radiation. We are also studying ways to understand long-term survivorship issues related to the heart by looking at special tests (biomarkers) at the time that chemotherapy is started (see http://1.usa.gov/fcIJg0). The focus of important research directed towards survivorship might not surprise you much, but it might surprise you to hear that a good part of our focus was on communication skills and their importance to our research enterprise.
