It is the post-lunch session and Dr Abhishek Shankar, assistant professor at the Department of Preventive Oncology at AIIMS, is counselling a 60-year-old woman undergoing treatment for breast cancer at the institute. The woman, who was earlier being treated at a private hospital in Delhi, is not only undergoing treatment here, but AIIMS doctors are also counselling her about the \u201cwhy and how\u201d of cancer.<\/p>\n
The woman is the 12th patient who has enrolled for \u201cgenetic counselling\u201d at the institute\u2019s Familial and High Risk Cancer Clinic at Dr B R A Institute Rotary Cancer Hospital at AIIMS.<\/p>\n
The clinic, started a week ago, aims to teach patients and family members about self-examination techniques, early detection and safe practices to prevent of cancer. It will focus on the most common cancers in the country \u2014 of the breast, cervical, mouth and lung.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe is the second person in her family who has been diagnosed with cancer. Certain types of cancer run in some families. Cancer risk assessment is important to understand a person\u2019s risk of developing certain types of cancer. In this case, where cancer has already been diagnosed, we need to counsel them on treatment and follow-up care. More importantly, it has to be explained that cancer may be passed from parent to child \u2014 and here we counsel them about options for screening and management of cancer risk,\u201d said Dr Shankar.<\/p>\n
Also Read | Not enough rooms for doctors, queues at AIIMS dept get longer<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter prevention, early detection in stages I and II is the second-best approach. If detected early, with proper treatment, a cure of almost 80 per cent of the patients can be achieved. This can be done by undergoing regular health check-ups and by understanding warning signals and reporting to the doctor,\u201d said Dr G K Rath, chief, BRAIRCH, AIIMS.<\/p>\n
Dr Shankar, the co-in-charge of the clinic, said in a phase-wise manner, the priority of the clinic will be to screen the staff and family members at AIIMS. \u201cThe initiative is to provide cancer patients and their family members an opportunity to know the risk of occurrence of primary and secondary cancers. We will also start cervical cancer vaccination drive,\u201d said Dr Shankar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is the post-lunch session and Dr Abhishek Shankar, assistant professor at the Department of Preventive Oncology at AIIMS, is counselling a 60-year-old woman undergoing treatment for breast cancer at the institute. The woman, who was earlier being treated at a private hospital in Delhi, is not only undergoing treatment here, but AIIMS doctors are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6928,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6927"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6929,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6927\/revisions\/6929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}