Dr Rick McDonough on Why Now Is the Time to Join the Oncology Field

Rick McDonough, MD, president of the Florida Society of Clinical Oncology, explains why right now is a great time to get into the oncology field.

Transcript:

One of the things that drew me to this is that it touches on so many people’s lives, [and] it has so many different aspects of medicine. And so, as we go through medical training early on, we see all the different aspects of the body and this is a field that many of these things come together because so many things [have an] impact on cancers­—how they develop, how you address them while they’re going through treatment, so the ability to do that. And beyond that, the advances are coming so rapidly on this that the nature of the care of cancer is evolving quickly from year to year. One of our speakers today was talking through the course of his career just how drastically things have changed and how much longer survival has been, how patients are coping, how many more cancer survivors that we have– and that’s another thing too, looking at getting together physicians and groups from across the state to work on things like survivorship. So, how does the patient fair after they’ve completed their cancer treatment and what are those steps for them going forward?