Until the 1980s, the value of exercise was unrecognized in the oncology setting. It was widely believed that patients with cancer undergoing cytotoxic treatments needed to rest and avoid exercise. But a 1989 study conducted by Winningham and Mac Vicar, both oncology nurses at the Ohio State University, dispelled this notion. The trial involved 45 women receiving adjuvant chemotherapy for operable breast cancer and showed that a 10-week interval-based, aerobic exercise was not only safe but also significantly improved body composition, aerobic capacity, and patient-reported nausea.

On August 25, 2017, ONS submitted comments to the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee in response to its Medicare Red Tape Relief Project. The initiative, sponsored by subcommittee chairman Pat Tiberi (R-OH), asked providers for input on ways to improve health care for seniors and reduce Medicare regulations and mandates.

Chemotherapy-induced alopecia has been reported by 77% of patients as the most-feared side effect of cancer treatment. In fact, as many as 10% of women say they would consider refusing chemotherapy or choosing a less effective treatment to avoid losing their hair.

Nurses in the intensive care unit (ICU) generally see patients with cancer only when they are extremely sick—not throughout the extensive cancer journey they go through before they get to the ICU. Educating and familiarizing ourselves, as ICU nurses, with a patient’s oncology plan, goals, and history can improve overall care. Learning at which points in the process of cancer treatment certain issues are more likely to arise, such as tumor lysis syndrome during high-dose induction, when a patient is most likely to be neutropenic during a stem cell transplant, and other general facts about oncology, can help improve the care we give. It helps us understand our patients as a whole. The oncology population is a huge part of medical intensive care, and encouraging critical care nurses and oncology nurses to collaborate can help improve the continuity of care and eliminate errors in the ICU.

In their article in the April 2017 issue of the Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing, Compton and Chang provided a guide for nurses caring for patients with substance use disorder (SUD), including overview, diagnosis, and treatment of SUD as well as its implications for pain management and cancer treatment considerations when a patient with SUD is diagnosed with cancer.

As more new treatments enter practice—like immunotherapy, targeted therapy, and combination therapies—oncology nurses are required to be experts in every treatment they administer. They need to constantly walk a tightrope, balancing multiple medications for one patient then quickly moving to the next patient on a completely different treatment protocol.

Rocky is a 56-year-old man with stage III oropharyngeal cancer. He is undergoing concurrent chemotherapy and radiation. Rocky is a long-haul truck driver, has had sporadic medical care in the past, has no primary care provider, and usually visits the emergency department in whatever town he is in when he gets sick. He was diagnosed during one of those visits after an episode of hematemesis.

Patients and healthcare providers are most likely to detect recurrence of early-stage melanoma based on symptom reports rather than routine imaging tests, according to the results of a study published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

Physical activity, by itself or in combination with psychological care, was found to be most successful at reducing cancer-related fatigue (CRF) in patients, according to a study published in JAMA. The researchers compared the efficacy of four different types of CRF treatments—exercise, the combination of exercise and psychological treatments, psychological treatments alone, and pharmaceutical treatments—to determine the most effective treatment for CRF.

The antidepression drug duloxetine, which is approved to treat depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, and diabetes nerve pain, may also relieve treatment-induced joint pain in breast cancer survivors receiving aromatase inhibitor therapy, according to the results of a study presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.