Personal Factors: Benefits and Risks Which treatment is finally recommended will also depend on such personal factors as your age, other medical problems (which might make surgery risky) and especially the possibility of significant side effects with one or another treatment.
Age comes into the decision because the patient who is forty years old may be able to tolerate the aggressive chemotherapy drugs that bring about a substantial rate of remission . The same drugs given to an eighty-year-old could be risky. At that age the kidneys don't function as well as they do earlier in life and the risk of therapy could outweigh the potential benefit. But each case has to be decided on its own merits.
Both you and your doctor have to consider the relative advantages and disadvantages of each therapy. You have to weigh the chances of achieving remission or cure with the risks and side effects of treatment. You and your family are partners with your physician in this decision- making process.
Your Decision In making the final decision on treatment, nothing replaces a good discussion between you and your doctor. He or she should be able to explain to you the staging process, the tests that were done, their results and all the available methods of treatment.
He or she may present the information from any Tumor Board that was held. Or he or she can sometimes pass on the consensus of the informal consultations with other doctors that often take place in medical groups having several physicians involved in the cancer field. Your doctor should also have alternative forms of therapy in mind and should outline what could be done if your tumor doesn't respond to treatment or if some other problem comes up.
