Importance of emotional support from pharmacist to cancer patients

摘要

Most people describe that it felt like being hit fay lightning when they found they had cancer. They might need a huge operation at first, and then receive chemotherapy and radiation for a long time. The chemotherapy might cause severe side-effects or toxicity. There might be nausea, vomiting, loss of hair, crack in the fingers, dry eyes, anemia, and mouth sores so painful that they keep them awake at night.As clinical pharmacists, we have seen a lot suffering of cancer patients on chemotherapy. We supply patients with anticancer medication, we design dosage regimens for them, and we brief them about the most important drug information drug interactions, adverse drug reactions or toxicity and so on to them, as integrated pharmaceutical care. Unfortunately, what we supply to cancer patients appears to be confined to medication and counseling only. In addition to these, it seems that we cannot do anything about the patients' suffering from side-effects or toxicity of chemotherapy.