I'm sure the 7 million survivors in the US have unmet physical and mental needs. If we had a great stroke association it would know about and have a plan to solve and meet those needs. But no, we have crap. You give me an open ended question and I'll just point to all 6800 blog entries.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=148623&CultureCode=en
Even decades after being cured, many cancer survivors face physical
and mental challenges resulting from their disease and its treatment.
That’s the conclusion of a new study published early online in CANCER, a
peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The findings
could help clinicians and other experts develop interventions that are
tailored to the specific types of problems and concerns that cancer
survivors may experience.
Increasingly, cancer patients are
living many years after cancer treatment, with the number of US
survivors expected to top 19 million by 2024. While many survivors do
well after treatment, some experience continuing problems that can
significantly impair their quality of life well beyond the magical
5-year survival milestone. These problems and challenges can vary by the
type of cancer patients had and the treatments they received.
To
assess the unmet needs of cancer survivors, Mary Ann Burg, PhD, LCSW,
of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and her colleagues
looked at the responses from an American Cancer Society survey, wherein
1514 cancer survivors responded to the open-ended question, ‘Please tell
us about any needs you have now as a cancer survivor that ARE NOT being
met to your satisfaction.’ "This study was unique in that it gave a
very large sample of cancer survivors a real voice to express their
needs and concerns,” said Dr. Burg.
Survivors most frequently
expressed physical problems, with 38 percent saying they were an issue.
(Problems related to sexuality and incontinence among prostate cancer
survivors were especially common.) Financial problems related to the
costs of treatment also persisted long after treatment for 20 percent of
respondents, with Black and Hispanic survivors being especially
hard-hit. Anxiety about recurrence was a common theme expressed by
survivors regardless of the type of cancer they had or how many years
they had survived cancer. The number and type of unmet needs were not
associated with time since cancer treatment.
“Overall, we found
that cancer survivors are often caught off guard by the lingering
problems they experience after cancer treatment. In the wake of cancer,
many survivors feel they have lost a sense of personal control, have
reduced quality of life, and are frustrated that these problems are not
sufficiently addressed within the medical care system,” said Dr. Burg.
She noted that improvements are needed concerning public awareness of
cancer survivors’ problems, honest professional communication about the
side effects of cancer, and the coordination of medical care resources
to help survivors and their families cope with their lingering
challenges.
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