What Does Multidisciplinary Treatment Look Like?
The video discusses the process of diagnosing and treating mesothelioma, highlighting the importance of a multidisciplinary approach. Each Thursday, a team meets to review cases, confirming diagnoses with pathologists and staging patients using PET scans. The team considers potential surgical options and collaborates with medical and radiation oncologists to create a comprehensive treatment plan.
Any pathology, diagnosis or biopsy that comes back as mesothelioma, we will actually see, and that'll be flagged. That'll be sent as a list to our group, and then we'll meet on a Thursday morning and essentially go over the patient, look at the imaging. We'll look at it with the pathologist to make sure they confirm that it's mesothelioma because it's often hard to confirm a diagnosis of mesothelioma. So we'll check that to make sure that that's all legitimate and accurate. And then depending on what stage it is, we'll also stage the patient. And we stage the patient based on, a PET scan usually. And so the PET scan will tell us what stage the patient is and if they're localized, or relatively early stage we will then send them to a thoracic surgeon which in our system or in KP Northern California it'd be me covering that and And then we would offer potential surgery, and then we'd also involve our medical oncologist and then a radiation oncologist afterwards. So we kind of coordinated all that before they actually start their treatment. So once they actually do get the treatment, the plan's already been set in place.
