Can someone help explain this field to me? I'm on a cardio onc rotation and it's driving me batty. All we do all day is talk about how some drug is associated with random cardiac conditions and then talk about strain imaging in patients getting chemo but we aren't doing anything for patients. In some cases it feels like we are doing harm, we had this patient today who's strain got a bit worse on trastuzumab for stage 3 breast cancer and basically freaked her out to the point where she's going to talk about alternative chemo. All I'm thinking in my mind is that my attending shouldn't have said **** because breast cancer will kill her before any cardiac complications.
Sure, I get the need to monitor people on anthracyclines and herceptin, but at the same time, preventing cardiac toxicity for inferior chemo is destroying the village to save it. If I had AML ****ing crush me with 7+3 for a chance at a cure instead of dicking around with GLS. Then we have journal club which is basically mental masturbation but yields no actionable information. Every trial of ppx cardio meds in high risk chemo fails to show a benefit and I bet if we did a trial using cardiology decision making and chemotherapy, it should show harm because we would be withholding or delaying chemo in highly lethal diseases.
What am I missing?
Sure, I get the need to monitor people on anthracyclines and herceptin, but at the same time, preventing cardiac toxicity for inferior chemo is destroying the village to save it. If I had AML ****ing crush me with 7+3 for a chance at a cure instead of dicking around with GLS. Then we have journal club which is basically mental masturbation but yields no actionable information. Every trial of ppx cardio meds in high risk chemo fails to show a benefit and I bet if we did a trial using cardiology decision making and chemotherapy, it should show harm because we would be withholding or delaying chemo in highly lethal diseases.
What am I missing?
