Cancer Rehabilitation

Timothy Sherwood, MD, the thoracic surgeon who was featured in Part 2 of this series, referred Alberta Hickman for prehabilitation before operating on her after she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Alberta received her care at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, VA, which recently adopted the STAR Program, a best practices cancer rehabilitation model of care. The medical team published Alberta’s story as a case report, because she did so well and her physical function improved after surgery compared with her baseline status before the operation. Moreover, she had a shorter-than-usual hospital length of stay for this type of surgery. This is Alberta’s perspective about cancer prehabilitation in her own words.

Cancer rehabilitation is “the next frontier” in survivorship care, according to Julie K. Silver, MD, Assistant Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.