It's important to work with healthcare professionals to make informed decisions that feel right for you and meet your medical needs.
When deciding on the sort of hormone therapy treatment you want to have, or whether to even have hormone therapy treatment at all, we strongly advise working in partnership with healthcare professionals.
You'll be supported to make decisions based on medical evidence and the expertise of clinicians, but also your personal preferences, values and beliefs.
This process is meant to help you fully understand the risks, benefits and possible outcomes of different treatment options, including choosing not to have hormone therapy. It’s also meant to ensure you get care that fits your personal needs.
Here's Louisa explaining the principles and benefits of this approach to healthcare.
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Decisions about your healthcare should be shaped by your personal needs, values, and priorities, and you have every right to be involved in that process. But what does that actually look like?
It means sitting down with your healthcare team, asking questions, exploring all the options that are available, and making decisions together. You can see it as a partnership.
This process can be very powerful as it allows for open and honest conversations between you and your healthcare team, which should ultimately equip you with all the information you need to decide on any treatment plans. This may include benefits, risks, and possible outcomes of all the different treatment options. It also means that you can make informed choices based not on just what's medically best, but also what's best for you overall, considering your life, your goals, and your preferences.
This process empowers you and helps put you in control of your healthcare. We know that when people are actively involved in their care, they are more likely to feel confident in their treatment plan and follow through with it, which can help to make the treatment more effective. Research also shows that when patients are actively involved in their care, they experience greater satisfaction, and that's because you're not just being treated, you're being heard, understood, and respected.
Let's hear from Dilip, explaining exactly who was involved in his choice of treatment and how they all worked together to reach a decision.
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I did ask both my medical oncologist and other doctors I have seen, "Well, what if I don't have any treatments at all?," and the answer was, "Well, then you won't live nearly as long as you would if you do have the treatments." So that was the first step, that no treatment was not an option.
So then we get to which treatments, and I think having the three monthly injections, there really wasn't any choice about, unless I wanted to go for the much shorter life. That was sort of a given.
The big issue was the enzalutamide. That carries the same sort of side effects as the injections, but it will sort of make them far more certain, and you may get certain side effects with the tablets that you don't get with the injections, and I was given lots of literature to read, and a consent form to read through, and then it was down to my wife and I to consider whether we should go for the enzalutamide as well as the injection.
So when I went back after a month with my wife, we did decide to go with the enzalutamide, but there was always the support there from the hospital and the possibility of support from other sources as well, like the Prostate Cancer UK nurses and website, in making that decision.
I've very much appreciated the fact that both myself and my wife, 'cause she's in this with me as well, did have some agency in the decision making, perhaps more so than I imagined would be the case. I did think perhaps they would say, "Well, this is the treatment that you have, and you have to have it," but there was that choice that was given. So all that, I did feel very much involved, and I did feel very much listened to as well.