New name for Radiation Oncology

[RadOnc2013]

There is something that I have personally be advocating for a while - a name change for the field of Radiation Oncology. Other doctors think we are Radiologists. Patients are scared of the word radiation and are therefore scared of us. We have to think of a way to make ourselves stick out in a nice way. There is an article in PRO recently actually advocating for a name change for our field. "Interventional Oncology" was recently taken up by Interventional Radiology as a subspecialty for them.

Any ideas or thoughts about a name change?

I am a fan of the name "Quantum Oncology" myself cause, well, we use quanta of energy to treat patients. And it would sound cool to other docs and to the general public.

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[FindMeOnTheLinks]

Minimally invasive Oncology. People love the words "minimally invasive"

 

[seper]

Slow Oncology - to highlight the fact we have time to think about these issues.

 

[nkmiami]

Clinical oncology | The Royal College of Radiologists

 

[Ray D. Ayshun]

Sunshine therapy.

 

[RadOnc2013]

Sunshine therapy.

LOL

 

[fw5tape6kq]

Take a page from Yale's book and refer to the specialty as "Therapeutic Radiology." Although I'm not sure this helps resolve patients' conflation of Radiation Oncologists and Radiologists (in fact, it might do the opposite), the idea implicit in referring to our specialty as "Radiation Oncology" is that we can and do only treat cancer.

 

[Haybrant]

There is something that I have personally be advocating for a while - a name change for the field of Radiation Oncology. Other doctors think we are Radiologists. Patients are scared of the word radiation and are therefore scared of us. We have to think of a way to make ourselves stick out in a nice way. There is an article in PRO recently actually advocating for a name change for our field. "Interventional Oncology" was recently taken up by Interventional Radiology as a subspecialty for them.

Any ideas or thoughts about a name change?

I am a fan of the name "Quantum Oncology" myself cause, well, we use quanta of energy to treat patients. And it would sound cool to other docs and to the general public.

who cares what other doctors think. we dont have to stick out in a nice way, dont let these things concern you focus on the medicine. IR getting more involved with cancer beyond Liver is just fantasy, truthfully if someone isnt trained in oncology or doesnt attend a tumor board to learn they shouldnt be touching cancer patients

 

[DrfluffyMD]

who cares what other doctors think. we dont have to stick out in a nice way, dont let these things concern you focus on the medicine. IR getting more involved with cancer beyond Liver is just fantasy, truthfully if someone isnt trained in oncology or doesnt attend a tumor board to learn they shouldnt be touching cancer patients

Lung ablation, etc, are outside of the liver. Radiologists/IRs do attend tumor board and oncological imaging is a very heavy part of our training. IRs also perform biopsies even before the confirmation of diagnosis to the end of folks’s life with pallative procedures like pleurix placement.

Just throwing it out there, that IRs are absolutely involved in oncological care, from diagnosis, to adjunct and pallative therapies.

 

[medgator]

IR getting more involved with cancer beyond Liver is just fantasy, truthfully if someone isnt trained in oncology or doesnt attend a tumor board to learn they shouldnt be touching cancer patients

Anything can happen in the real world, and unfortunately, often does. I've seen it with my own eyes

As egregious as urologists doing upfront cryo which I've seen quite a bit.

The unscrupulous IR will get a referral for a lung biopsy and then bring the patient in for a "consult" prior to the procedure as well follow up to go over the "results" and discuss the option of RFA, sometimes without getting surgery or RO input, which is why I have been trying to get biopsies done with CT surg or pulm via ENB.

IR worries about sbrt

How disruptive could SBRT be for Interventional Oncology?

 

[scarbrtj]

We're not not radiologists. "Radiaists" or "radioists"? That we're no longer "therapeutic radiologists" represents our field's nascent inferiority complex and neurotic tendencies, ha. Herman Suit and some other guys formed a club in the '50s; they called it the American Club of Therapeutic Radiologists. We only became "radiation oncologists" in the 80's. Radiotherapist is a really good name but it's now taken by non-MDs and thus we'd never stoop to calling ourselves that. I don't favor minimally invasive as we're non-invasive almost all the time. Protons and electrons and neutrons and carbon ions and alpha particles (Xofigo) are not quanta, if that gives you any Quantum of Solace. At the end of the day, from the myriad of tools we use, the primary target of all our therapies is DNA. We are DNA attackers. If our tool doesn't damage DNA (directly, neutrons, or indirectly, photons, e.g.), our tool has no effect. Like penicillin is an antibiotic, we are antinucleotidists.

 

[Lamount]

When friends and family want to know what I do, I usually ask them if they have seen ghostbusters.

 

[scarbrtj]

When friends and family want to know what I do, I usually ask them if they have seen ghostbusters.

Sometimes I cross the beams; i.e. use photon and electron on same patient.... no explosions/universe destruction yet!