Multidisciplinary Care of the Cancer Patient

Gregory A. Masters, MD, Editor

I am excited to help bring you this most recent addition of the Surgical Oncology Clinics of North America , focusing on the multidisciplinary treatment of cancer patients. Ongoing clinical research demonstrates the value of a team approach to complicated cancers, especially in this age of increasing technical complexity of surgical procedures, radiation oncologic techniques, and systemic therapy, including new biologically targeted agents.

We have put together a table of contents focusing on multiple different cancer subtypes and have asked the authors to focus on the multidisciplinary approach to these patients, including ways that systemic therapy and regional radiation can be integrated with new and improved surgical techniques to offer patients the best chance for tumor control and palliation.

In these articles you will read about aggressive approaches to patients with localized disease, regionally advanced cancers, and even patients with metastatic disease who may benefit from a multimodality approach to therapy. This is an exciting time for clinicians caring for cancer patients, given the increasing armamentarium available for combating this disease. I hope this text provides you additional insight into the many ways that clinical care is advancing through clinical research. I also hope this will stimulate further enrollment of cancer patients into clinical trials investigating these new techniques.

I thank the authors and coauthors for their insight, diligence, and hard work in putting together these articles.

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