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The simplest way to establish the ability of a doctor is to ask him directly what he does about tracking the outcome of his treatments and what these outcomes have been. Good doctors will share this information gladly, because neither ego nor poor results will prevent them from doing so.
If you find that concept too challenging (although bearing in mind the results of a poorly performed procedure, perhaps you shouldn't) can I suggest two things:
1. If you go back to the Site Search Engine and enter the names of the doctors you are considering, you might find the names of men who have used their services.
2. If you go to RESOURCES you will see the names of two men who say they keep track of the best medical people in the business. you might like to mail them and ask them their opinion of the two doctors concerned.
Doug,
Salvage radiation treatment is done by a team of people and is not so dependent on the skill of a radiation oncologist, unlike surgery. With salvage radiation treatment they will be trying to radiate an area about the size of a golf ball where they think the cancer cells may still be. There is not a lot of precision required.
The dose I got last year was pretty much standard at about 66 greys given over 33 days, give or take a little. Your radiation oncologist may be in the building when the linear accelator is running but he won't be running it. It is programed by radiation technologists and is then controlled by a computer. You don't need leading edge equipment because they don't know exactly where the cancer cells are so it doesn't have to be too precise.
Before you get the radiation you will get scanned and then tattooed (that part hurt a bit) so they can aligne the machine to your body the same way every day by shining some laser beams exactly on the tattoo micro dots.
For me the only issues were having to go every day and trying to keep my bladder at the same level of fullness every day during the time you are in the machine (about 3 minutes) so the radiated area stays the same.
You will probably be asked if you want hormone treatment along with the radiation. No one really knows if it helps or not. I'm part of an international research study and was randomly assigned to get 6 months (the choices were none, 6 months or 2 years)of hormone treatment. Then 15 years from now they might really know if hormone treatment helps or not.
- More information than you asked for but I thought you would be interested.
