Via the telephone, group support reaches cancer patients who might otherwise go without it

People with advanced cancer may find themselves homebound, but that doesn't mean they're cut off from support networks. Telephone and online support groups offered by the New York City-based nonprofit organization, Cancer Care, Inc., keep seriously ill cancer patients connected with medical information and with each other.

They also give patients a chance to offer support and advice to other people with cancer-related illnesses, says social worker Yvette Colon, the agency's program coordinator of online services. Colon notes that as people grow more comfortable with technology, telecommunications media are an increasingly popular way of delivering patient support.

Her agency's online and telephone groups--essentially group therapy sessions conducted on the Internet or on conference calls--are free to patients and focus on such issues as coping with emotions, fatigue, loss and death.

One telephone group, run by Colon, is ongoing and open to patients with varied ages, forms of cancer and interests. The 12 participants, scattered throughout several states, meet on the phone in a group call once every two weeks, in a telephone discussion she facilitates.

Although members are free to learn one another's identities and to call each other privately between sessions, Colon says the group's relative anonymity frees people to speak openly early on.

"You don't have that social inhibition you get with face-to-face," she says.

The main drawbacks of telephone support are technical glitches--sometimes noise interference plagues phone lines or group participants are inexplicably cut off--and the fact that some group members drop out and can't be found, says Colon. But a benefit is that patients who move frequently between house, hospital and nursing home, can participate no matter what their location, says Colon. Also, she says, participants teach one another that cancer patients needn't be passive but have rights and can be their own advocates.

"A lot of people have said they wouldn't have wanted to get cancer to learn all these things, like how to participate in making decisions about their own health care, how to plan for their future and how to talk about their own mortality," says Colon.

To find out more about Cancer Care's online and telephone support, visit its web site at www.cancercare.org, or call (800) 813-HOPE.

--B. Murray



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