Doctor tells 'stubborn colleagues': Pancreatic, liver cancers not a death sentence

PROFESSOR of liver and pancreas surgery at the NWRHA Shamir Cawich said contrary to what some doctors practise and preach, liver and pancreas cancers in TT in 2021 are no longer a death sentence.

Professor Cawich, president of the Caribbean Chapter of the Americas Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Association (AHPBA). spoke to the Newsday after the first international conference hosted by TT on January 30. He said such conditions can now safely be treated in TT with a combination of surgery and chemotherapy for good survival results.

“As little as ten years ago, if you were diagnosed with pancreas or liver cancers, surgeons would pretty much tell you to go take a cruise, enjoy yourself and put your will in order.

“Nowadays we have been very aggressive with these patients, operating on them and getting long-term survival. It is still a bad disease, but the outcomes we are getting now with the right training and the right awareness out there is really, really good.”

He said data in TT over the past ten years supports that the outcomes here are similar to those in first-world countries.

“So this whole notion of us practising in the third world and practising third-world medicine, as least in this discipline, is nonsense. We are doing just as well as any first-world or developed country.”

He said the problem facing TT and the Caribbean as a whole is their refusal to embrace change.

“We like things one way and we don’t want to change it. This is how it was from time immemorial and so it has to stay. Which is not good. “

He said many advances have been made in medicine and advised doctors to embrace the changes and not fight them.

“To be honest, doctors are stubborn people. Many of them have a complex, an attitude that they are educated, they know better and nobody could teach them anything.”

He said increased education is needed to remind doctors that this is no longer the case in 2021.

“But the message is hard to get across, so we have to attack it from both a patient and physician perspective.”

He said if doctors do not want to embrace the change. then they have to reach the patients. who can demand a referral.

He noted that where he trained. at a hospital in the UK, the patient population was 1.3 million, similar to the population of TT. The difference is, he said, they did four pancreas and four liver-cancer surgeries aweek.

“In TT we are doing two per month. So you know what is happening to other people: they are just kept in palliative care and they are just dying.

"That is what we want to change.”

The virtual conference, to advance liver and pancreas surgery for the Caribbean, attracted some 300 doctors from around the globe, including India, Canada, Turkey, USA, UK, Chile, Australia, Nepal, Brazil. The conference was conceptualised by recently qualified surgical oncologist and HPB surgeon Dr Ammiel Arra, who was inducted into the association as the general secretary.

Arra. who recently returned from India. where he specialised in surgical oncology for a year, said he gained great experience and knowledge from his exposure to similar conferences in that country. He said he wanted to share his experience with others, proposed the idea to the association for TT to host a similar conference and it ran with it.