PESHAWAR, June 8: Lack of facilities for the treatment of cancer, have been adversely affecting the patients because most of them are seen by the doctors other than the oncologists in the Frontier province, bringing them more harm than benefit, doctors told Dawn on Saturday.

As the medical science has made tremendous progress, so has the cancer, and there are three types of treatment being provided to the patients: medical oncology, surgical oncology and radiation oncology. But the patients afflicted with the dreaded ailments like breast, lung, pancreas, liver and prostate cancer or leukemia and lymphoma are still being treated by surgeons and physicians not qualified to treat such patients.

Consequently, cancer, which is 100 per cent treatable, has become a disease totally incurable in this province because the doctors treating cancer patients do not know about the new researches, diagnoses and treatments in the field and the gullible patients suffer in the end.

There are only two treatment centres in the NWFP, one is a 60-bed Institute of Radiology and Nuclear Medicines (Irnum) while the other is a 17-bed medical oncology unit at Khyber Teaching Hospital (KTH), Peshawar. These two are supposed to cater to the needs of 17,55,000 population of the NWFP besides a large number of Afghan refugees living here.

The patients visiting Irnum, have to wait for weeks for admission and treatment because of the heavy workload there. Some 13,000 people have been enrolled for treatment during the current year at Irnum while the medical oncology unit at KTH has treated some 700 patients so far.

The doctors argue that step-motherly attitude of the federal government has hit the cancer patients in the NWFP. Explaining, one doctor said there were 10 full-fledged wards in different cities of Sindh, 15 in Punjab, 3 in Islamabad and one in Balochistan while the NWFP health department is yet to establish medical oncology wards in different cities of the province.

A tiny unit had been started in Ayub Teaching Hospital, Abbottabad in 1999 which was also closed down due to leg-pulling by the medical community, and the lady oncologist, who headed the ward, went to Saudi Arabia in protest.

Irnum, which is the main hospital of the province, was established in 1974, under the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission’s strategy to use nuclear facilities for peaceful purposes. The sole unit established under the NWFP health department at KTH in March, 1999, has yet to sail smoothly because the physicians and surgeons, who dominate the healthcare system, describe is as useless by arguing that they have been treating cancer patients over the years and there was no need of oncology unit.

Nevertheless, the KTH unit would soon get registered with the US-based International Cancer Research Group which would provide Rs400,000 for the research and treatment of a single patient.

The unit has attained high-tech investigation facilities and the doctors there are hopeful that the unit would get enrolled with the international cancer research group in the near future.

On the other hand, the government has repeatedly been proposing in every five-year-plan that cancer treatment and diagnostic facilities would be provided at every teaching hospital of the country. The oncologists say that 300,000 new cases of cancer are reported every year in the country.

Inadequate facilities and lack of cancer hospitals have magnified the problem of the patients because they aren’t finding the right doctor at the right time. A case in point is the 28-year-old young man suffering from Leukemia at the medical unit of a city hospital six months ago. He had been told by the physicians that he won’t survive. Luckily, one of his acquaintances, took him to medical oncologist where he was treated and now the same person is working as a salesman.

Similarly, a young doctor suffering from throat cancer had been pronounced as incurable by a physician in Peshawar. He was called by his elder brother to the US where he was treated and now he is absolutely normal.

The oncologists argue that chemotherapy needed proper training because many a time the side-effects of the high-dosed intravenous medication to the patients kill both germs of cancer and the patients. To avoid the counter-effects of the chemotherapy, the patients should be given other drugs to save him/her from being killed.