Press Release - Nancy Hassett Dahm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

GARDEN CITY, NY – Say your “God Forbids” now and imagine, just for a moment, that you’re face-to-face with cancer. You’re living with an uncertain prognosis, or perhaps you’ve been told your life-clock is now counting months instead of years, and “nothing else we can do …” is the resounding medical verdict. Your body is racked with unimaginable pain, your days filled with nausea and misery, and the physicians you counted on are no where to be found.

Registered nurse Nancy Dahm has witnessed the above scenario played out hundreds of times. As a cancer care specialist, she’s traveled with patients on a harrowing roller coaster of emotional and physical turmoil. She’s shared the joy and celebration of life with survivors, but also held the hands of many who were dying. Caring as much for their souls as their bodies, she counseled many patients as they approached death, and empowered them to die pain-free, with dignity.

Too often, Dahm discovered, cancer patients wallowed in a place she calls the “Valley of the Forgotten” – a place of rampant physician indifference, unnecessary pain, grief and worst of all – abandonment.
Now, the mild-mannered nurse from Garden City, NY is on a mission to make medical professionals re-examine the way cancer patients are treated. Put simply, she’s determined to make compassion as important a component of cancer treatment as chemo and radiation.

Dahm’s experience with hundreds of cancer patients opened her eyes to a chilling, and seldom discussed, reality: Many physicians take no interest in the control of patient pain, and often totally ignore the emotional and psychological impact the disease wreaks on patients. Making matters worse, patients and families are left uninformed about the reality of the disease, and are forced to fight their way through a callous medical system at a time when their worlds are crumbling.

“Why do so many patients die in pain when it is widely known that pain can be controlled?” asks Dahm. “Why do so many physicians and medical professionals avoid fulfilling the most basic needs of cancer patients – understanding, compassion, respect and dignity?”

“Care given without compassion is not care at all – it’s just academics with indifference.”
According to Dahm, the problems stem from ignorance, not malice. She believes many physicians are simply ill-prepared and under-educated when it comes to addressing the needs of cancer patients. Valiant in their efforts to defeat cancer through treatment, physicians often leave patients uninformed, in pain and essentially out of the loop of their own medical assessment. Reliance upon science only in the battle against cancer spells a cold, impersonal and often agonizing reality for the patient.

Dahm, who has developed a new model for pain management in cancer care, is hoping to open a dialogue among professionals and spark change in the medical establishment by first empowering the patient. She’s written a veritable cancer patient Bible, a book titled Mind, Body and Soul: A Guide to Living With Cancer.

The book combines practical information such as pain management, medications and stress management with spiritual and philosophical inspiration for the suffering soul
-- from Plato and Marcus Aurelius to discussions of the afterlife.

“I only want patients to be treated with the same respect as everyone else,” adds Dahm. “As healthy people, we expect others to treat us with compassion, love and understanding … isn’t it ironic that people stricken with cancer need to ask for the same things?”

Nancy Hassett Dahm is a registered nurse specializing in cancer care. She conducts many programs and seminars on the care of cancer patients, and developed a new model of pain management, “The Continuum of Pain, The Continuum of Pain Control,” which she has effectively implemented to keep most of her patients pain-free.

Mind, Body and Soul: A Guide to Living With Cancer, is available in bookstores and online book retailers. For more information, visit www.cancerbook.com