Dr. Kerry Courneya

The oncologist is absolutely crucial.

You know, if the oncologist says that that patient should be exercising or think about exercising, they take that very seriously.

So we've been able to get the oncologists on board or the urologists and say, hey, your urologist thinks, you know, with your prostate cancer that you should be exercising as well.

So it's really building that team of support.

and motivating patients with the benefits that are going to be specific to them and their unique situation.

So the short, simple answer is evidence.

So oncologists will recommend for patients things that are evidence-based.

And one, I think the real strength of the exercise oncology field is we've subjective exercise to the same rigorous research that they would subject their drugs to.

So we do randomized controlled trials, which are sort of the gold standard research methodology with large sample sizes showing these benefits for their patients.

and then we publish them in the top cancer journals that the oncologists read so that's what they're looking for is evidence not that anecdotal stories about hey my uncle fred did this and his cancer went away they want to see these uh... high-quality research studies and so that's been building over the last couple of decades slowly at first but now uh... much more quickly where the evidence is getting out there and most oncologists are now aware of it in fact

Two years ago, so it's only in 2022, two years ago, the American Society of Clinical Oncology put out its first exercise guidelines.

So this is cancer doctors.

So it's one thing for exercise specialists to say, hey, cancer patients should exercise.

But now we have the cancer doctors themselves, their professional organization, ASCO, the

who are being treated with curative intent, should be recommended aerobic and resistance excise while they go through treatments.

And those guidelines are adhered to very closely by oncologists.

So almost all of them now will be aware of these new ASCO guidelines saying you need to be recommending and referring your patients to a good quality exercise program to help them get through treatments.

Yeah.

So in one way, it's one of the surprising, I think, findings in this literature.

When we talk to some of our patients, they will tell us that the psychological benefits are more important to them than even what it's doing to the cancer or some of these other outcomes because it can be very difficult to cope with cancer psychologically.