Prescribing Exercise for Cancer Survivors:Time for Physicians to Become More Proactive

Survivorship has become an integral component of the cancer care continuum. Advances in diagnosis and treatment have resulted in decreasing cancer mortality and a subsequent increase in the cancer survivorship population. International guidelines recommend counselling these patients with regards to healthy lifestyle changes. Increased physical activity has been shown to have profound impacts on quality of life and has also been shown to reduce recurrence rates in patients with breast, colon and prostate cancer. However physicians remain reluctant to prescribe exercise for these patients. Contributing factors include inadequate understanding of the benefits of these programmes, as well as uncertainty with regards to their patients' ability to tolerate such an intervention. It is thus imperative to raise awareness of the benefits of exercise, to guide physicians' selection of patients for exercise and to outline the available options to promote and increase physical activity as part of a healthy lifestyle.