Breast cancer-related inquiries by patients to a telephone information service

The authors studied 2804 breast cancer-related inquiries that were made in 1226 patient calls placed to a cancer hotline between 1979 and 1983. One third of the inquiries concerned treatments or their side effects. Questions about rehabilitation, biology, and specialists accounted equally for another third of the inquiries. The patient-directed nature of these telephone inquiries suggests that these data may provide a particularly accurate assessment of breast cancer patients' needs for information and counseling that are being inadequately addressed under conventional medical care.