The future of cancer patient education

The future of cancer patient education, extrapolated from its mystified past through the promising recent developments reported elsewhere in this issue, would seem to be bright. Growing financial constraints on medical care in most countries, however, will retard the expansion and strengthening of patient education unless it can demonstrate both its effectiveness and its cost-containing potential. This can be accomplished by (1) emphasizing the potential benefits of patient education beyond the strictly medical; by (2) evaluating the effectiveness of patient education in achieving those benefits; and by (3) developing triage and step-by-step approaches to allocating scarce educational resources to the patients who will benefit most from them.