Understanding the balance between efficacy and toxicity

John Kuruvilla, MD, FRCPC, from the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto, Canada, discusses the balance between efficacy and toxicity of treatments at the International Workshop on Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (iwNHL) 2017, held in Vancouver, BC, Canada. An important thing that patients should understand about treatment is that there is a balance between efficacy and toxicity. Patients are often willing to consider treatments that have high toxicities, without understanding the potential consequences, which can include prolonged hospitalisation. There are safe options, for example, autologous transplantation, that have been shown to be very effective across a large spectrum of patients.