Medical Oncology

For standard, guideline-based care in an accredited centre, generally yes — the protocol is the same. The variables to check are the hospital's accreditation, the volume of your specific cancer treated there each year, and whether a multidisciplinary tumour board reviews cases. Volume matters more than nationality: a surgeon who does your operation weekly is a better answer than a country.

No. A second opinion is a review of documents, not a treatment, and it does not require you to pause anything. Stopping an active regimen to wait for an appointment abroad is one of the few genuinely harmful things a patient can do on their own initiative. Keep your current plan running and let the review happen alongside it; if it changes nothing, you have lost nothing.

Most often it confirms the plan you already have, and that confirmation has value of its own — it ends the doubt that makes people delay. In a minority of cases it changes something concrete: a re-read of the pathology gives a different subtype, a biomarker test not yet done opens a targeted option, or an operable tumour was called inoperable. Those cases are why the review is worth doing, but they are the exception, not the expectation.

A medical oncologist manages the drug treatment of cancer — chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immunotherapy and hormone therapy — and coordinates it with surgery and radiotherapy. They are the doctor who owns your overall plan from diagnosis onward, decides the sequence of treatments, monitors response on scans and adjusts doses. Surgeons remove tumours; the medical oncologist runs the strategy around that.

Yes — send your pathology report, imaging on disc or link and the list of drugs you have already received, and the tumour board reviews them without you being present. The written opinion comes back within three to five working days and states whether the current plan matches international guidelines. Most patients use it to confirm a plan they will continue at home.

Yes — the same molecules from the same manufacturers, approved by the European Medicines Agency and the FDA, are used under their original brand names. Turkey's licensing follows EMA decisions closely, so the standard first-line regimens are identical. The difference is price, not chemistry: the drug is manufactured in the same plant and shipped through the same regulated supply chain.

Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons patients come. Bring the full protocol, the cycle dates, the doses actually given and your latest blood counts, and treatment resumes on schedule rather than restarting. What the team needs above all is the pathology report; without it the regimen cannot be verified and the first cycle here will be delayed.

No — it depends entirely on which drugs you receive. Taxanes and anthracyclines usually cause complete hair loss, while many platinum-based and targeted regimens cause only thinning or none at all. Ask your oncologist about your specific drugs rather than about chemotherapy in general. Where loss is expected it starts around week two or three, and hair regrows within three to six months of the last cycle.

Most regimens run on a 21-day cycle, some on 14, so you have two to three weeks between treatments. Flying is generally safe, but not in the first week after a cycle, when your white cell count reaches its lowest point and infection risk is highest. The usual pattern is to fly home a few days after treatment and return for the next one.

A single chemotherapy cycle costs roughly 1,000 to 4,000 US dollars, and the drug itself is what moves that figure — targeted and immunotherapy agents cost several times more than classical cytotoxics. Ask for the price per cycle and the planned number of cycles together; a per-cycle quote without the cycle count tells you nothing about the total. Scans and blood tests are billed separately.

Plan on four to six days for a first visit: consultation and staging scans on days one and two, the tumour board decision on day three, and the first cycle after that. A companion is expected rather than merely allowed, and they can stay in the room during treatment. Later cycles need only two to three days each.