My greatest teachers are my patients, and one woman with incurable bowel cancer was a

great teacher, and we wrote a paper together.

That's Dr. Chris Booth.

She had some very powerful lines that I still remember.

The diagnosis of cancer quickens time, and patients lose patience.

The good doctor will recognize this.

As an economist, I think about health care in terms of resources.

Others and other providers are resources, so are the buildings where they work, and the

equipment they use, and the medications they prescribe.

And there's another resource that doctors sometimes don't pay much attention to, one that

we'd always like to have more of.

I think oncologists, we do a pretty good job describing the potential benefits of treatments

in the side effects.

I think there's a fair bit of attention given these days to the cost of cancer medicines

and the financial cost of care, but we haven't done a good job of really quantifying

the opportunity cost of treatments, and the most important opportunity cost that we

thought of was the patient's time.

Time.

When you're a patient with cancer, time affects you in a lot of ways.

Time going for treatment.

Time between appointments.

Time spent not feeling well.

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