Many patients feel the urge to understand what is happening to them. A wealth of information is available online; unfortunately, not all information is equally reliable and trustworthy. In this section, you will find support to find and access the right resources – in other words, evidence-based information.
Under all circumstances, your most important source of information must remain your health physician.
The aim of this page is to help you understand your disease and available treatments and foster deeper and richer discussions with your treating physician.
KickCancer does not take any responsibility for any treatment decision that you will make on the basis of the information mentioned on this website.
In this section, you will find a list of websites providing quality-approved scientific information about paediatric cancer. These websites have been jointly analysed and verified by patients and patients’ representatives, the Anticancer Fund, the Belgian Society for Paediatric Haemato-Oncology and KickCancer.
Naturally, most patients will google (or use another search engine) for additional information (even when told not to do so).
The web is equally full of good and anecdotal or even wrong information that can put the quality of the treatment of a patient in jeopardy. Some websites will even spare no efforts to appear like any other scientifically sound website in order to draw a commercial benefit from patients’ distress.
In this section, we want to equip you with a few tips and tricks to make sure that the information you find online is as trustworthy as possible:
You can always start from our list of trustworthy ressources.
Our first concern as a patient or parent of a patient is to ensure that we receive the best treatment. However, most of us do not have the time, energy or knowledge to skim through the literature to discover all our options.
A team of scientists and physicians from the Anticancer Fund can provide you with curated scientific information to help you understand what information is relevant to you and make well-considered and informed decisions about your treatment.
MyCancerNavigator is a free service for cancer patients treated in Belgium.
One of our major concerns as a patient or parent of a patient is to ensure that we understand what is happening and regain a sense of control or ownership over the events.
Discussing with a peer or someone who had to deal with a similar life experience can be extremely helpful in this regard because such a peer understands the turmoil of disease from inside.
KickCancer trained former patients and parents of former patients to become expert patients: this means that not only do they have the experience of cancer treatment, its impact on one’s daily life but also, they do know patients’ rights and have been educated to have an elevated view on their own experience to help other patients or parents of patients in a neutral fashion.
Connecting with a former patient or with a parent who had to deal with the similar events can really help you on a practical and medical level: peers can be a source of practical support and provide you with useful information on a vast array of topics, such as the identification of reliable websites, the relevance of an enrolment in a clinical trial or of a second opinion.
If you wish to enter in contact with a peer to discuss any aspect of your journey, please fill in this form.
KickCancer has developed MY COMPANION Support kit to assist families navigate through the cancer storm. It is a suitcase filled with tools and information to support them from the moment of diagnosis and throughout the treatment journey.
If you feel comfortable to dive into scientific publications, we provide you here with the most relevant websites and cues to assess the quality of the articles you will find.
Please note that the conclusions of some articles are difficult to interpret even for the specialists of the field.
You should always discuss the articles you find with your treating physician.
To find information, these sources are a great place to start:
To choose information that is relevant and useful:
To access information:
I’m too small to cure, are you too big to care?