Provider Counseling About Health Behaviors Among Cancer Survivors in the U.S.

About 10 million cancer survivors reside in the U.S. As our ability to cure cancer increases, we have begun to focus on maximizing quality of life and health status of survivors. Health behavior is one area within the survivorship field that has garnered attention recently, because of an awareness that some cancers occur more commonly in patients who have poor health behaviors, such as smoking, drinking, sedentary lifestyle, or low-quality diet. Although healthcare professionals generally find changing health behaviors among their patients to be challenging and frustrating, patients who have faced potentially life-threatening events might be more amenable to counseling about health-behavior modifications. Investigators used U.S. government …