The Stretch – Cancer Care Today and How Employers Can Keep Up

Kevin Fyock:
We'll interview thought leaders and spotlight organizations that are setting new standards in employee benefits and health. So, our goal is to bring our listeners topics that are relevant and meaningful, to attempt to impart some learnings, and ideally, a call to action. And so, in today's episode, we're going to be discussing a widespread and life altering health issue facing millions of individuals and their loved ones.

And that topic is cancer.

Cancer is one of the most pressing areas that employers are concerned about. And justifiably so. Two in five people in the United States will develop cancer sometime in their lifetime. And many others will play caregiving roles to support those with cancer. And while World Cancer Day is not until February, nearly every month is dedicated to awareness and remembrance for some different form of cancer.

From breast cancer awareness in October to National Cancer Research Month in May. So, we've titled our episode “Cancer Care Today. How employers can keep up.” And given how broad and pervasive this impact is, it's hugely important for employers to develop a specific and candidly holistic strategy around cancer, a strategy that expands traditional approaches used in prevention, treatment, survivorship and more.

And I'm so excited that we have joining us today to help us understand these elements, our expert guest, Dr. Arif Kamal, the chief patient officer of the American Cancer Society. So, Arif, welcome. We're super excited to have you on today.

Dr. Arif Kamal:
Appreciate the invitation, Kevin.

Kevin Fyock:
Well, hey, Arif, maybe we just jump in. I'd love you to introduce yourself. What's your background? Like, how did you get to American Cancer Society? Lay it on me.

Dr. Arif Kamal:
Yeah. Well, thanks, Kevin. So, I think like everyone, right, we wear lots of hats. Let me start with the first hat I wore, which was not by my own liking or doing it was as a caregiver to my mom who was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was in high school.

And I had set out with all these career plans. I was going to be a lawyer and do some other things, too. And it just clicked. It clicked that it was the right thing to do, it’s where my passion was to do that. And as I took care of her during her journey, that got me to medical school and to various different places, including being the first person trained in supportive oncology as a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, so where I trained in, and then moving on to becoming a breast oncologist, but to me like it's always been about the experience.

I mean, as I talked to my patients, you know, we cure when we can, but we care always. And you know, in that ethos, it brought me to being a clinician, but also a researcher, being in the app development space to help people make important decisions.

And then you know, as American Cancer Society was really pivoting towards paying more attention to the experience. I mean, it's a great organization. It's been around for 113 years, has always cared about the cancer continuum, but it was clear that ACS is responding more so than ever before to the challenges people face in accessing care, getting through that. And as more people at younger ages are being diagnosed, including those who are employed at the time of diagnosis, that a focus on that experience is really important.

And so I'm very privileged to take this role as the inaugural chief patient officer. And I work with a fantastic team of folks who wake up every morning thinking about how we make that experience you know, better. And so to me, my ethos is more and better days. I want people to have more days, but not at the expense of a lower quality of life.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah. Well, you know, it's amazing. Three minutes into the episode and you're already giving me probably the thing that I'm going to say to myself over and over again, which is we cure when we can and we care always. That's a really nice takeaway. So, so I appreciate that. And I also appreciate you giving us your background too.

Why don't we jump into the first question I have for you? So, the World Health Organization projects that there's going to be about a 77 percent increase in cancer cases over the next 30 years. You spoke, Arif, about you know, people are being diagnosed younger and younger. Could you opine on that? What's going on here?

Dr. Arif Kamal:
Well, part of this is a counting issue. I mean, you know, when we, you know, in the United States, the leading cause of death in general has been thought to be heart disease. But I, I being one of those physicians, oftentimes when people die of natural causes, we write down on their death certificate that that was a heart, you know, their heart stopped.

But I would challenge us to say that actually many of those people who die of natural conditions too may in fact have cancer as well. Prostate cancer may be one of them. And so, you know, cancer in and of itself is growing in numbers, which is a reflection of our ability to screen more. So it's not that there's more cancer.

It's, it's really the issue of, is there more cancer later staged because it makes it harder to treat. I don't mind more cancers that are stage one. That means that we can generally clip them out, cut them out, surgically get them out. That's okay. But to us, it's really that the later stage a cancer is, the more treatment modalities and frankly, time intensity and costs and all these other things come into play because the difference between a stage one and a stage four is not only ability to cure, but what that experience actually looks like for someone going through that because a stage one is a lot simpler than a stage four.

So what's happening in the world is a couple things. I mean, we know that there's a lot of unknowns we have in the environmental risk factors that that people are up against. There's a few that we understand that are occupational risk exposures that are pretty well understood, but I think there's this, that's an evolving space where we're starting to better understand where that is.

I think the other thing is too, that as we see cancer starting to increase, particularly in westernized countries where we see the western diet becoming the predominant diet. And we know that, for example, in, let's say, immigrant populations to this country who experience pretty remarkable weight changes, my mom was an example of that, where when she came from Bangladesh to this country, she, over a short period of time, gained a significant amount of weight, and that's not unusual, actually, for folks who get exposed to the westernized diet. And what we do know is that there is, that as a lifestyle risk, is a pretty remarkable risk to increasing a person's risk of cancer.

We know 13 cancers are associated, for example, with being at an unhealthy weight. We know that 70 percent of Americans are at an unhealthy weight. That means being overweight or obese. And so, part of that is reflecting that as populations of folks, if we don't sort of change that, that we expect cancer to kind of come in behind them.

We also know that there are just some cancers that are going up, for example, pancreas cancer and brain tumors, which we don't have really good reasons for. But that number, that 77 percent number, has actually never been debated. It is a number that we all recognize and recognize that we need to lean into this issue.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah, so irrefutable increase. But what you're saying is sort of the reasons behind that is a bit more difficult to understand.

It's so funny you talk about weight, because, you know, in our world here at Aon, it seems like you can't enter a room without talking about obesity and talk about the different, you know, pharmaceuticals that are now here to impact weight, like, like GLP 1s, and maybe that's a good lead in to the other question I wanted to ask you, not necessarily even digging into the weight, although that could probably be part of your answer.

So, as this cancer landscape evolves, we know that there's this rapid increase in cancer cases. What, in your mind, are the biggest evolutions that are going on in cancer care now?

Dr. Arif Kamal:
Yeah, they're across the continuum. So, when I first entered oncology 15 years ago, and I said that to colleagues, particularly those who had choices, they went into, you know, orthopedic surgery or cardiology. They were like, boy, that's, that sounds really depressing. You're going to take care of cancer patients all day long. And 15 years ago, frankly, it was very different. Today, in fact, most people are like, Ooh, you’re in oncology, there's so much good stuff happening. And there absolutely is. In fact, I, you know, over my 15-year career tried to count the number of new drugs or indications from the FDA in the cancer space and I stopped counting at about 300.

There are 300 either new drugs or new indications just in cancer which is unprecedented both in terms of there being that many approvals, let alone in one space. I mean, both of those things are unprecedented. So, I would say one, just the options that people have.

But what's important for everyone to recognize is that it would be great to think that those options come with sort of a rationalization, maybe to the pricing that's behind them. And without going into a ton of detail, you know, I think that the average person might think that if, if drug A helps you live a year longer. And drug B helps you live a year and a half longer, so it's 50 percent better. And drug B might be 50 percent more expensive. In fact, that's not how it works.

There's a lot of complexity there, but like, what we're not seeing is while there may be the curve of survival improving like this, we recognize that the cost of that survival is happening like this. And when I mean cost, I mean the true sort of financial piece that we all share into, whether you are a self-insured employer, whether you are paying out of pocket, all of that is there is a cost to this that we are sharing.

So that evolution is both a good news, bad news story. It's a good news story in that we've got more options. The bad news story is they haven't come in a place where rationally we can say, the pricing structure reflects the incremental benefit that we're seeing from the drugs themselves.

I think the other evolutions we're seeing too is really in the early detection space. I mean, for, you know, decades now, we've had these tried and true radiologic based imaging to help us find something. So, you're looking for breast cancer, you get a mammogram, right? That's an x ray is what it is. You know, you're looking for lung cancer, you get an x ray, a fancy CT. That's what it is. You're looking for colon cancer, you might visually go and look directly, but they're also CT cloud free, so you can use a CT scan actually to, you know, look through the colon and look in the same way. The evolution now that's happening is us asking the question, well, if you look for on a scan, and by the way, right, an X ray is just a light source and a shadow.

And so, when I explain this to patients, I say, well, an X ray is just a flashlight and your hand. And so, if I use a flashlight and my hand, the shadow of my hand that projects onto the wall, that's the x ray. That's what I'm reading. And so, someone might say, well, how do you know that that hand is alive? How do you know that that hand is not growing? How do you know that the hand, because right, The flashlight, the size of the hand changes with the proximity of the flashlight, right? Everyone knows from just elementary school, if you move the flashlight closer to the hand, the hand gets bigger. And so there's a lot of limitations to radiologic based testing because, you know, there's a lot that goes into that.

People have asked the question, well, if I see a one-centimeter tumor on a mammogram, what does that mean? I said, well, it means you have about a billion, with a B, cancer cell sitting in one space. So that naturally asks the question. Well, well, I don't want it to be a billion cells by the time you see it, Dr. Kamal, when can we find it when it's 10 or a hundred because doesn't, isn't it easier to treat 10 or a hundred than a billion? And the answer to that is clearly yes. So how do we do that is we use blood tests because then what blood tests can do is find 10 or 100 cells because you don't need a shadow to tell you something there.

Use a blood test to say there's a cell that shouldn't be there. And so, we're seeing this growth in blood based early cancer detection that's growing. And you know, I think most of us in this space predict that in the next couple of years, that's going to go from sort of a concierge level approach where, where it is now to really you know, employees asking for this patients expecting it and clinicians using it as part of their, you know, average screening process.

Kevin Fyock:
That's so great, right? Because, you know, not many of us, and I suppose maybe there's a couple, right? We don't have x rays and we don't have radiological instruments in our home, right? So, you think about a blood test ostensibly, there's, there's a world in which you can also do that at home and, you know, improving that early detection.

So that's really cool. And I guess it's not even science fiction, right? Cause it's, it's happening all over the place today.

Dr. Arif Kamal:
Well, it is. And it's Moore's law applied to, you know, not transistors, but to this, you know. There's at least a hundred companies working on this. And there's really good, strong value propositions for why catching any number of cancers early is really important, particularly for the non screenable cancers.

I mean, we're, you know, you were talking about sort of what are those cancers that are growing? I mean, there there's uterine cancer, of which there's not a screening test, there's pancreas cancer, and there's even lung cancer in non-smokers. In fact, you know, a lot of recent news about some high-profile people who have faced lung cancer without having ever smoked.

It is the eighth leading cause of cancer death in the United States, is lung cancer in never smokers and it is growing. So, you ask yourself the question, well, how do we find these deadly, increasingly common and affecting people who might not have typical risk factors like smoking, you know, blood base test might be the answer to that.

And I think if we're looking at over the next couple years, if I'm employer thinking about how we're gonna approach this issue because it's an inevitability. It's not an issue of if it's an issue of when. And how does one even potentially differentiate as a payer, as an employer, as a provider of employee services, where you say, well, hey, this is something people are looking for, asking for, are aware of, and the long term benefits are clear when we catch things very early.

Kevin Fyock:
We couldn't agree more. And we constantly have our clients asking that same question to, I think, in so many ways, this has become one of the most important issues that are facing employers throughout the United States.

Dr. Arif Kamal:
And so, to that question that I'm not in this space, I'm just a doctor. And so, I wonder, as I'm talking about these evolutions in science and the treatment base. What are you seeing in terms of employers and how they're thinking about responding to all these changes?

Kevin Fyock:
I'm humbled that you're asking me a question on this podcast. So, so thank you, Arif, and I would argue you're not just a doctor, especially going through your pedigree from earlier, but I mean, it's a great question, right?

I mentioned before that this is such a huge topic for all of our clients, and I think I opened up the podcast to say that so much of what employers are endeavoring towards is more of a holistic strategy, and maybe that's where I'd start, right? Is there's an importance of having an established cancer strategy.

We know that it's a top cost driver for employers, and maybe to even take a play out of your book, part of it is identifying engaging members and it's screening, right? Like you can't detect cancer and you can't improve survival if people aren't getting screened. And whether that's preventive screens or whether that's early detection like you're mentioning, it's probably a rare situation where somebody just happens upon cancer without sort of potentially digging into the why behind it.

So, I think there's an acknowledgement among employers that we have to be more creative, we have to be more directive with our strategies from offering wellbeing and get screen days to onsite screenings to virtual offerings. But then there's also sort of a focus on optimal outcomes, right? So, there are, I would say, solutions that have been around for many years, like surgical COEs and second opinions and virtual care coordination, which are incredibly important, but I think it's about how can that journey be improved from prevention all the way through end-of-life care. And so, I know, Arif, you and I've had conversations as I've picked your brain around, you know, how Aon should continue to focus in this area. And, you know, one of the areas that we're digging into is financial burden and emotional toll.

I mentioned before that it's not just about those who are undergoing treatment, but it's the impact upon employees and loved ones and caregiving that folks have to spend, you know, with their families and folks that they're caring for. So, it's great to cover preventive screening at 100%, but what about, say, follow on diagnostics once you get a positive result?

A lot of people can't afford care, you know, more holistically in the United States, let alone, you know, the very expensive add on care that comes with cancer, including caregiving. So hopefully that sheds a little bit of light, but yes, the non scientific answer being employers really need some type of strategy they can lean into.

Dr. Arif Kamal:
That's great. I mean, we've talked before about cancer, not only as a sort of, you know, epidemiologically being very important, but clearly it's a cost driver in a lot of different ways. And you know, I think about sort of the, that journey, I think one of the evolutions that's continuing to happen is cancer was at a time thought to be the reflection of either bad luck or bad genetics.

And the challenge with framing it that way is there is a certain like helplessness that comes along with like bad luck and bad genetics, which because you can't do much about either, right?

But if I told you instead that nearly 50 percent of cancers have a modifiable risk factor, that can involve a change you can make today. Now, that's a different story, right? And so that makes it, you know, it still says, well, what's the other 50 percent Arif? And yeah, yeah, I mean, we're figuring that out. But the reality is that today, we have evidence that very clearly shows that if you eat less red meat, you eat less ultra processed foods, that you walk 30 minutes a day, that you get these cancer screenings, that you are able to make changes on a day to day basis that are going to add up over time. And I think that this message that there are things you can do is one that I think is relatively new in the cancer space. Because most people I run into, if I say, how do you reduce your risk of heart disease? They can tell me. How do you reduce your risk of diabetes? They can tell me. How do you reduce your risk of hypertension? They can tell me.

And I say, well, how do you reduce your risk of cancer? They go, well, isn't that just something that just kind of happens to you? And I think that that role for employers, health systems, communities to think, because look, I tell you all day long. If you exercise more, regardless actually of the weight loss benefits, your risk of cancer will go down.

Okay, but I'm positioning the American Cancer Society, we all are, and ACS, to be moving from the “you should.” And I say this not only as an ACS imperative, but I think this is an imperative all of us can sign up for, is we're past “you should.” “You should” is you know, public health campaigns. It's a billboard. It's, you know, teaching somebody something they didn't know and realizing that they would do that thing if only they knew. That if education was the challenge and you're solving the challenge.

But I'm positioning us, and I think really, in a lot of other ways, we're positioning to be from “you should” to “this is how.”

Kevin Fyock:
I love that that connection to heart disease to, Arif, because growing up, you know, as always, you need to exercise, you need to eat better because it's going to reduce your cardiology risks like heart disease. It's going to reduce your chances of getting type two diabetes. But you're right, it's not until somewhat recently has the same exact story been told for cancer, and it makes perfect sense, right?

Dr. Arif Kamal:
Yeah, and you're gonna see this line between, you know, how I live, where I work, how I play, had been here. And then where I go when I get sick was here. And you're seeing this important blurring where the two things are actually coming close together, meaning that we're recognizing how we live, how we work, where we play, has risk factors, behaviors that are modifiable, improvable, and we lean into the things that work.

And so that's bringing that a little bit closer this way. But you're also going to see you know, insurance plans and health systems that people on sort of the sick side of the equation, S I C K, sick side of the equation, coming a little bit more this way and saying like, well, how can your health plan promote these healthy behaviors that start to feel like there's less of a solid line that differentiates these two worlds, that “this” can help “this” and “this” can inform “this” is really what we're seeing.

And I think over the next 10 years that will continue to happen, that we'll talk about that you're going to have prescriptions from your primary care physician about what to eat, comma, to reduce your risk of cancer, right? That you're going to have employer, as you were talking about, employer programs that are also going to facilitate some of these healthy behaviors, comma, to reduce your risk of cancer that that this over here and this over here are really closer together.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah. Wow, that's fascinating. So you've mentioned obviously American Cancer Society quite a few times. One of the main reasons why we want to have you on just such an amazing brand here in the United States. So, because it is, again, I would argue one of the most recognizable names in cancer. Just would love you to tell us what's new.

What are you all focusing on? You touched a little bit around sort of how you're trying to change the paradigm of getting people to move and understanding around risk factors. But, but what else can you tell us about?

Dr. Arif Kamal:
Yeah, well, you know, cancer care as I, as I was, you know, alluding to is I've talked about the availability, accessibility gap.

Availability is, you know, does something exist? And 15 years ago, if you were treating melanoma, I would say there's two things that existed. So, the challenge at the time was, we need more things. We need more treatments. I would say today, not in all cancers, but we are shifting to where the challenge of our time right now is actually accessibility.

In Melanoma, we've got eight, nine, 10 things, I would argue, right? But a lot of people cannot access those things. Why? Well, primary reasons have historically been lodging and transportation and so we lean in heavy to that issue to say if you need a place to stay to get access to treatment well great we've got 31 Hope Lodges in the country that last year served 501,000 nights for free we don't do a needs assessment I don't care who your insurance is or who your employer is the reality is if you have a need we're here to meet that so we did that.

We are one of the largest transportation providers for cancer patients in the country. We use a program called Road to Recovery, which we started nearly 30 years ago, that uses, you know, the passion of volunteers. And so I say for any employers and employers out there, this is a great program where we actually lean into employers and say, Hey, do you have employees who want to give back in a micro volunteerism way because your commitment is measured in the ride, you know, the time it takes to give someone a ride from their home to their appointment.

But I will tell you over that 20, 30-minute ride is a real genuine sense of warmth that you're getting somebody to something that is life saving for them. And, you know, in all the things that we might do and all the noise that exists, I mean, that clarity of like the way I'm using this 20 minutes will help save this person's life.

There's very few other things I think that have that level of clarity between the action and the outcome itself. And I'm very proud of the new things that we did. This year we launched something we call the ABC grants. They stand for Addressing Barriers to Care grants. We did it as a pilot.

We're going to do it much bigger in 2025, but we funded 15 community-based organizations to address the things that we are not as the American Cancer Society. And so, I think that what's important to recognize is, yes, we're a strong brand, there's a lot of things we can do, but we're not going to do it alone. And this was recognizing that we're going to fund food banks, medical legal programs, loneliness and social isolation nonprofits, those that are addressing cancer mortality in these other ways that are non-biological, but they may be emotional, logistical, financial, relational, spiritual, etc.

And you're going to see us as an organization continue to lead into that because I want to solve the accessibility gap. The availability gap is an R& D issue, and I think we're doing really well in that space. The accessibility gap is where we need to position. And if you look over the next 10 years, cancer will continue to look more like heart disease and diabetes and hypertension, because it will be a chronic disease, thankfully so for so many millions of people, where we're going to cure what we can.

And for the rest, we're hoping that they're going to be at a place where they get a chronic, stable treatment that keeps it at bay over a period of time. Like we can't cure type 2 diabetes without significant weight loss, for example, but we can keep it under control. And that diabetes model applied to cancer is exactly the vision we have for the next step.

Kevin Fyock:
I love that. And I love the focus on, you know, accessibility, availability. You know, we've talked even before about this idea of vulnerability. So, you know, really intersecting these true social determinants of health. You even talked about food banks. I think the folks who are listening here, particularly employers, I think are really going to be encouraged to hear that. So just bravo. That's awesome work.

So maybe two other quick questions for you, you know, you touched a little bit about this, but so much of what we do at Aon, you know, obviously I focus on health, and then we have an entire portion of our business that focuses on risks and climate. And so maybe I can ask you to opine on that.

So as we focus on climate, we focus on, as you mentioned before, the environment, what do sort of employers need to be aware of around the connection between these factors, sort of external factors and health risk? And what is the relationship between, you know, these environmental factors and cancer look like?

Dr. Arif Kamal:
Yeah, well, one is you know, this evolving evidence base around how environmental risk exposures are affecting biology. I mean, what we do know is record numbers of people. I mean, because we've never seen this much before under the age of 50 are being diagnosed with cancer. And that's not because there are major genetic shifts that are happening in the country, right? Like the genetics of the United States is relatively stable.

What we're seeing though is something else is happening. And maybe it is, as I alluded to some things related to weight, but it's clearly more than that. It's clearly more than that. And what we don't yet know is, is what those sort of environmental and climate change are contributing to that.

But it is clear, for example, air pollution does have very clear links in geographic restricted ways that you can in fact, look at the county level where you see actual air pollution levels map to cancer prevalence, and it's literally where the air pollution is and where it blows. And so, we already know that to be the case.

And then I would say the second thing is we're seeing access to care issues already start to pop up. For example, last year, your listeners might remember the Maui wildfires. Well, you know, the Maui wildfires are reflective of human-based change on the environment. Because for anyone who knows that western side of Maui is extraordinarily dry because it was previously rainforest that was cut down for sugarcane.

I was there right before that. So, I kind of know a little bit of this history and they were sharing with me what was happening. Well, anyways, what that means is that there's no rain. In fact, it's one of the driest parts of the United States is that western side of Maui, because the clouds that come over the mountain are not caught by trees that used to be there.

So what happens is when there's a spark, that spark turns into a fire. Now, why is that important is well, in addition to Lahaina and those parts of Maui sort of going up in flames very quickly is, there were infusion centers giving chemotherapy to cancer patients in that western part of Maui that we as the American Cancer Society had to solve for by making sure that those people's treatment was not interrupted. We've seen the same thing happen with you know record hurricanes that hit Florida. We as ACS end up providing shelter and water to cancer patients whose treatment is interrupted in areas like that. We saw flooding in Jackson, Mississippi be the reflection of that, too. And so we're seeing more and more of this happen and I worry that you know, yes I mean there's literally physical barriers like flooding and roads get washed away that actually keep people from where they need to go to get.

Kevin Fyock:
Well, that's so fascinating because, you know, when I asked the question, I thought it was going to be one of to your point, you know, air pollution and temperatures rising, sea levels rising.

But you're right. There's this whole logistics element that, you know, if a beach erodes and you have a system there that's supposed to treat a patient with cancer and that can no longer be there, that’s obviously an unintended consequence of, you know, these environmental factors. So, so thanks for sharing.

Dr. Arif Kamal:
That's, that's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, literally, Kevin, in Maui, we created a program to fly those patients off the island to Honolulu to stay at our Hope Lodge and to get cancer care there. Because again, it turned into a place where they had no access to care at all. And we had to solve that problem for them, and it is we recognize skipping a cycle or two is not a minor thing. It actually changes your ability to survive cancer. And so to us, that was like a level one emergency. Get these folks on a plane, get them somewhere else so they can get the next infusion. And that's you know, reflective of the fire that happened there.

Kevin Fyock:
Oh, that's, that's so fascinating. I feel like we're going to have a whole episode just on the environmental impacts. So thank you for sharing.

Okay, as our listeners know, I like to end with a pretty consistent question and, and you're no different, Arif, So, you know, take me 10 years into the future. How, you touched a little bit about this, right? But. How is cancer viewed and perceived in society, and are we doing better in 10 years than we are today?

Dr. Arif Kamal:
I think it will be unrecognizable to today. The reason I say that is because we will catch more cancers earlier, probably through non radiologic based tests. We will have shifted many cancers to chronic diseases, and we will cure more. I mean, the reality is the high watermark for cancer death in this country is behind us.

So, while cancers are going up, mortality is not. That's the good news. And that's an okay trade off, actually, because it means we're finding them more and curing them.

The high watermark was in 1992. So, in terms of the rearview mirror, it is pretty far behind us, actually. We have reduced cancer mortality overall since 1992 by a third.

The goal is to get to 50 and beyond that. I think in the next 10 years, we'll get to 50. So, it will be like, you know, you've got a 50 percent chance your cancer, whatever it is, will be cured. And the other 50%, I think the majority of them will be chronic disease. And I think we'll catch a lot of them earlier too. So maybe we'll even surpass that.

So I think when we're talking about this, or our kids are talking about this, they will be surprised to hear that the innovations we're using in 2035 were not mainstays in 2020, you know, I think it'll be unrecognized.

Kevin Fyock:
What an optimistic ending to the podcast. So, so that's great.

And it's so funny. You talk about sort of into the future and looking back on treatments. And, you know, you think about so much of medicine 100 years ago appeared barbaric in nature, right? Like, how could we ever have treated people that way? And I think to your point, I guess there's this level of optimism for oncology and that these new treatment modalities and early prevention and early detection could allow us to rethink how we've been treating cancer and preventing it. So that's, that's awesome.

So, Arif, thank you so much for coming on the show and your expertise. It's always a pleasure talking to you. And to our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed “Cancer care today, how employers can keep up.” This is episode five of the stretch, a podcast dedicated to the ideas that are revolutionizing the world of workplace health and benefits.

If you enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to subscribe to the podcast and follow us again throughout the season. We hope you'll join us again. Thank you so much and goodbye.