Immunotherapy and psychotherapy for cancer patients: A viewpoint

Objective: Immunotherapy is a biomedical treatment for cancer. The objective of this paper was to examine the relevance of psychotherapy in the context of immunotherapy. Materials and Methods: The expert-based documentary analysis method was adopted in synthesizing information for this paper. The review was done by three independent experts who examined the information obtained from peer-reviewed articles, grey literature and web documents. Search keywords included cancer immunotherapy, cancer patients, and psychotherapy in the Google search engine, Google Scholar, and PubMed. Results: The literature is replete with psychological concerns of cancer patients and their families. But, studies aimed at addressing the need to use psychotherapy to overcome the psychological distress associated with immunotherapy are scarce. We addressed the need for psychotherapeutic interventions for cancer patients who are about to or have undergone immunotherapy and their families. We highlighted the likelihood of psychological distress emerging before, and after immunotherapy procedure, and the need to overcome such concern through psychotherapy, while advancing the benefits of immunotherapy for cancer patients. Conclusion: Cancer is a chronic illness which poses a huge global public health burden. We encourage future psychological perspectives to address the probable psychological concerns of cancer patients arising from immunotherapy procedure.