Dr Geoffrey Liu

One review of “Dr Geoffrey Liu”

Ilya Davydov

• 22 September 2022

This is a review for Dr. Geoffrey Liu, and partly for Dr. Daryl Roitman. The purpose of this review is to say my honest opinion about the care provided by Dr. Liu as the son of a cancer patient. My name is Ilya, my mom, Tatiana, was diagnosed with stage 4 alk-mutated lung cancer in the spring of 2019. She was feeling very unwell and was in the hospital, after the biopsy had come back she was given alectinib, an alk-inhibitor and she felt much better, and left the hospital. She was back to good shape in a month. She was referred to Dr. Daryl Roitman and he kept her on alectinib. My mom was on alectinib for about a year and a half. After this the cancer became resistant. This was when we decided to switch oncologists because Dr. Roitman was uncooperative in any of our ideas, like sending a piece of biopsy material to a gene-sequencing analysis company called Oncobox. We wanted to do this in order to see what results a more in-depth biopsy would give so we could combine alectinib with another drug to treat the cancer more effectively, and have resistance develop less quickly. Dr. Daryl Roitman simply wanted to keep with the standard protocol and nothing else. He did not give any kind of answer to a possible diet change or anything else that can help treat the cancer. Over time we were liking this attitude less and less and we decided to find a a oncologist who would be more engaging and attentive to the person they are treating, and just plainly more human. Somebody who would care about the patient instead of being very shallow and showing no effort to do anything other than protocol. We also wanted to find an oncologist who would be a specialist in ALK mutations. We came accross Dr. Geoffrey Liu. My mom had her first visit with him and told me he is more professional than Dr. Roitman and seems to know more on what he is talking about and about what he is doing, specifically about the ALK. He seemed smarter to us, like somebody who could really help. He also was enthusiastic and seemed like somebody who cared. The first visit my mom had with Dr. Liu was one of the last visits she had with him because after my mom only saw his assistants. I later found out Dr. Liu has around 30 cancer patients that he cares for. He told me this himself. With this amount of patients under his care, I can see why he has no time to talk with a patient in-person, and much less, formulate any sort of plan to try to cure an individual patient. Every oncologist can keep to protocol, and some have more knowledge than others on what is better to do when things do not go to plan. But not every oncologist, like Dr. Liu, has the time or most importantly, the will, to try to CURE a patient. Most oncologists look at patients with cancers stage 3 or higher as finished material. It is all just a chance to create studies that can help people sometime later, they show minimal intention to help now. They put effort when something lucky happens like a drug working better or longer than usual. When things do not go to plan they shake their head, make a sad face and say, its cancer, what am I supposed to do.

Dr. Roitman put my mother on Lorlatinib and she transferred to Dr. Liu when she was already taking it. The way Dr. Liu handled the transfer of a patient showed the type of person he is. Instead of openly contacting Dr. Roitman and saying that my mom was under his care now, he said that he will act as if his care for my mom is not a permanent thing to not hurt Dr. Roitman’s feelings. This continued for a very long time with Dr. Liu pretending in his reports that my mom was still a patient of Dr. Roitman when he was in fact her primary doctor. This way of not wanting to tell the truth to Dr. Roitman about what was actually going on, is something I did not like right away, but I did not understand at the time that this was not only one instance of such unacceptable behaviour but a trait of Dr. Liu’s character. When my mother after a long time had another visit with Dr. Liu in-person and my mom was not happy with her condition, he yelled at her, and he did so not only on this occasion. Regarding thinking about treatment that went a little outside the box, he was also uncooperative, except he was a more talented speaker than Dr. Roitman. He never said no explicitly but that was the real answer. What came out of his mouth was a lot of words about why this is difficult and unneeded, and how we are already doing this and this, and why are you not be happy with how everything is. I want to emphasize that this sort of manipulation is a strong aspect of Dr. Liu’s character. He blamed my mother multiple times saying things like, but this was YOUR idea, I TOLD YOU we should have done this, why did you not TELL ME you wanted this, YOU are wasting time and because of this there are PROBLEMS NOW. The patient, my mother, was blamed when she did not do anything wrong and did her best to listen to what Dr. Liu was saying and make sense of it. My mother is not a doctor and this is why she wanted to make decisions WITH Dr. Liu, not Dr. Liu give her a choice between many things, making all of them sound viable, have her choose on her own, and later blame her for making a bad choice. And that is exactly what he did, more than once. I have not seen Dr. Liu take responsibility for his actions. The more we saw these things the more we wanted to quickly find another oncologist, and this is not my mother being picky, she to her last wanted to stay with Dr. Roitman, and after all of Dr. Liu’s antics thought that he still cared and can help. I, her son, was the one saying that these people are not right for us and that we should look for an oncologist who we would not make ourselves like, but like naturally, seeing that they really want to help.

My mother progressed on Lorlatinib and we began to be worried. Dr. Liu administered platinum-based chemotherapy and said to keep taking Lorlatinib. Beforehand we had done the Oncobox analysis and received a report of drugs that can be used alongside the ones my mother was currently taking as combination therapy.

An important sidenote, I have already mentioned taking multiple drugs at once to treat cancer. This is called combination therapy. After my experience of studying cancer research articles, the best bet for treating cancer most effectively, in my opinion, is this. By doing a biopsy as detailed as finances allow to find mutations and basically, find out the most information about the cancer, various drugs that can be helpful specific to the patient’s cancer are found. A right match of these drugs treats cancer more effectively, it kills more cancer cells as it does so from multiple sides, not one, and this significantly slows the cancer cells from becoming resistant, because the cancer must learn to overpass multiple blows.

The report of drugs said that platinum-based chemotherapy was helpful for my mom. After doing chemotherapy, which was hard, my mom saw her cancers shrink and she was feeling okay and happy that the treatment was working. After a pause to recover, Dr. Liu administered another type of chemotherapy which was not platinum-based, with no evidence on the Oncobox report that it was effective for my mom. My mom did two trials which were less potent than the platinum-based but for some reason much much harder to bear. It turned out that they did not help my mom but only made her weaker. Another break was given for my mom to recuperate in order to start a trial that Dr. Liu was offering. At this time my mom was again blamed for apparently not knowing what she herself wanted. Does she want the trial right now? Does she want to wait? Decide already! It’s HER choice! This was when both me and my mom knew we needed another oncologist and were looking to have an online consultation with Dr. Camidge, an ALK mutation specialist, and on his advice start thinking about what to do next. But slowly my mother’s condition got worse, she got covid while admitted at hospital but handled it exceptionally well. My mom was holding up and waiting until her condition improves so she could start the trial. It was a matter of increasing her sodium levels that was the source of the wait. Then I got a call sometime in January 2022 telling me my mother was transferred to the ICU with a septic shock. She had a couple of infections before while staying at the hospital past times but this one seemed to go unnoticed and my mother being in an especially weak state, the infection spread. I think this also shows the level of service at Ontario hospitals because once my mother recounted to me how a young doctor did not even sanitize her hands before a procedure with a needle. My mom passed away on February 6, 2022.

All the time my mother was in the ICU I never got a call from Dr. Liu. I had to call him myself and ask him what he thought, and about what we could too. He said my mother is very sick, there is very little chance she will make it and there is nothing we could do. I do not need anyone to make a sad face and speak to me like a child, but Dr. Liu said this in a cold-blooded, matter-of-fact way. He did not understand why I have questions at all. After my mom passed away he never gave me a call to say anything. I think this shows the most about the type of person he is.

I am telling this story so others could have an idea of what they could possibly face if they choose Dr. Liu as their oncologist. I want people to make an informed choice. I am not writing to slander Dr. Liu, I am honestly recounting what me and my mother went through. Dr. Liu is a professional oncologist who understands much more about ALK mutations than other oncologists, but I personally think he is not a good person, and that means he cannot be a good doctor. I can call him capable. And most importantly like the overwhelming majority of oncologists, he does not want to cure you, just like Dr. Roitman. And this is the most important for a person who has cancer or any grave illness – do not let anybody tell you you are terminal, and treat you like you are terminal. There is no such thing as terminal. There have been many people with all types of illnesses who were told they have a number of months to live, and who who were cured and asked the doctor who told them this what they thought now, after many years of being strong and healthy. God is the one who decides when and how our time will come, it is the job of the doctor to believe in every patient and do their best. If a doctor does not tell you they want to cure you, if you see it in their eyes that this is not the case, go and find one that will. Decide for yourself what you want and act accordingly. And do not lie to yourself.

Ilya