About the Symptom Management Service

The Symptom Management Service offers consultations to improve the quality of life and care for patients at UCSF’s Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Patients are referred by their cancer doctors to members of the service’s interdisciplinary team.

The service provides treatment and counseling for physical and emotional symptoms of cancer. Assistance includes help with pain, fatigue, depression, anxiety, advanced-care planning and spiritual issues. Treatments integrate medical, psychological, social work and spiritual approaches, which are offered along with regular cancer care. Care is coordinated with cancer treatments and with the support of patients’ doctors.

The service does not have after-hours or on-call availability, but works directly with oncologists for these needs. Doctors are kept abreast of medication and symptom-management needs. Patients who become hospitalized should notify the service for assistance.

Dr. Michael Rabow received one of four 2012 Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Physician Awards.
Read more below.

SMS Director Dr. Michael Rabow receives one of four 2012 Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Physician Awards. The aim of the awards is to foster those skills and virtues by providing financial prizes to those physicians, young and old, who have shown their care of patients to be exemplary, a model of good medicine for other physicians, and a great benefit in advancing the centrality of end-of-life care as a basic part of the doctor-patient relationship. >more info