[Organizational forms in the internal medicine treatment of cancer--experiences of the Swiss Working Group for Clinical Cancer Research].

The treatment and care of the patient suffering from cancer which often extends over months, even years and in which participate numerous specialists of the fields is, in order to be optimally effective, bound to organisational prerequisites. This particularly concerns the therapeutic research. This forms the framework in the centre of which shall stand the physician to which the patient has confidence. In Switzerland this is the family doctor. The participating specialists assume their specific tasks in every case for a limited period. Hereby the interdisciplinary talk often plays a decisive role. Not infrequently the only unilateral care overlooks important aspects, which are precarious for the course of the disease. The internal therapy of cancer has to a large extent the character of empiricism, to which the standards of the strongly controlled experiment are to be applied. During the last decenniums the methodology of the clinically controlled study was permanently extended and improved. Many studies, particularly the randomized ones, may be performed only multicentrically. Such a cooperation is realized in the Swiss working group for clinical cancer research. With the help of such an instrument relevant clinical questions can be investigated and answered, which further the treatment of the cancer diseases step by step.