In general, every cancer patient should have access to psycho-oncological treatment, aiming at helping patients to deal with the difficult situation. The patient’s individual need for treatment can be ascertained by measuring the patient’s degree of distress. The general and individual treatment goal should be to maintain a certain quality of life and to assess and treat serious psychiatric diseases resulting from the cancer diagnosis such as anxiety disorder or depression. Treatment possibilities include: psycho-oncological psychotherapy as depth psychology, supportive, analytic or behavioral psychology, as well as group therapy in terms of support groups, with relatives or without as a mere patient group.

In the last ten years opioid prescription has increased considerably. It is not that cancer patients would receive more analgesics, but it rather can be traced to a rising use of opioids for non cancer chronic pain (NCCP). There is evidence that serious opioid overuse may be present. Why should NCCP patients not benefit from opioid therapy and which side effects would justify to deprive NCCP patients of these strong analgesics? Our article summarizes the current discussion on opioid use in NCCP and outlines current evidence.

As quite typical for patients with plaque psoriasis, mainly if they are seriously affected, some of the major problems aside the obvious systemic inflammatory component, are social decline due to loss of work and/or personal problems. With this case presentation we are shedding light on the actual extent of this disease in our society.

Psoriatic disorders are a visual diagnosis. Aside from several subtypes of skin psoriasis, skin appendages such nails are often affected. The burden of disease is defined by the disease activity (extent of affliction of skin) as well as restriction of quality of life. Validated scores are a good tool for the evaluation.

Plaque psoriasis is one of the most common skin disorders and has been recognized as a systemic disease for a few years. It,s part of the immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. This is why the management of these patients includes the investigation of possible comorbidity like the metabolic syndrome, depression or psoriatic arthritis.