I was doing about 3K calories of formula a day and still dropping weight. Everything hurt. My joints were a wreck and getting out of bed was a chore. I started doing 8oz of formula (TwoCal HN) and mixing that with 8oz of vitamin D milk. In a few days my joint pain went away.
But yes, infusion rooms have little cafeterias and are stocked with soda, ice cream, juice, candy, and so on. Anything to get calories in people.
> However, patients with severe weight loss, sarcopenia, cachexia or malnutrition are probably not good candidates for a STF intervention [27, 28]. Recent guidelines recommend to increase protein and fat consumption in patients with cachexia [29, 30]. Thus, STF may be particularly useful for relatively fit patients treated with (neo)adjuvant chemotherapy.
I did 4 rounds of chemo, one round is a week (5 days) on, 2 weeks off. During the third round the nausea was so bad that I ate a piece of toast and drank some water. That week.
They try to get you to eat anything and everything so you have some strength. It's also a factor to flush the chemo drugs out of your body. Food and fluids help that too.
I had heard on a podcast[1] about the Ensure thing quite awhile back, and I asked an MD acquaintance about it before I posted to make sure I wasn't about to post "fake news." The acquaintance is the one that then mentioned the appetite-inducing drugs. They're not an oncologist though so it's possible they're not up-to-speed on current practices, or more likely I misremembered their exact wording and they may have been referring to anti-nausea meds in the first place.
[1]: I think it was the Peter Attia Drive podcast with guest Dr. Rhonda Patrick
I wouldn't be surprised to know that some oncologists put patients on meds to induce/increase appitite. But, from what I know of the chemo drugs I studied, anti-nausea is pretty much a given.
It may also be a factor for some who don't have much mass to lose and maintain a healthy weight. My oncologist kept up with me throughout the process and asked how I felt as it related to the weight-loss, red blood cell counts and all of those other blood tests. I probably could have gotten those meds too, if I asked. But, I was kinda against putting even more drugs in my body at that point.