Join Y. Luh, MD, FACP, FACR, FASTRO, talks about the importance of World Radiotherapy Awareness Day and how it can reduce global health disparities.
Join Y. Luh, MD, FACP, FACR, FASTRO
Radiation therapy, also known as radiotherapy, plays an integral role in curing cancer. It helps reduce patients’ symptoms and improves their quality of life — all while being a cost-effective treatment method. However, disparities at all levels are preventing patients from getting access to this crucial form of care. On Sept. 7, 2025, radiologists and radiation oncologists hope to help reduce these disparities through World Radiotherapy Awareness Day (WRAD). WRAD aims to bring together the radiotherapy community from around the globe to raise awareness on these issues.
WRAD has been gaining support from radiology societies everywhere, including ACR, the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology, the Royal College of Radiologists, the American Society for Radiation Oncology, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists (RANZCR). Join Y. Luh, MD, FACP, FACR, FASTRO, radiation oncologist with Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, CA, is leading ACR’s involvement in WRAD and spoke with the Bulletin to discuss how members can get involved.
There were several international radiation oncologists around the world who thought it would be a good idea to recognize the importance of radiation therapy in cancer care. So, WRAD officially launched during London Global Cancer Week in November 2024. There were in-person meetings as well as virtual participants on Nov. 14, 2024. There was great interest in making sure this would be an annual event to raise awareness about radiotherapy’s role in cancer care, so we decided to designate Sept.7 as WRAD moving forward.
As a radiation oncologist who serves on the ACR Board of Chancellors, I was tagged as the point person for championing ACR’s involvement in WRAD. We’re very happy to join our colleagues in the cancer-care world in promoting this initiative.
It’s been very exciting. It’s always fun to connect with our global colleagues who are doing the same thing as we are. When this initiative kicked off last year, we met many radiation oncologists throughout the world, many in developing countries, who shared what they were doing with their limited resources. It just seemed natural to bring everybody in our field together. Regardless of what your resources are, we all have one goal — to offer radiation therapy to patients who need it.
It just seemed natural to bring everybody in our field together. Regardless of what your resources are, we all have one goal — to offer radiation therapy to patients who need it.
I have also been working with other leaders in the specialty to promote the event, like ACR 2025 Honorary Fellow Sandra Lynne Turner, MBBS, PhD, a radiation oncologist internationally recognized for her advocacy for equitable access to radiation therapy in Australia through her Targeting Cancer campaign. She was one of the champions behind making WRAD happen and has been a driving force behind a global effort to make radiation therapy accessible to all who need it.
Awareness that there are disparities in radiation therapy access is a first step, particularly for those patients in low- or middle-income countries. But even in the United States, cancer patients in rural communities can suffer from lack of access while those in larger cities may be denied access to radiation due to misinformation or hesitancy from other specialties. So, the aim is to raise awareness of radiation therapy as an essential and safe cancer treatment and to advocate for investments in radiation therapy equipment, infrastructure and work force globally. We’d also like to recognize those professionals besides radiation oncologists who serve on the radiation oncology team, such as the medical physicists, the dosimetrists and the radiation therapists and technologists, nurses and office staff.
The awareness and the education from WRAD will help dispel a lot of myths about radiation therapy. Even in well-resourced countries, we see patients who would have been excellent candidates for radiation therapy not benefiting from this modality because of fears about the dangers of radiation. We have to help healthcare providers and patients understand that radiation therapy an effective and cost-effective treatment for cancer, whether it be curative or palliative.
There’s an opportunity on the website to sign up as a supporter so that you can get announcements about WRAD. There’s also an X page and LinkedIn page.
A large portion of the ACR membership consists of diagnostic radiologists, interventional radiologists and nuclear medicine physicians. So, they don’t prescribe radiation therapy or what was previously known in the United States as therapeutic radiology. But they overlap a lot with patients who get treated with radiation and they help us as radiation oncologists determine patients’ cancer staging, diagnosis and response to treatment. They are very much part of the cancer treatment team. Diagnostic radiologists, interventional radiologists and nuclear medicine physicians, as colleagues in the large House of Radiology, stand shoulder to shoulder with us in radiation oncology in promoting awareness of the importance of radiation therapy.
Interview by Alexander Utano, associate editor, ACR Press
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