Bucharest, May 15, 2025 – RBJ – Craiova, the capital of the southwestern region of Romania, has been asserting itself in recent years not only through the Christmas and Easter Fairs or through entertainment that, everywhere, haunt small and large cities. The capital of Oltenia has been standing out for several years in modern performance medicine. A strong argument is the “Saint Nectarie” Oncology Clinic. A point of reference in the healthcare system in our country.
I am writing these lines because everything I will mention is the result of my own experience, together with my brother, who was struck by this sudden disease – cancer.
I came to “Saint Nectarie” out of desperation: no doctor I consulted dared to consult and treat a patient in an advanced stage of the disease. The CT scan seemed to some doctors in Bucharest not at all encouraging. Although Romania has not adopted any regulations regarding the “end of life”, some of the medical interlocutors in Bucharest set me exact terms of the patient’s life expectancy: three weeks, one month, etc.
Some, however, urged me to quickly get to the “Saint Nectarie” Oncology Clinic in Craiova.
The Oncology Clinic in Craiova is a private integrated center of oncological medical services, starting from outpatient consultations to specific treatments, performed in a day hospital setting, and its main goal is to provide free medical services of the highest quality in the field of medical oncology, organized according to the principles of the best current healthcare systems. The clinic is currently one of the largest medical oncology platforms in Romania.
As soon as I arrived here, I understood that the philosophy that animated the medical staff at this clinic is “supporting the cancer patient until the last beat of the heart”. The doctors here exclude the Bucharest variants of the “nothing can be done”. And another sign of the devotion and professionalism of the doctors at “Saint Nectary”: they do not accept any “attention” or “financial gratitude” from their patients. As I have encountered so many times in Bucharest. At the Oncology Clinic in Craiova, the Hippocratic Oath is sacred, starting from the moral duties of a doctor, to maintaining professional secrecy or prohibiting extra-professional relationships with patients.
Without much effort, but with the support of some young people who ensure the interface between patient and doctor, I ended up under the responsibility of a doctor who was extraordinarily empathetic to the patient: Dr. Florina Simniceanu, the radiotherapy department. An oncology unit equipped with two state-of-the-art accelerators. Even if we were from the same family, this doctor would not have provided us with greater assistance and support than she did in the 10 days spent, partially, at “Sfantul Nectarie”. Not only did she have a well-studied radiotherapy program for the patient, but she was the one who mobilized colleagues from the Clinic for the exhaustive examination of the patient. That is how I ended up with Dr. Mihai Olteanu, an excellent pulmonologist in the way he evaluated the disease and the “talent” of performing a bronchoscopy accepted by the patient. I found the same dedication and closeness to the sufferer in the oncologist Dr. Ioana Irimie. But also in the infusion compartment that the patient needed daily.
Dr.’s attachment Florina Simniceanu, in front of the patient, I found him every morning when he stated a new hypothesis on the possibilities of saving or improving the patient, insistent on supporting him and challenging him to trust in the potential of doctors to prolong his life.
The cornerstone of the Oncology Clinic in Craiova was laid by a respectable personality of medicine in Craiova and the country: Dr. Michael Schenker.
Associate Professor Dr. Michael Schenker, primary care oncologist in Craiova, is one of the few Romanian specialists who managed to conduct clinical trials of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration, USA) for biological substances against cancer.
Dr. Schenker is an associate professor at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Craiova and founder and director of the “Sfântul Nectarie” Oncology Center (Craiova), since 2014.
Thank you Craiova! We thank the “Saint Nectarie” Oncology Clinic. (Constantin Radut).
