Mario Alberico got his education in oncology the hard way. He has lived with cancer and the long-term effects of his treatment for most of his life.

At 51, Alberico has finally assembled a team of doctors near his home in suburban Chicago to manage his care. Before that, he saw one doctor after another who failed to recognize serious health problems that stemmed from radiation and chemotherapy drugs used to treat his bone cancer decades earlier.

During his senior year of high school, Alberico, the seventh of nine children supported by his widowed mother, got radiation and rotated through 4 different chemotherapy drugs at high doses that eradicated the cancer. Each one of those drugs can have grave long-term effects.

As Alberico and many other cancer patients have learned, most doctors outside the oncology community never learned about the impact cancer treatment may have on the longer lifespan they fought to achieve.

That has deep implications for the ranks of U.S. cancer survivors, which have quadrupled to nearly 12 million people since the 1970s, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Alberico has already ha