  Markov Decision Processes and Dynamic Treatment Regimes have grown
increasingly popular in the treatment of diseases, including cancer. However,
cancer treatment often impacts quality of life drastically, and people often
fail to take treatments that are sustainable, affordable and can be adhered to.
In this paper, we emphasize the usage of ambient factors like profession,
radioactive exposure, food habits on the treatment choice, keeping in mind that
the aim is not just to relieve the patient of his disease, but rather to
maximize his overall physical, social and mental well being. We delineate a
general framework which can directly incorporate a net benefit function from a
physician as well as patient's utility, and can incorporate the varying
probabilities of exposure and survival of patients of varying medical profiles.
We also show by simulations that the optimal choice of actions often is
sensitive to extraneous factors, like the financial status of a person (as a
proxy for the affordability of treatment), and that these actions should be
welcome keeping in mind the overall quality of life.
