A Call For More Research On Cancer’s Environmental Triggers
No question about cancer is more contentious than its causes.
writer, health care advocate, physician
No question about cancer is more contentious than its causes.
These results have the potential to reduce overtreatment of breast cancer—stopping patients’ unnecessary exposure to chemotherapy—in a large fraction of cases.
What’s at issue is the right of all cancer patients—regardless of wealth—to obtain high-quality information about their conditions.
Few doctors, even oncologists who subspecialize, can keep up with developments in the field.
Perhaps the literature fails to capture the clinical value of oncology drugs. This could happen for several reasons.
Who should decide when evidence for a drug sufficient to support a patient’s decision to give it a try?
The FDA’s accelerated approval of this drug might surprise traditional oncologists. It suggests the agency may be ditching an archaic system for classifying cancers based on body parts—like breast or liver or colon cancer—and instead will focus..
Can you perform a sentinel lymph node biopsy, and avoid removing all of the glands from my armpit?
Are unbridled profits necessary to drive medical innovation and progress?
Prior to the program’s start, maternal mortality for women with sickle cell disease exceeded 9% at the teaching hospital. With team-based care, the death rate fell to 1%.
We need and can afford both: to raise the bar so that everyone has access to modern healthcare, and to advance treatments through medical science.
The Cures Act will keep the U.S. at the forefront of medical progress, a draw for scientists and doctors around the world, a source of pride.
The FDA’s decision reflects a thoughtful, not knee-jerk approach to its mission, which is to protect the public from fraudulent and unsafe substances. What’s at issue is how well eteplirsen works. And that it’s too expensive.
The agency’s leadership might accomplish what medicine does best: applying science humanely, so that people can get well if it’s possible, and not wait.
..as if mothers telling an FDA panel about what’s happening to their kids with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a disabling condition, is the opposite of science.
If there’s one thing that’s become clear about precision medicine – and the delivery of optimal care based in science – it will require super technology. This need is especially urgent in oncology.
The concept of valuing drugs, at least in part, by how easy it is to reliably produce, distribute and take them, appeals to reason.
The EPA suggests an action level for lead in water: it should be below 15 parts per billion. Because lead toxicity causes irreversible neurological damage, prevention is crucial.
Martin Shkreli is not the only bad player in the game of hiking up drug prices.
Over time, the costs should drop, like for smartphone tech, what my Dad – a chemistry major and retired physician – called “magic.”
DCIS accounts for approximately 1 in 5 breast cancer-ish diagnoses in the United States. The practical problem with DCIS is that most oncologists, surgical and medical, will admit they’re not sure what to do about it.
Logistic toxicity might be defined as the administrative burden of health care.
If overtreatment is the problem, the solution is not by avoidance of breast cancer detection, but by better education of physicians and patients.
What’s needed is greater moral stewardship of health care resources.
A new study sheds light on social and economic factors that influence whether women with breast cancer get lumpectomy or mastectomy.
The authors’ definition of false positives and assumptions of overdiagnosis undermine calculations of mammography’s costs.
By telling her story, she helps break the mystery and stigma that deter honest and needed discussion about cancer-causing, inherited genetic mutations.
Researchers today are analyzing our grandmothers’ mammograms to inform women’s health and screening decisions today.
Formaldehyde in wood products can cause cancer and other ailments including skin and breathing problems.
Radiologists who publish academic papers on breast imaging may be influenced by idiosyncrasies in training, what machines their practices own or hospitals happen to have purchased, anecdotal experiences and personal skills.
Women have every right to know if they have dense breasts and if they’re at increased risk for a hidden tumor.
To issue sound guidelines on breast cancer screening, would the USPSTF benefit by including an oncologist or radiologist on the panel?
The implications extend beyond cancer drugs. Biosimilars have the potential to significantly reduce the costs of modern health care for people with all kinds of illness
To deny new cancer treatments that might prolong life in a good way, possibly for cure or a remission, or even just to tame the disease, is a misguided proposition.
A key question, about which we all might agree, is this: Can and should health care be run as a business?
In 2002, scientists reported that acrylamide forms when seemingly healthy carbohydrate-rich foods like potatoes, other root vegetables and grains are cooked at high temperatures by frying, roasting, broiling, toasting or baking.