Posts tagged as:

cancer

Can less aggressive cancer screening recommendations be better for patients?

November 19, 2009

by Amy Tuteur, MD
Doctors have understood for some time that it was inevitable. The American Cancer Society has acknowledged that cancer screening has been oversold.
It seems like every day you read in the newspaper that what was standard medical care yesterday is now no longer recommended. Don’t doctors know anything? Well, actually they do. And [...]

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Why health reformers should be worried about the breast cancer screening backlash

November 19, 2009

What if a non-partisan, authoritative entity wrote a robust, evidence-based guideline, but nobody followed it?
That is precisely what’s happening with the USPSTF’s recent revision of their breast cancer screening recommendations. The change most find problematic is their recommendation that women younger than 50 not undergo any breast cancer screening, such as with a mammogram.

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Will patients accept the new, evidence-based, breast cancer screening guidelines?

November 17, 2009

Breast cancer screening has been scaled back, according to the recent recommendations of the USPSTF.
That’s the right move. Although women aged 50 to 74 years should receive a mammogram every 2 years, evidence of breast cancer screening in other age groups has been marginally conclusive at best, and non-existent when it comes to clinical [...]

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Should tobacco companies pay for smokers’ CT scans to screen for lung cancer?

November 3, 2009

According to a potential ruling in Massachusetts, tobacco companies will have to pay for smokers’ screening CT scans.
The Boston Globe (via Doug Farrago) writes that the decision “would allow thousands of other Massachusetts smokers to join the lawsuit, which covers people 50 or older who have smoked at least one pack a day of Marlboro [...]

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Are doctors getting enough skin cancer exam training?

October 30, 2009

Originally published in MedPage Today
by Nancy Walsh, MedPage Today Contributing Writer
Opportunities to learn how to perform skin cancer examinations during medical training are inadequate, a survey of residents found.
More than half (55.3%) of residents said that they had never observed a skin cancer examination, 75.8% said they’d never been taught to perform one, and [...]

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Does robotic surgery for prostate cancer help patients?

October 19, 2009

Originally published in MedPage Today
by Peggy Peck, MedPage Today Executive Editor
Men who opt for minimally invasive prostate surgery — often with a helping hand from a robot — are twice as likely to have genitorurinary complications as men who have a traditional prostatectomy.
That finding is especially troubling because the use of robotic-assisted minimally invasive [...]

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Dating advice from an oncologist

October 14, 2009

How do you know if a couple is right for each other?
Watch how they interact in a cancer clinic.
So says this oncologist in a poignant column from the Boston Globe. As Robin Schoenthaler writes, “When you’re a single woman picturing the guy of your dreams, what matters a heck of lot more than how [...]

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When a health care professional gets diagnosed with breast cancer

October 9, 2009

A social worker at a Boston hospital, who counsels patients with cancer, discovers that she herself has breast cancer.
She tells her compelling story to Better Health’s Val Jones.

You can join Val and myself at Blog World Expo 2009 on October 15th in Las Vegas, where we will participate in panel discussions exploring the intersection between [...]

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Is clinical breast examination, added to mammography, worthwhile?

October 6, 2009

Originally published in Journal Watch General Medicine
by Allan S. Brett, MD
CBE was associated with 55 additional false-positives for each additional breast cancer detected.
Whether patients benefit when clinical breast examination (CBE) is added to screening mammography is unclear. Canadian researchers addressed this issue in an analysis of data from the Ontario Breast Screening Program, a [...]

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Not all doctors discuss the risks and benefits of prostate cancer screening to patients

October 2, 2009

Originally published in MedPage Today
by Todd Neale, MedPage Today Staff Writer
Men might not be getting the information they need to make an educated decision about prostate cancer screening, two new studies suggest.
Among 375 men surveyed by telephone, only 69.9% had discussed a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test with their physician before making a decision about [...]

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Are hospice doctors relying too much on symptom scores to assess pain?

September 29, 2009

by Eric Widera, MD
A recent issue in The Lancet included an article entitled “The Death of Ivan Ilyich and pain relief at the end of life.” This is a thought provoking article focused on the question of whether there is overuse of pharmaceuticals to treat various forms of suffering in hospice and palliative medicine.
The authors [...]

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What’s the latest on prostate cancer and the PSA screening test?

September 28, 2009

Originally published in MedPage Today
by Chris Emery, MedPage Today Contributing Writer
Prostate specific antigen (PSA) tests may lead to unnecessary treatment of healthy men for prostate cancer, and there is little evidence supporting the common but controversial test for routine cancer screening, two new studies found.
Measurements of blood concentrations of PSA failed to predict cancer [...]

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Radiologists and communicating mammogram results to patients and their doctors

September 24, 2009

by an anonymous radiologist
I recently read the article and comments on this link from this post, concerning radiologists, from Musings of a Dinosaur.
I was disturbed to discover the animosity with which this topic is covered. The tenor of the blog is that radiologists are greedy, self-serving and are out to erode the doctor-patient relationship. The [...]

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A routine brain MRI can lead to incidental findings

September 10, 2009

by Nancy Walsh, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today
Almost 3% of healthy, asymptomatic people who underwent MRI brain scans showed incidental abnormalities in a recent study, leading researchers to express concern about about psychological and medical fallout from these increasingly popular screenings.
In meta-analysis of MRI brain scans, the prevalence of neoplastic incidental findings was 0.70% (95% CI [...]

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The value of a cancer diagnosis second opinion

September 8, 2009

by Wendy S. Harpham, MD, FACP
Here are words any patient awaiting cancer surgery would be thrilled to hear: “We are canceling your upcoming operation! It turns out that the suspicious changes we saw on your recent biopsy are completely benign.”
This happy turn of events happened in my life recently, thanks to a second opinion from [...]

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