TV Meets Real Life Oncology, and Anticipating the MCATs

Yesterday I wrote on some tough decisions facing a TV show‘s protagonist. She’s got metastatic melanoma and might participate in a clinical trial when the show resumes.

Now imagine you’re an oncologist, or a real patient with this killing disease – you really need to be on top of new developments, to understand the pros and cons, because someone’s life depends on it.

If you’re the doctor in the relationship, you need keep abreast of current information for all the other tumors types of patients in your care: what are the new findings, if any, what are the limitations of the data. You need to know how the advances apply to an individual person who, most likely, has another condition or two, like high blood pressure or, say, osteoporosis.

Oncologists ought to be familiar with new drugs, and how those compare to old ones, and the side effects, and the distinctions between tumors with and without BRAF mutations. They should know what BRAF stands for.

Melanoma is one form of skin cancer. We understand now there are breast cancer subtypes – with distinct behavior and responsiveness to treatments, with and without inherited and acquired genetic mutations (BRCA-1 and -2 were identified well over 10 years ago; there’s much more known now), dozens of lymphoma forms and innumerable leukemia subtypes. Lung cancer, prostate cancer, brain cancer… Each is a group of diseases.

But the science physicians apply in their work doesn’t just apply in oncology. Even in traditionally “softer” fields of medicine, like pediatrics, doctors need to know how congenital diseases are diagnosed with newer, cheaper methods for testing mutations; in gynecology, doctors need to know about inherited clotting dispositions; in psychiatry, doctors give medicines with complex metabolic effects that involve, or should involve, some grounding in modern neuroscience.

This is why we need to keep the MCAT hard. (I’ll write more on this current issue in medical education, soon.)

Have a great weekend!

ES

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