Dr. Elaine Schattner's notes on becoming educated as a patient
Dr. Elaine Schattner's notes on becoming educated as a patient
© Elaine Schattner, 2009, 2022 By : Template Sell.
The Metastatic Breast Cancer Network held its fifth annual meeting in Baltimore over this past weekend. Most of the nearly 300 registrants were women living with MBC. The lively group of women coalesced in the face of unexpected, pre-seasonal wintry weather. At an evening reception they stood, sat, waited for drinks and lined up for […]
This story, shared today by Debbie Woodbury, warrants ML Annals of Pink inclusion: The Arizona Republic reports on a divided community in Gilbert, AZ. At issue is the high school cheerleading team’s plan to wear pink tee shirts with the slogan: “Feel for lumps – save your bumps” on the back. The group’s intention was […]
Some of the more understandable discussion comes from women with metastatic disease whose tumors were missed by screening mammography. Notably, neither paper quotes an oncologist.
Days ago, the USPSTF issued a new draft for its recommendations on routine PSA measurements in asymptomatic men. The panel’s report is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The main findings are two: first, the absence of evidence that routine PSA testing prolongs men’s lives, and second, that PSA evaluation may, on balance, cause […]
A metastasis refers to a lump of cancer cells that’s physically separated from the original tumor. A metastasis can be local, like when colon cancer spreads to a nearby lymph node in the gut, or distant, as when lung cancer cells generate tumors in the adrenal gland, liver, bone or brain. Sometimes metastases cause serious […]
More, a magazine “for women of style & substance,” has an unusually thorough, now-available article by Nancy F. Smith in its September issue on A Breast Cancer You May Not Need to Treat. The article’s subject is DCIS (Ductal Carcinoma in Situ). This non-invasive, “Stage O” malignancy of the breast has shot up in reported incidence […]
Early this week I was saddened to hear of a former colleague’s death from pancreatic cancer. Dr. Ralph Steinman, a physician-researcher at the Rockefeller University, received a Nobel Prize for his work on the innate immune system. For many, news of Ralph’s death at 68 years arrived synchronously with word of his award. Yesterday we […]
This morning I walked into a Starbucks and noted a woman wearing a little pink ribbon on the lapel of her suit. She appeared to be in a meeting, speaking seriously with a small group of people dressed for business. How great is that, I thought, that she wears the pink ribbon unabashedly, in this […]
With little fanfare, the NEJM published a feature on breast cancer screening in its Sept 15 issue. The article, like other “vignettes” in the Journal, opens with a clinical scenario. This time, it’s a 42 year old woman who is considering first-time mammography. The author, Dr. Ellen Warner, an oncologist at the University of Toronto, takes […]
A post in yesterday’s Well column, about coverage of breast cancer by the media, focused on the first-person narrative of NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Journalist Tara Parker-Pope writes: Her announcement has generated much discussion in the blogosphere, including an analysis by Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, who writes that Ms. Mitchell made some missteps in discussing her […]
Well, it’s the day after Labor Day, time to resume our discussion of Bending the Cost Curve in Cancer Care. We’ve reached the end of the list, on ideas to reduce oncology costs put forth by Drs. Smith and Hillner in the May 25 issue of the NEJM. Really this 10th and final point intended for […]
Yesterday morning I wrote a short post on CelebrityDiagnosis.com. By evening, news broke that Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs resigned from his position, presumably for reasons of his health. What’s public, by Jobs’ decision, is that he had a relatively good, typically slow-growing kind of malignancy in the pancreas, a neuroendocrine islet cell tumor. He informed […]
Late Friday afternoon, the FDA announced its approval, upon accelerated review, of a new drug, Adcetris (brentuximab) for patients with Hodgkin’s lymphoma that has relapsed after bone marrow transplant and for some patients with T-cell anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL). This interests me for a lot of reasons, among them that I used to work in the field of lymphoma immunology […]
We’re up to point 9 on the list – and nearing the end – on Bending the Cost Curve in Cancer Care from the May 26 NEJM. The suggestion from Drs. Smith and Hillner is that doctors better integrate palliative care into usual oncology care. The authors start this important section well: We can reduce […]
This morning the FDA announced approval of Zelboraf (vemurafenib) for treatment of some patients advanced melanoma. This is the second drug the agency has approved for this disease in recent months, after nearly two decades of a lack of new or effective therapies for melanoma. Zelboraf is a pill. This small-molecule drug is thought to […]
I’m half-tempted to put down yesterday’s new NYT Magazine feature on crazy sexy cancer goddess Kris Carr. Her blog was one of the first I found when I started ML, and it was the most popular link on my fledgling site until I pulled it, fearful of somehow sponsoring a too-alternative oncology perspective. But I […]
There’s so much weird and exciting cancer news this week, it’s hard to keep up! Double-kudos to Andrew Pollack on his front-page and careful coverage in the New York Times of the hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (Hipec) technique that’s being used at some name-brand health care facilities to treat colon cancer. First, he spares no detail […]
We’ve reached what may be my favorite of the proposed ways to reduce cancer care costs, published in the NEJM by Drs. Smith and Hillner. Idea Number 8 is to realign compensation to value cognitive services, rather than chemotherapy, more highly. What the authors are saying is that we’d save money if oncologists were paid more for […]
This afternoon Ed Silverman of Pharmalot reports that Roche has proposed a compromise to the FDA over Avastin’s use in women with metastatic breast cancer. The drug would be approved for use only in combination with paclitaxel (Taxol), for which the data are strongest, and with special warnings. He writes: The deal includes revised labeling […]
Today’s New York Times features an op-ed by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, on the oncology drug shortage. It’s a serious problem that’s had too-little attention in the press: Of the 34 generic cancer drugs on the market, as of this month, 14 were in short supply. They include drugs that are the mainstay of treatment regimens […]
