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Showing 351 - 400An Epic Medical Story by an Old-Style Doctor on the Front Lines of Care
The U.S. health-care system is a $3 trillion behemoth of dizzying complexity. Government oversight, ever-changing regulations, mountains of paperwork, electronic health records, initiative after initiative, and so forth, all of which has reshaped the delivery of care, for the good and bad. But...
Internationally Renowned Geneticist, Alfred George Knudson, MD, PhD, Dies
Considered a visionary in cancer research, Alfred George Knudson, MD, PhD, was internationally recognized for his “two-hit theory” of cancer causation, which explained the relationship between hereditary and nonhereditary cancer types, predicting the existence of tumor-suppressor genes. ...
A Concerned Physician Reflects on Today’s Doctor-Patient Relationship
Doctoring isn’t what it used to be. Like many other professions, it has gone through a multitude of changes ostensibly to improve efficiencies and lower costs. The digital age has reshaped clinical practice from the front office to the exam room. And with the advent of electronic health records...
Complexities in the Diagnosis and Management of Amyloidosis
Case Study A 70-year-old man is referred to your clinic for a consultation. Recently, a diagnosis of IgG monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) was established. Medical history is significant for essential hypertension, type II diabetes mellitus, hyperlipidemia, and atrial...
The Age of the Atomic Hematologists/Oncologists
Every longstanding culture has ages: The Minoans were followed by the Mycenaeans and, later, the Hellenistic peoples. And so it is with hematology/oncology. A descriptive age dominated predominately by histopathologists was followed by an age of experimentalists. Development of the atomic bombs...
Something Happened
Over the years, my patients have been my most important teachers. I’ve learned so much from them about human nature and the resilience of the human spirit. When my time came to pass through the fire and confront the same challenges they and their families face so bravely and with such compassion, ...
Medical Decision-Making: At the Heart of Care for Older Patients With Cancer
Although oncology has moved toward a personalized approach to care, medical decision-making within the context of multidisciplinary care has broad public health implications. To shed light on this and other relevant issues, The ASCO Post recently spoke with William Dale, MD, PhD, of the University ...
Prostate Cancer: Opinions Vary on Gleason Scores and Surgery
Diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer have been the source of heated debate for decades, most of which has centered on the clinical value of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test. In 2012, the U.S Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) gave the PSA test a D grade, which discourages many...
Noted Gastrointestinal Oncologist Leonard Saltz, MD, Tempers Optimism With Reality and Factors Cost Into the Equation of Value in Cancer Care
Leonard Saltz, MD, was born in New York, New York, and reared in Westchester County, in the suburbs of the City. Terrance Archer, his high-school biology teacher, whom Dr. Saltz described as a “force of nature,” a wonderful human being, and a major role model, influenced his nascent curiosity in...
With a Strong Personal Connection to His Patients, Stephen P. Hunger, MD, Strives for a Cure for All Children With Leukemia
Nationally regarded children’s cancer specialist Stephen P. Hunger, MD, was born and reared in South Windsor, a small suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. Dr. Hunger grew up in the mid-1960s and 1970s, and in his words, “South Windsor was a pretty homogeneous experience. There wasn’t really any ethnic...
International Authority on Radiation Effects, Robert Peter Gale, MD, PhD, Has Pushed Scientific Boundaries in Search of Answers
It is widely reported that the first use of sargramostim (Leukine) in humans (granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor; GM-CSF) was to treat victims of the Goiânia, Brazil, radiation accident in 1987. However, recently declassified documents show that sargramostim was first used a year...
A Toolkit for Dealing With the Trauma of a Prostate Cancer Diagnosis
This year, an estimated 180,890 men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer; about 21,120 men die of the disease each year. On top of these sobering statistics, from screening to diagnosis and treatment, prostate cancer is fraught with controversy, creating untoward anxiety...
White Knuckling
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the “Art of Oncology” as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO). These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
Maximizing Cancer Cure: How Do We Get There?
Is cancer really “curable,” and if so, how? For a “Cancer Dialogue” held during the 2016 American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting, half a dozen stellar participants from the research, industry, regulatory, and advocacy communities convened to debate the topic. The ASCO Post was ...
A Psychotherapist’s Approach to End-of-Life Care
BookmarkTitle: Dying: A TransitionAuthor: Monika Renz, PhD; translated by Mark Kyburz and John PeckPublisher: Columbia University PressPublication date: October 2015Price: $38.00; hardcover, 176 pages The night before Julius Caesar was assassinated, he had dinner with his friend Marcus...
Meet W. Charles Penley, MD, FASCO
A Partner at Tennessee Oncology, PLLC, W. Charles Penley, MD, FASCO, has been an ASCO member since 1988. He has served on the Conquer Cancer Foundation Board of Directors since 2005 and currently holds the role of Immediate Past Chair. What led you to oncology? WCP: While it may sound silly to say ...
Compartmentalizing Cancer
I was the last one on the oncology team to meet Mel. He was 36 years old, and by then Mel had been living with metastatic colon cancer for several years. During that time, his clinicians had never referred him to our psycho-oncology team because of his strong attitude and outlook. Mel’s outward...
A Political Activist Challenges the Drug Approval Process and the U.S. Government
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) primary concern in the drug approval process is to ensure that the drug is safe and effective. For the past several decades, the advocacy groups have vociferously painted the agency as a stodgy bureaucracy that prevents desperate patients access to...
A Cancer Patient’s Harried Survivorship Story
There are approximately 14 million cancer survivors in the United States, a number that is steadily increasing, thanks to our advances in detection and treatment. However, surviving cancer can leave a host of physical, emotional, and financial hardships for years after diagnosis and treatment. In ...
A Drop of Blood
I was a third-year internal medicine resident, rotating through the oncology service, when I was asked to perform my first circumcision. My team was rounding on Tom, a 52-year-old gentleman currently receiving third-line treatment for metastatic esophageal cancer; we were discussing at length his...
A Fight to Remember
In 2006, one of my close friends, Robert O’Connor, won the mayoral race for my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Everyone loved Robert, affectionately known as “Bob” and often referred to as “The People’s Mayor.” Bob was “Mr. Pittsburgh,” and it was his promise to reverse the city’s...
Benefiting From Mind-Body Therapy
My diagnosis of early-stage breast cancer at age 35 was a shock, also because I come from a family with no history of cancer. In disbelief, I was literally speechless—I lost my voice completely for several days. I grew up in the former Soviet Union and then in the newly independent Kyrgyzstan. My...
ASCO Provides Support and Guidance for the White House Cancer Moonshot Initiative
Although President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act in 1971, essentially declaring a war on cancer, the genesis of the idea had actually been born 2 years earlier, after the first landing on the moon set off a new era of scientific exploration and sparked a belief that any scientific...
Men Get Breast Cancer Too
Like many men, it never occurred to me that I could get breast cancer. But it turns out it is more common—and deadly—than I thought, with about 2,600 men diagnosed each year with invasive breast cancer and nearly 440 dying of the disease.1 In 2010, I became one of those men, and the diagnosis was...
A Surgeon’s Inspiring Journey to Death
Every so often, a memoir comes along in which the story speaks to universal themes. For that magic to occur, the author must step aside at times and let others tell their story, too. Moreover, the writing must be clear, vibrant, and above all else honest to the core. The recently published memoir...
Pieces of Grief
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the “Art of Oncology” as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO). These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
Important Lessons for Oncology from the Front Lines of the AIDS Pandemic
On June 5, 1981, the CDC issued a warning about a rare type of pneumonia discovered among a small group of young gay men in Los Angeles, later determined to be AIDS-related, ushering in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Early on, AIDS-related malignancies brought the oncology community into this formidable...
Humor Is Helping Me Survive Cancer
Despite a strong family history of colon cancer—all five of my mother’s siblings had colon cancer, and my mother died of the disease 10 years ago—when some flecks of blood started showing up on my toilet tissue in early 2005, I figured it was from hemorrhoids. At 38, I was a marathon runner and in...
Facing the Future without Fear of Breast Cancer Recurrence
A year ago, I was living my dream. Married to a wonderful man, Danny, and with two young children to raise, Karl, 7, and Marcus, 4, I had given up a career in accounting to be a stay-at-home mom. At age 34, I was enjoying life, helping my children with their homework and going to their soccer and...
SIDEBAR: Marking 40 Years of Cancer Progress
It’s been 40 years since President Richard Nixon declared, “The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease,” and later signed into law the National Cancer Act of 1971. Passage...
New Biomarker Predicts Survival in Advanced Prostate Cancer
Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have developed the Bone Scan Index (BSI), which is the first quantitative imaging response biomarker that can assess response to treatment and prognosticates for survival in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Based on Bone ...
Our Patients, Our Teachers
There is no greater professional satisfaction than the knowledge that you have cared for a patient and the care brought an improvement in the patient's health. Regardless of the level of appreciation, whether the patient is cured or not, and even if the patient's sense of well-being may be...
Geriatric Oncologists: A Small but Passionate Group
Although age is the major risk factor for developing cancer, geriatric oncology is still a relatively new discipline within the oncology community. To gain insight into this evolving component of cancer care, The ASCO Post recently spoke with a leader in the field, Stuart M. Lichtman, MD, FACP,...
Expert Point of View: Study Shows Continued Benefit of PSA Screening in Reducing Prostate Cancer Mortality
Many of the almost 100 reports in various journals and newspapers refer to the lack of effect on overall mortality with screening in ERSPC in a very critical fashion. Clarification is necessary. Our trial did not intend to and is not powered to study the effect of screening on overall mortality....
New PSA Recommendations: The Debate over Prostate Cancer Screening Continues
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recently issued a recommendation statement advising against the use of prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based testing for prostate cancer,1 leaving many in the oncology community concerned that decades of clinical progress will be stalled, and setting ...
Cancer Care in Rwanda: A Model of Creative Partnerships
While disparities in cancer care remain problematic in wealthy industrial nations like the United States, the challenges faced in poorer regions of the world are, by comparison, inestimable. Nationally regarded health-care expert Lawrence N. Shulman, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is part of...
The Affordable Care Act Stands: Now What?
On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law—a hotly contested bill that enacted sweeping changes to the U.S. health-care system. The debate over the Affordable Care Act continued all the way to the Supreme Court, spearheaded by the case Florida...
As Conflicting Guidelines Evolve, Experts Continue to Debate the Merits of Cancer Screening
In the 1930s and 1940s, when the American Cancer Society [ACS] first brought forth the message that early cancer detection saves lives, it was a broad brushstroke and an appropriate message. The problem now is that new technology enables us to find [tumors that would never progress to invasive...
Rethinking the Role of PSA Screening in Public Health
Population screening to identify preclinical disease is considered a central factor in the decades-long decrease in mortality seen in certain cancers. However, hope in the face of deadly disease can sometimes blind us to the scientific evidence. According to the recent U.S. Preventive Services Task ...
Management of a Patient with Hodgkin Lymphoma following Failure of Autologous Stem Cell Transplant
Case Summaries presented by Joseph M. Connors, MD, Clinical Director, Centre for Lymphoid Cancer, British Columbia Cancer Agency, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada When considering the management of a patient whose Hodgkin lymphoma has relapsed despite high dose...
Pediatric Pathologist Sidney Farber, MD: The ‘Father of Modern Chemotherapy’ and Cofounder of the Jimmy Fund
In June 3, 1948, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study by Sidney Farber, MD, showing that a synthetic compound, 4-aminopteroylglutamic acid (aminopterin), could induce remissions in seriously ill children with acute leukemia.1 Although the study was small—just 16 children—10 showed...
Challenging Times: A Day in the Life of a Community Oncologist
Community oncologists man the front line of cancer care, treating upward of 85% of our nation’s patients. Over the past 2 decades, regulatory and economic changes have left many practices in a state of flux and uncertainty, some struggling to keep their doors open. To shed light on the community...
Media Campaign with Real Smokers a Success
Real smokers sharing in graphic terms what it is like to live with disfiguring or disabling tobacco-related diseases were the featured spokespersons for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) national media campaign to encourage smokers to quit. Based on short-term response, the CDC...
Explaining Research to Patients
Everyone understands the need for medical research, especially regarding cancer. However, only a minority of the public understand what is actually involved in taking part in a clinical trial. As professionals, we are responsible for designing relevant studies, for their conduct and analysis, and...
Novel Agents for Breast Cancer and Prostate Cancer Impressive in Early Trials
Several sessions at the 2012 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in Vienna focused on novel targeted therapies in various stages of development. Summarized here are data on two promising drugs for breast cancer and two for prostate cancer. E-3810 in Breast Cancer Two experimental...
Treatment Goals, Molecular Monitoring, and the Role and Use of Guideline Recommendations
The importance of achieving a certain level of response with imatinib (Gleevec) by 3 months in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) had previously been established in the IRIS (International Randomized Study of Interferon and STI571) trial.1 Analysis of data from this trial showed that...
Past ASCO President, John Ridgway Durant, MD, Dies at 82
John Ridgway Durant, MD, ASCO’s 20th President, was born on July 29th, 1930, and died on October 28th, 2012. Dates that mark a person’s birth and passing are made all the more significant by how that person filled the days that link the two milestones. Dr. Durant will be remembered fondly as a man...
Physician-Scientist Judah Folkman, MD, Faced Years of Skepticism Before His Theory of Angiogenesis Was Proven
That Moses Judah Folkman would buck tradition, breaking his family’s long line of rabbinical succession and pursuing a career in science and medicine instead, was evident from the time he was a young child. Born in Cleveland on February 24, 1933, the first child of Rabbi Jerome and Bessie Folkman,...
Recently Reported Long-term Outcomes Could Motivate More Men with Prostate Cancer to Consider Active Surveillance
Fifteen years after being treated with radical prostatectomy or external-beam radiation for localized prostate cancer, “the prevalence of erectile dysfunction was nearly universal,” among men enrolled in a long-term functional outcomes analysis of the Prostate Cancer Outcomes Study (PCOS). There...
C. Everett Koop, MD, Surgeon General Under Ronald Reagan, Dies at 96
Appointed by the President and called “America’s Doctor,” the Surgeon General’s chief task is to protect and advance the health of the nation. Most of our Surgeon Generals have tiptoed around hot-button public health issues that might bruise political sensibilities and their own careers. C....
