End of Summer Blog-Break

Dear Readers, ML will take a blogging break through Labor Day. I hope the storm doesn’t cause too much damage. Stay safe, wherever you are, and enjoy these end-of-summer days! – ES —- Related Posts:Reading LisaTalking About Physician Burnout, and Changing the SystemGive Doctors a BreakSome Articles I Authored A While AgoSteve Jobs Takes a Medical […]

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Considering Steve Jobs, Medical Diagnoses and Privacy

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 […]

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FDA Approves Adcetris for Refractory Hodgkin’s Disease and a Rare T-Cell Lymphoma

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 […]

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Mars Chocolate Company Advertises With Broccoli

The other day, over lunch, I was reading the Sept 2011 issue of the Atlantic and came upon this image on p. 37. According to the not-so-fine print, this full-page broccoli fix is sponsored by MARS chocolate, North America, website listed: www.marshealthyliving.com So we can find out about nutrition from the company that manufactures M&M’s, Snickers, Twix, MilkyWay […]

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Reducing Costs by Better Integration of Palliative Care in Cancer Treatment

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 […]

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Big Melanoma News: FDA approves Vemurafenib (Zelboraf)

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 […]

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Notes on Kris Carr and Crazy Sexy Cancer

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 […]

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News on an Unusual Cancer Treatment by Heat in Surgery (Hipec)

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 […]

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Reducing Cancer Care Costs: The Value of Physicians’ Cognitive Work

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 […]

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Breast Cancer Avastin Update

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 […]

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