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 movie, based in part on the true story of scriptwriter Will Reiser, surprised me by its candor. Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt smoothly portrays Adam Lerner, who soon finds out he has cancer. The opening scene
Methotrexate has been used in cancer wards for over 50 years. And like other beyond-patent meds, it’s become less profitable to manufacture MTX compared to much costlier new agents.
Yesterday morning, two women who were active in the on-line breast cancer community died. Rachel Cheetham Moro (1970 – 2012) was a critical thinker who vigorously supported BCAction and the NBCC’s 2020 deadline. She was a generous and thoughtful on-line friend to many women in the metastatic and more general BC community, where she used the handle @ccchronicles. Her […]
All of this meshes with my experience – knowing women who’ve had breast-conserving surgery and then got mixed information about the results and what to do next. You’d think lumpectomy would be a standard procedure by now, and that decisions about what to do after the procedure, surgically speaking (let alone decisions about chemo, hormonal treatments and radiation) would be straightforward in most cases.
When I first heard the Susan G. Komen Foundation is nixing its financial support of Planned Parenthood, I thought it might be a mistake. Maybe a rogue affiliate or anti-choice officer had acted independently of the group’s core and mission, and the press got the early story wrong. I waited for Nancy G. Brinker, Komen’s […]
Last week I came upon a new term in the cancer literature: the Disease Control Rate. The DCR refers to the total proportion of patients who demonstrate a response to treatment. In oncology terms: The DCR is the sum of complete responses (CR) + partial responses (PR) + stable disease (SD). Another way of explaining […]
Tomorrow the American Society of Clinical Oncology* will host its 9th annual GI Cancers Symposium. Bloomberg and the LA Times have already reported findings of a paper, still in abstract form, to be presented on Saturday. The drug of interest is regorafenib, a pill that loosely inhibits quite a few kinases – enzymes critical in […]
This week I finished reading the Emperor of All Maladies, the 2010 “biography” of cancer by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. The author, a medical oncologist and researcher now at Columbia University, provides a detailed account of malignancies – and how physicians and scientists have understood and approached a myriad of tumors – through history. The encyclopedic, […]
Earlier this month, the ACS released its annual report on Cancer Facts and Figures. The document, based largely on analyses of SEER data from the NCI, supports that approximately 229,000 adults in the U.S. will receive a diagnosis of invasive breast cancer (BC) this year. The disease affects just over 2,000 men annually; 99% of […]
This week the ACS released its annual report on Cancer Facts and Figures in the U.S. The journal Cancer analyzes and considers the data in a helpful article. Some of the key and mainly positive findings have been covered elsewhere: Between 1990 and 2008, death rates from cancer in the U.S. declined rather steadily, overall, by […]
Earlier this month the IOM issued a big report on breast cancer and the environment. The thick analysis, commissioned and sponsored by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, was authored by an expert panel. Their task – to assess all available information on what causes BC, and make recommendations accordingly – was essentially impossible. […]
The author is saddened to learn that Christopher Hitchens died late yesterday evening at the age of 62, roughly a year and a half after receiving a diagnosis of esophageal cancer. He was a prolific and articulate man; I respected him for his words. His essays on the language and cancer might be of particular […]
There’s a ton of BC and women’s health news this week. But yours truly is, among other things, not in San Antonio where is the 34th annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. NTW, quite a few major news outlets are covering this business closely and carefully, as are some bloggers I know. Upon reading the […]
A hit in the women’s breast cancer Twitter league came my way from the Breast Cancer Sisterhood®. Brenda Coffee, a survivor and founder of the Survivorship Media Network, offers a serious post on What Your Oncologist Doesn’t Tell You About Sex. There’s a music video, Don’t Touch Me that’s annoying but depressingly right on how […]
My fingers stopped this morning for a while when I came upon a reference to @whymommy. Last thing I read about her condition, she was at home having a tough but cozy Thanksgiving at home. Now she’s in the hospital and in her words, OK. Susan is a woman in her 30s with metastatic breast […]
The latest issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine contains 2 noteworthy papers on cervical cancer screening. The first, a systematic review of studies commissioned by the USPSTF, looked at 3 methods for evaluating abnormalities in women over 30 years: 1. Conventional cytology (as in a Pap smear; the cervix is scraped and cells splayed […]
Today’s breaking breast cancer news is on Avastin. The FDA has just announced, formally, that it will rescind approval for the drug’s use in people with metastatic breast cancer. Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg writes this her statement: I know I speak on behalf of the many physicians that have been involved with this issue here […]
Today’s ML comes straight from the Oval Office. President Obama talks about smoking, and how hard it is to stop, and what can be done to reduce the use and long-term health consequences of tobacco. What I like about this Presidential health advisory: He credits the ACS, which is sponsoring a smokeout today. He’s clear about […]
On Friday I visited the Scar Project exhibit at Openhouse, on Mulberry Street just south of Spring. Photographer David Jay offers penetrating, large, wall-mounted images of young people with breast cancer. The photos reveal women who’ve have had surgery, radiation, reconstruction or partial reconstruction of the breasts. Some are strikingly beautiful. Some appear confused, others […]
Few BC news items irk some women I know more than those linking alcohol consumption to the Disease. Joy-draining results like those reported this week serve up a double-whammy of guilt: first – that you might have developed cancer because you drank a bit, or a lot, or however much defines more than you should have imbibed; and second – now that […]
