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By Elaine Schattner, MD, on November 18th, 2011 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 at the Food and Drug Administration and elsewhere in saying that we encourage patients, and those who support them, to ask hard questions and demand explanations concerning the drugs that are recommended to treat serious illnesses.
On this much I agree with Dr. Hamburg – that patients and others, including doctors who prescribe treatments to patients with likely incurable illnesses, and all medical conditions, for that matter, should ask hard questions.
Others have already, immediately expressed that the FDA did the right thing. Because they think the FDA’s decision was rational, and it was. Likely
See more Final Word on Avastin, and Why We Need Better Physicians
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on July 7th, 2011 Yesterday’s post was not really about Avastin, but about medical journalism and how patients’ voices are handled by the media.
L. Husten, writing on a Forbes blog, cried that the press fawned, inappropriately, over patients’ words at the FDA hearing last week, and that led him to wonder why and if journalists should pay attention to what people with illness have to say, even if their words go against the prevailing medical wisdom.
There’s a fair amount of controversy on this. For sake of better discussion in the future, I think it best to break it up into 3 distinct but inter-related issues:
1. About health care journalism and patients’ voices:
A general problem I perceive (and part of why I started blogging) is how traditional medical journalists use patients’ stories to make a point. What some of my journalism professors tried to teach me, and most editors I’ve dealt
See more Patients’ Words, Unfiltered, Medical Journalism and Evidence
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on November 12th, 2010 I’ve been wondering, lately, why so many of the medical blogs cover the same topics, like last week’s lung cancer detection trial, which are often the exact same studies as are reported by conventional news outlets. I’ve been trying, here, to sometimes consider new published articles that seem important to me but, for whatever reasons, don’t get so much attention.
Here’s one:
Yesterday’s NEJM includes an article Romiplostim or Standard of Care in Patients with Immune Thrombocytopenia.* It’s about a drug, manufactured and sold by Amgen as NPlate, that received FDA approval for treatment of chronic immune thrombocytopenia purpura (ITP) in August, 2008. Some consider ITP a rare disease, and
See more Considering Evidence for a New Drug for Immune Thrombocytopenia Purpura
By Elaine Schattner M.D., on September 27th, 2010 What is comparative effectiveness research and why does it matter? The idea, basically, is to inform medical decisions with relevant data derived from well-designed clinical trials. This sort of research will provide the foundation for evidence-based medicine (EBM).
See more News, and Thoughts, on Comparative Effectiveness Research
By Elaine Schattner M.D., on May 16th, 2010 This week I’ve been reading about new developments in breast cancer (BC) pathology.
At one level, progress is remarkable. In the 20 years since I began my oncology fellowship, BC science has advanced to the point that doctors can distinguish among cancer subtypes and, in principle, stratify cases according to patterns of genes expressed within tumors. This sort of information – cancer cell profiling – might inform prognosis and influence treatment decisions that BC patients and their doctors, usually oncologists, make every day.
What disappoints is the slow pace by which this knowledge infiltrates the clinic. In practice, women and their physicians rarely have much more information on BC pathology than what was available two decades ago — the tumor size in its largest dimension (crudely measured in centimeters), whether it’s spread to the lymph nodes (and if so, how many nodes), the type of cancer (based on the cells’
See more More News, and Considerations, on OncotypeDx
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connections…