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.
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 […]
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 […]
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
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).
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 […]