Results for: cancer screening
The Cancer Moonshot: Hype versus reality
The Cancer Moonshot has been promoted as a strategy to break the logjam that seems to be holding up new, much more effective treatments for cancer. The key word is "seems," because in reality the Cancer Moonshot is more hype than promise.
Newborn Phototherapy and Cancer: Cutting Edge Research or “Big Data” Failure?
While social media and news outlets were reacting, or in some cases overreacting, to a new rodent-based medical study on the unlikely link between cell phone use and brain cancer last month, two studies and an accompanying commentary were quietly published in Pediatrics that raised similar concerns. Rather than cell phone use, the proposed potential cause of pediatric cancer in these newly...
Reclassifying thyroid cancer and the willful misunderstanding of overdiagnosis
If there’s one lesson that we here at Science-Based Medicine like to emphasize, it’s that practicing medicine and surgery is complicated. Part of the reason that it’s complicated is that for many diseases our understanding is incomplete, meaning that physicians have to apply existing science to their treatment as well as they can. The biology of cancer, in particular, can be vexing....
Confusing overdiagnosis for an “epidemic” of thyroid cancer in Japan after Fukushima
One of my favorite topics to blog about for SBM is the topic of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. These are two interrelated phenomena that most people are blissfully unaware of. Unfortunately, I’d also say that the majority of physicians are only marginally more aware than the public about these confounders of screening programs, if even that. Overdiagnosis has long been appreciated to be...
The American Cancer Society’s new mammography guidelines: Déjà vu all over again
One of the things that feels the weirdest about having done the same job, having been in the same specialty, for a longer and longer time is that you frequently feel, as the late, great Yogi Berra would have put it, déjà vu all over again. This is particularly true in science and medicine, where the same issues come up again and...
Presidential candidate Ben Carson: Shilling for Mannatech with his very own alternative cancer cure testimonial?
Over the years, mainly at my not-so-super-secret other blog, I’ve frequently made the points that the vast majority of physicians are not scientists and, in fact, that many of them suffer from a severe case of Dunning-Kruger when it comes to science outside of biomedical sciences—or even biomedical sciences outside of their medical field of expertise. The most common science I’ve seen...
An aspirin a day to prevent heart attacks, strokes, and cancer?
Taking an aspirin a day has always been controversial when it comes to preventing disease before it occurs. Now a task force is recommending daily use under some circumstances. Do the benefits really outweigh the risks?
Cancer Centers and Advertising Practices
You have probably seen the TV commercials or other ads for Cancer Treatment Centers of America. They make it sound like “the place to go” if you have cancer. They claim to be “different,” to combine the best cancer technologies with natural therapies in a humane, patient-centered approach that helps you fight the disease and maintain your quality of life. They offer...
Angelina Jolie, surgical strategies for cancer prevention, and genetics denialism (revisited)
Sometimes, weird things happen when I’m at meetings. For example, I just got home from the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) meeting in Houston over the weekend. Now, one thing I like about this meeting is that, unlike so many other meetings these days—cough, cough, ASCO, I’m looking at you—at the SSO there wasn’t a single talk I could find about “complementary...