Results for: overtreatment
Obesity, cancer, and chemotherapy
In medicine, particularly oncology, it’s often the little things that matter. Sometimes, however, the “little things” aren’t actually little; they just seem that way. I was reminded of this by a story that was circulating late last week in the national media, often under titles like “Obese cancer patients often shorted on chemo doses”, ”Are obese people with cancer getting chemotherapy doses...
Once more into the screening breach: The New York Times did not kill your patient
Dr. George Lombardi thinks that he could have saved a patient from dying of prostate cancer if a prostate specific antigen test had been done. Is he right? Probably not.
A holiday round in the mammography debate
There are times when the best-laid blogging plans of mice and men often go awry, and this isn’t always a bad thing. As the day on which so many Americans indulge in mass consumption of tryptophan-laden meat in order to give thanks approached, I had tentatively planned on doing an update on Stanislaw Burzynski, given that he appears to have slithered away...
The mammography wars heat up again (2012 edition)
One issue that keeps coming up time and time again for me is the issue of screening for cancer. Because I’m primarily a breast cancer surgeon in my clinical life, that means mammography, although many of the same issues come up time and time again in discussions of using prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer. Over time, my position regarding how...
Choosing Wisely: Five things Pharmacists and Patients Should Question
Is the health care spending tide turning? Unnecessary medical investigations and overtreatment seems to have entered the public consciousness to an extent I can’t recall in the past. More and more, the merits of medical investigations such as mammograms and just this week, PSA tests are being being widely questioned. It’s about time. Previous attempts to critically appraise overall benefits and consequences...
Cancer care in the U.S. versus Europe: Is more necessarily better?
The U.S. is widely known to have the highest health care expenditures per capita in the world, and not just by a little, but by a lot. I’m not going to go into the reasons for this so much, other than to point out that how to rein in these costs has long been a flashpoint for debate. Indeed, most of the...
Keeping the customer satisfied
These days patient satisfaction is becoming more and more important in judging how well hospitals and physicians are doing. Indeed, Medicare reimbursements are linked in part to a patient satisfaction survey administered by the government. The underlying assumption is that patient satisfaction correlates with high quality care, But is that true? I have my doubts. Indeed, there is evidence that, at best,...
Why haven’t we cured cancer yet?
Why haven’t we cured cancer yet? If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we cure cancer? If we can harness the atom, why can’t we cure cancer? How many times have you heard these questions, or variants thereof? How many times have you asked this question yourself? Sometimes, I even ask this question myself. Saturday was the two...
Molecular breast imaging (MBI): A promising technology oversold in a TED Talk?
Occasionally, there are topics that our readers want — nay, demand — that I cover. This next topic, it turns out, is one of them. It’s a link to a TED Talk. I’m guessing that most of our readers have either viewed (or at least heard of) TED talks. Typically, they are 20-minute talks, with few or no slides, by various experts...
Oprah’s buddy Dr. Christiane Northrup and breast thermography: The opportunistic promotion of quackery
Dr. Christiane Northrup came to fame as Oprah Winfrey's resident women's health expert. Unfortunately, she's using that fame to promote the unproven breast cancer screening modality thermography during Breast Cancer Awareness Month.