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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery

Crank spin versus science on mammography

Sometimes when a study comes out that I’m very interested in blogging about, I don’t get around to it right away. In the blogging biz, this sort of delay is often considered a bad thing, because blogging tends to be very immediate, about being the firstest with the mostest, and the moment to strike and […]

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Cancer Politics

"Overselling" mammography?

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 […]

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Cancer Medicine Politics

Simplistic criticisms of cancer therapy by Dr. Margaret Cuomo

I wondered how long it would take for someone critical of current cancer care to capitalize on the recently reported health misfortune of a celebrity. The answer, unfortunately, is “not long at all.” I will admit, however, that the source of that use and abuse of the misfortune of a celebrity was not the usual […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics

No, Virginia, cancer care in Europe doesn’t suck, contrary to what a recent paper implies

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 the […]

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Medicine

Choosing Wisely when it comes to medicine

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Basically, overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of a condition that, if left untreated, would very likely never cause the patient harm. Because I’m a cancer surgeon, I’ve almost always written about overdiagnosis in the context of–you guessed it–cancer, particularly breast cancer. In breast cancer, for […]