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Cancer Medicine Surgery

Early detection of cancer, part 1: More complex than you think

In the course of a few days last week, two prominent political personalities from different parties, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, announced that their cancers (breast cancer in the case of Edwards and colon cancer in the case of Snow), after having apparently been […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Friday Woo Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Feedback loops, reproductive cells, cancer, and design

It is with some trepidation that I approach the latest target of Your Friday Dose of Woo. No, it’s not because the woo is so potent that it has actually struck the fear of You-Know-Who in me (I leave it up to readers to determine whether I was referring to God or Valdemort), although it […]

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Bioethics Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Quackery

Checking in with The DCA Site

It’s been a week since I last wrote about dichloroacetate (DCA), the chemotherapeutic agent that targets tumor cells by an interesting new mechanism based on the Warburg effect, as I’ve described in the past. After a very interesting article in Cancer Cell in January by investigators at the University of Alberta, the blogosphere erupted with […]

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Cancer Medicine Politics Surgery

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and liver metastases from colon cancer

It’s been a bad few days. A mere four days after Elizabeth Edwards announced that her breast cancer had recurred in her rib, with an update the other day saying that the apparently was also another lesion in in her hip, I learn from a commenter and multiple other sources that White House Press Secretary […]

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Cancer Medicine Surgery

Immediate reconstruction after breast cancer: A most disturbing study

I realize that being in academic medicine at a tertiary care center often produces the “ivory tower” syndrome, but occasionally it is brought home to me that the way we practice surgery here often differs considerably from how surgery is practiced “in the trenches.” This time around, it was a study about how often surgeons […]