Aug 03, 10 04:47AM
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NPR has a great blog on their website called “Shots” about current events in health care. Last week Scott Hensley, the main blogger there, posted about a recent article on treatment of prostate cancer from the Archives of Internal Medicine. If you look at the article, you may notice a very small subheading above the article’s [...]
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Sign in nowNice post – it points to the merit of watchful waiting, which even in the 1980s and 1990s, when I learned and practiced oncology, was a treatment of choice for elderly men with low-grade prostate cancer.
The thing is, prostate cancer is not the same as breast cancer. And there’s been a lot of confusion in the press, especially in the past year, about the possibility of managing breast cancer with this approach. Particularly in younger women, breast cancer tends to be aggressive and is, most often, lethal when left untreated.
So it’s an important subject, but I hope readers don’t conflate the treatment recommendations regarding different kinds of cancer. Those differences matter a lot.
I hear you. I was writing specifically about the recent study and news about early stage prostate cancer. The finding that men appear to be getting “overtreated” is a pet peeve of mine.
Agree with you that breast cancer behaves much differently.
In fact, I hoped to make the point that “Cancer” is really multiple different diseases, not the way it’s often portrayed as a single entity. Maybe that didn’t come across.