Cancer basics
palmd | October 14, 2009First let me remind you that I've written extensively about HPV infection, cervical cancer, and Gardasil, the vaccine to prevent these. The links are at the bottom of the post for your reference.
OK, here's the deal. A bloggy friend of mine is dealing with some serious health concerns due to HPV infection. I've written lots of pieces about the more intimate side of medicine, but no one can tell it like a patient. How someone deals with disease is a personal matter, and she has decided to "come out" and share her story in order to help others. (Digression: a great book called Everything…
palmd | June 28, 2009(NB: as is usual with my more "science-y" posts, oversimplification is the rule. --PalMD)
It's been a very long while since I've updated my series on cancer. I keep meaning to, but you know how things go. Lately, though, I've been curious about radiation oncology, the use of ionizing radiation to treat cancers. What set me off was a recent Times article about some pretty crappy practices. Radiation oncology requires a very thorough education in physics and medicine and the field attracts some of the best minds, but no field is immune to unethical behavior (which in this case I feel is…
sb admin | September 24, 2008Once a cancer has been diagnosed, we must use our knowledge of biology, medicine, and clinical trials to plan treatment. Treatment can be curative or palliative (that is, with a goal of reducing symptoms or extending life, rather than effecting a cure).
Understanding cancer treatment requires a little bit of basic biology, and as with all of my more "science-y" posts, please forgive any oversimplification (but please also note that this complexity stands in stark contrast to the simplistic altmed cancer "cures"), or for overtopping the head of the hapless non-scientist.
As you recall from…
sb admin | September 19, 2008In Cancer 101, I gave some basics to understanding cancer. A commenter asked a good question, and our next lesson will attempt a simple answer.
The question regarded how a pathologist can tell if a cancer is "invasive" by looking at a specimen. Well, depending on the specimen, the answer changes, but let's use the colon as an example. Most colon cancers start out as benign polyps. Eventually the cells in the polyp can become malignant, and after that, they can they can begin to grow through layers of normal cells.
Here is a diagram of a cancer of the colon at various stages. As you can…
sb admin | September 16, 2008Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S., and at any moment directly affects almost 4% of the population, or about 10.8 million Americans. A diagnosis of cancer can be one of the most frightening moments in someone's life, and yet most people understand little about the disease. I hear the same questions about cancer over and over again, so it's well past time to give a bit of an explanation of this set of diseases.
First of all, cancer isn't a single disease----it's over a hundred different diseases with certain commonalities. Second, cancer has many synonyms, some of…
sb admin | August 14, 2008OK, if you insist. This comes with the usual caveat directed at scientists that I know this is oversimplified, but I wish to reach the largest audience possible. Feel free to correct my mistakes, but please don't bother me about oversimplification.
So here's the deal. Several decades ago, it became scientifically fashionable to believe that most cancer had a viral cause. This belief coincided with the discovery that some viruses do cause cancer. And while it turns out that most cancers are not caused by viruses (probably), many of them are. Viruses can cause cancers in a number of ways…