cancer
oracknows | October 22, 2008I hate it when an article starts right out with a rather annoying usage of terminology, even when it provides information that interests me:
(AP) -- Nearly a fourth of widely used new-generation biological drugs that treat several common diseases produce serious side effects that lead to safety warnings soon after they go on the market, the first major study of its kind found.
Included in the report released Tuesday were the arthritis drugs Humira and Remicade, cancer drugs Rituxan and Erbitux, and the heart failure drug Natrecor. All wound up being flagged for safety.
That might surprise…
oracknows | October 14, 2008OK, I give up.
I hadn't planned on blogging about this because I thought I had already taken care of this woo before. Well, not exactly this woo, but a related woo of which this new issue is just a warmed over more woo-ified version. Indeed, I had even considered it as a candidate to be the first "victim" of a new, improved, resurrected version of Your Friday Dose of Woo (yes, I still do intend to resurrect it but haven't managed to find the time to give it the justice it deserves), but decided against using this particular form of woo because, well, it's quackery that kills. And that's a…
revere | October 10, 2008The health concerns about bisphenol-A (BPA), a component of hard polycarbonate plastic, has been extended once again (see here, here, here for previous posts on BPA). BPA, a ubiquitous contaminant of human bodies, leaches from water and baby bottles, the lining of tin cans, dental sealants and many other sources. BPA also looks a lot like potent hormones, like estradiol and the synthetic estrogenic agent, diethylstilbesterol (DES), the cause of transplacental carcinogenesis in humans. So there have been plausible concerns that BPA might increase the risk of cancer in humans, especially in…
oracknows | October 9, 2008Well that didn't take long, did it?
Three days ago, I described a study that I had noticed in the October 1 issue of Cancer Research that described an animal study that strongly suggested that vitamin C administered at sufficiently high doses may interfere with the action of multiple chemotherapeutic agents. You can read the link for full details of the study as discussed by yours truly. In fact, although I only blog sporadically about the exaggerated claims of advocates of vitamin C as a cancer cure, but when I do I like to think I hit the mark, starting two and a half years ago when I wrote…
oracknows | October 7, 2008For women undergoing menopause, hot flashes are a real problem. In my specialty, as I've pointed out before, women undergoing treatment for breast cancer are often forced into premature menopause by the treatments to which we subject them. It can be chemotherapy, although far more often it's the estrogen-blocking drugs that we use to treat breast cancers that have the estrogen receptor. Estrogen stimulates such tumors to grow, and blocking estrogen is a very effective treatment for them, be it with tamoxifen or the newer aromatase inhibors like Arimidex. The utterly predictable consequence,…
oracknows | October 6, 2008Sometimes I have to look for blog ideas, trolling through various alternative medicine sites, medical news sites, or science news feeds or my medical and science journals. Sometimes ideas fall on me seemingly out of the blue. This is one of the latter situations. This time around, as I do twice a month I was perusing the very latest issue of Cancer Research, hot off the presses October 1. As I did so, it didn't take me long to come across an article from the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia entitled Vitamin C Antagonizes the…
oracknows | September 29, 2008More than two-thirds of breast cancers make the estrogen receptor. What that means is that these tumors have the protein receptor that binds estrogen, which then activates the receptor and causes all the genes that are turned on or off by estrogen to be turned on and off. That's how estrogen acts on normal breast epithelial cells and on breast cancer cells. The significance of this observation is that estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancers respond to estrogen. Indeed, estrogen contributes to their growth, and blocking estrogen is an effective treatment against them. Indeed, that most…
oracknows | September 26, 2008It figures.
I know, I like to start posts with "it figures," and maybe I do it too often, but this time it really fits. For a moment I thought I was going to have a lot of egg on my face over this, but just for a moment. Yesterday, I wrote a rather extensive post about how some left wing bloggers are going into fits of paranoid conspiracy-mongering frenzy, claiming that John McCain's melanoma was more extensive than advertised and that he is supposedly dying of recurrent melanoma and hiding it from everyone. I spent a lot of effort, not to mention verbiage, explaining why that scenario is…
oracknows | September 25, 2008Less than a month ago, I got a bit perturbed by some vile rhetoric written by a left-wing blogger named Matt Stoller, who referred to John McCain as a "crazy, cancer-ridden dishonest madman." As you recall, I administered a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence to him. It wasn't so much because I like John McCain. Indeed, I've pretty much decided that McCain is a lost cause, a shadow of his former self. I would have voted for him in 2000, but in the last eight years he's let his ambition to become President utterly destroy whatever honor he had left, a truly sad thing to see given his previous…
oracknows | September 24, 2008Here we go again.
Tuesday night and yesterday, you probably saw it, plastered all over the media, in the newspapers, on ABC, on the radio, in press releases, and around the blogosphere. Yes, it was another bit of science by press release, with news outlets practically falling all over themselves to hype the results of an acupuncture study reported earlier this week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO). Leading the pack was ABC News:
A new medical study finds that acupuncture, an ancient form of healing that has been around for thousands…
oracknows | September 22, 2008Oddly enough, I'm more tired this morning than I was on Friday.
That's the sort of thing that happens when I actually do as much work over the weekend as I often do on two typical weekdays. The reason is that I've suddenly found myself with an unexpected promotion, and--oh, by the way--there's stuff that needs to be done on Monday. Consequently, my originally intended topic for Monday will have to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday, mainly because it might require a bit of thought. That's OK. It'll wait. Besides, it'll be much more useful and educational if I have a little time to think about it…
oracknows | September 19, 2008As a cancer surgeon, I maintain a particularly intense contempt for peddlers of cancer quackery. Although I've been fortunate enough not to have had to see the end results of it more than a handful of times in my career, women with bleeding, stinking, fungating tumors with widespread metastases that could have been treated if they hadn't decided upon woo rather than good old-fashioned surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, I've become aware of enough such cases and seen the dishonest marketing of quackery enough to drive me to maintain this blog and undertake other activities to promote…
oracknows | September 15, 2008One of the aspects of blogging that I've come to like is the ability to follow a story's evolution over the long term and to comment on new developments as they come along. If you're good at blogging, you can take that story and make it your own, adding it to your list of "signature" issues for which you become known and about which people come to you for commentary as new developments arise. Indeed, now that the fourth anniversary of the start of this blog is fast approaching (December 11, in case you don't remember!), I can look back and see a number of issues that I've done this with,…
oracknows | September 13, 2008After yesterday's lovefest that really did go to my head. Really, when I wrote it I wasn't trolling for praise, although in retrospect it now does kind of look that way to me. I was simply expressing amazement that anyone would listen to a pseudonymous (although not really anonymous anymore) blogger. Fortunately for my ego, which threatens to expand until it pops like an overinflated balloon, there are are readers who aren't all that impressed by me. Heck, there's even a whole blog, every blogger of which really, really detests me. (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess to which…
oracknows | September 12, 2008Even after over three years at this, I still find it amazing that as many people read my verbal meanderings as in fact do. In fact, I still can't believe that I'm one of the more popular medical bloggers out there. True, I'll probably never approach the traffic and readership of the huge political blogs or of our very own P.Z. Myers (who has at least ten times my traffic), but I appear to have become a fixture in the medical and scientific blogosphere.
Even more amazingly (to me, at least), I appear to have developed a bit of influence. I know it's hard to believe, but I was forced to accept…
oracknows | September 9, 2008If there's one thing I really detest, it's cancer quackery. Indeed, one of the very earliest posts on this blog was about this very topic, and applying science, skepticism, and critical thinking to extraordinary claims of cancer cures has remained a major theme of this blog ever since. Shortly after that, I described how, because of the variable course of cancer and the fact that many cancers are cured with surgery alone, "testimonials" for cancer quackery can sound very convincing. It's a topic I've covered several times over the three and a half year history of this blog. Whenever a high…
oracknows | September 8, 2008"One dumb tumor is still smarter than ten smart oncologists."
--George Sledge, MD
My only retort is that, slowly but surely, oncologists and we oncologic surgeons are getting smarter.
oracknows | September 8, 2008If there's one thing that cancer researchers, indeed most biomedical researchers in the U.S., know today it's that the research funding climate sucks right now. Indeed, after the completion of the near-doubling of the NIH budget in 2003, during which time it was flying high, the NIH budget in essence crash landed--hard. Paylines, which had been well over the 20th percentile (meaning that over 20% of grant applications in any give deadline cycle were funded) plummeted to near single-digit ranges almost overnight. Indeed, I almost fell victim to this myself in 2004. The initial score on my R01…
terrasig | September 6, 2008When one serves on NIH grant review panels, or study sections, one must now register with the US government as a government contractor in order to get reimbursement for hotel and meals, plus the staggering $200 honorarium for each day of the meeting (for which you have spent between two and four weeks of reading, writing, and prep time.)
As a result, you get on e-mail lists for all sorts of federal solicitations for bids on all kinds of projects, or "federal business opportunities." I chose not to opt out of these e-mails because, well, you just can't have enough e-mail, right?.
In all…
terrasig | September 5, 2008It wasn't triskaidekaphobia that kept me from submitting to the Cancer Research Blog Carnival - I just thought I hadn't written a useful cancer post in quite some time.
But thanks to Walter at Highlight Health, our discussion on the relevance of an article on in vitro antileukaemic activity of methadone was included in the proceedings.
Walter also has a very timely message to kick off the carnival:
Everyone knows that cancer is a devastating disease. What many people don't know is that cancer kills more than 1,500 people a day; that's one person every minute. Tonight, Stand Up To Cancer, a…