ONCOLOGY Vol 26 No 8

Let’s be clear. Loving support is an important component of compassionate care. Promising miracles is not.

In populations in whom there has been a focus on the important components of rectal cancer management, 5-year survival is better in rectal cancer than in colon cancer, which was not the case in the past. Total mesorectal excision (TME) is one of many important components of current management.

If doctors were trained in communication skills, then quackery would diminish greatly. When you are told what day you are going to die and all hope is taken away, why not seek alternative therapies?

As they say, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Many alternative therapies, once believed by conventional medical practitioners to be merely placebos, have now been shown to have proven therapeutic value (eg, acupuncture, numerous botanical extracts, meditation).

As we look forward, we suggest that the priority should be to further our understanding of the tumor’s interactions with its microenvironment and with the immune system. We think that such an understanding will be critical for advances in locally advanced rectal cancer therapy.

This review provides a brief recap of the history of medical quackery and an overview of the various types of unproven or disproved cancer therapies popular now in the United States and elsewhere.

The preferred integrated treatment modality for locally advanced rectal cancer is preoperative radio(chemo)therapy followed by total mesorectal excision, though certain aspects of this standard are still debated.

Given the current rate of progress in this field, it may not be completely unlikely that women with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer will be cured of this disease in the foreseeable future.

It is time to develop more active treatments in the early-disease setting that actually eradicate ER-positive breast cancer before new mutations and secondary resistance have a chance to develop. In this regard, standard chemotherapy is not the answer.

In this article, we describe the long natural history of HR+ breast cancer and review current research and clinical strategies to address this clinical challenge.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) encompasses multiple disease entities that differ with regard to marrow morphology, cytochemistry, immunophenotype, pretreatment clinical characteristics, and treatment outcome.

Prognostic factors in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) may be subdivided into those related to patient characteristics and general health condition, and those related to characteristics of the tumor.

Although the overall prognosis for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) associated with unfavorable, complex, or monosomal karyotypes is poor, some patients can be cured.