All News

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

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.

We discuss the current controversies in prostate cancer-PSA screening and approaches to initial treatment for men diagnosed with the disease.

A new study finds that adding rituximab maintenance to R-CHOP induction is an effective treatment for older patients with mantle-cell lymphoma.

Cross-cultural miscommunication has undermined this immigrant's trust in his physician. How do you respond to his demand that alternative therapies be discussed?

What is the most ethical way to make difficult treatment decisions for a patient with dementia who has no living relatives and no advance directives?

A patient on opiate therapy insists on working against her physician’s recommendations. She works as a nurse. Should the doctor inform her employer?

According to a study in the journal Cancer, without the use of PSA screening the number of men presenting with cases of metastatic prostate cancer would be three times greater than the actual number observed today.

Ethics and Oncology is a new blog for CancerNetwork written by Paul R. Helft, MD, director at the Fairbanks Center for Medical Ethics and associate professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine.

Research report from May 2012 ONS Congress interview and poster discussion with Deborah Allen, from Duke University.

A new study suggests suppression of breast cancer metastasis relies on an antitumor immune response. Researchers found that administering interferon can reduce bone metastases and increase the survival time of a metastatic breast cancer mouse model.

We’re now entering the fourth decade of HIV/AIDS awareness. Last year marked the 30th anniversary of the earliest report (on June 5, 1981) of what is now known as AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome).

With National HIV Testing Day recently behind us and the 19th International AIDS conference happening later in July in Washington, DC, I would like to share some recent HIV/AIDS statistical, research, and policy highlights.

The FDA approved the mTOR inhibitor everolimus (Afinitor) last week for use in postmenopausal women with HER2-negative, hormone-receptor-positive advanced breast cancer patients.

A new target of melanoma tumors has been identified that may be promising as part of a novel combination therapy for melanoma. In a study published in Nature Medicine, researchers have identified that more than half of melanoma cases, both early and late-stage, may have higher levels of MDM4, a p53-interacting protein.

CancerNetwork speaks with two practicing oncologists about how the recent Supreme Court decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act will affect oncology practices and patients.

A new study finds higher levels of vitamin E consumption could stave off liver cancer. The association held up for those who had a family history of liver disease and those who self-reported liver disease.

ICD-10 is a massive undertaking that expands our current 13,000 codes to 68,000 codes. It will impact nearly all business processes in a physician's practice: verification of eligibility, pre-authorization, clinical documentation, research activities, public health reporting, quality reporting, and claim submission.

How should oncologists advise patients about the best surgical approach to use to treat their prostate cancer? Quite simply, it is the surgeon, not the approach. The self-fulfilling prophecy about surgery is that the best surgeons tend to do the most surgeries, so an easy metric is volume.

CancerNetwork speaks with Dr. Sara Hurvitz, director of the breast cancer program at the University of California in Los Angeles. Dr. Hurvitz is actively involved in translational phase I/II breast cancer clinical trials as well as in research to better define distinct types of breast tumors to better design novel targeted therapies.

For oncologists, the impact of the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act will likely mean that their patients will no longer be in danger of losing insurance or being denied insurance because of cancer.

For independent physician practices, the realities of overhead expenses, time available for patient care, and regulatory requirements can only be assessed when the specific requirements for reporting and reimbursement are clear.

As with any legislation, there are both positive and negative aspects. Specific to oncology, one of the greatest impacts of the ACA will be the move to a bundled payment for a treatment of a disease.

This will have a significant impact on medicine and on the care we will be able to deliver. It has life and death implications. The patients of America, who have enjoyed the best healthcare in the world, have lost.

How will we deal with patients and families who, given their tremendous access to information, learn about and demand expensive (and up until now reasonable) treatments once we have recast them as too expensive to justify their marginal benefits? Are we prepared to engage in such discussions directly?

I think it is a real shame that inside the Beltway, both sides of the political arena have had neither the wisdom nor the courage to recognize and address the fact that medicolegal drivers will continue to push costs upward until someone takes the lead in tackling this issue.

My thought is that it is good to move forward. No doubt there will be needed changes, but the status quo is broken.