Category: Oncology/Hematology

Lung cancer screening explained by a pulmonologist

Lung cancer screening is a process that is used to detect the presence of lung cancer in otherwise healthy people at high risk for cancer. In 2020, 229,000 people will be diagnosed with lung cancer, and 136,000 people will die from the disease, making …

Help the public understand what more can be done to support loved ones affected by a serious illness

“Is ere anything more we could have done?” I am not the first person to ask this question, and I will not be the last. This past week I learned that an ex-boyfriend from my graduate school years, who had moved overseas in 2016 and disappeared off the g…

A medical student’s summer of 2020: Family matters

The summer of 2020 is easily one that I would rather forget but has been one that, I believe, will be etched in my memory for a very long time. After a brief vacation to visit my maternal relatives in India during last winter break, I welcomed  2020 wi…

Treating cancer patients in a pandemic [PODCAST]

“As an oncologist, perhaps the hardest part I play is as witness. I am there to give a diagnosis that, more often than not, will alter someone’s life forever. For some, I see resignation—a sense that they’ve known something was wrong and that it’…

Death is personal for this physician

An excerpt from Dying with Ease: A Compassionate Guide for Making Wiser End-of-Life Decisions. Used by permission of the publisher Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved. In 2017, there were 2,813,503 deaths in the United States. About a quarter…

Do COVID restrictions in the office negatively affect patients?

Many health care facilities are enacting policies during this time of COVID-19 that restrict the number of people attending appointments in person. Family care providers are asked to wait outside or drop off the patient for their appointment and come b…

Patients without traditional support systems, and the doctors who stereotype them [PODCAST]

“When doctors ignore the evidence showing that a support system doesn’t have to be traditional in order to be effective, that’s not a medical judgment. It’s a personal prejudice that puts singles at serious risk. Classifying patients as married o…

Sunscreens: The balancing act between safety and cancer prevention

That’s the question that will be on the minds of many as the Food and Drug Administration releases a second study on the absorption of sunscreens. The reality is that answering the “safe” question is becoming more complicated—and more important as well…

Why this physician created the Cancer and Pregnancy Registry

Breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed during pregnancy. In fact, 5 percent of invasive breast cancers occur in women less than 40 years of age, and 7 to 14 percent of premenopausal breast cancers occur in pregnant women. Harrington and othe…

The story of how a supportive residency program made a difference

An ecosystem of inpatient medicine moved at full speed around me as the news came in. It was the fall of my intern year, and my mother’s glioblastoma was back. Just months earlier, I had begun residency as a liability – a brand new, unproven doctor who…