Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Cancer, Evidence-based medicine, Health care journalism, Medical devices
I’ve been traveling in Europe, including giving a talk at the Salzburg Global Seminar on involving & informing patients in health care decisions. In that talk, I talked about promotion of a newer form of cancer radiation therapy called IMRT or intensity-modulated radiation therapy.
So I want to point out that, while I’ve been away, the Wall Street Journal published an important piece on this very topic, under the headline, “A Device to Kill Cancer, Lift Revenue.”
Disclaimer: I welcome comments but will delete those with any kind of product pitch, profanity, personal attacks or those from anyone who doesn’t list what appears to be an actual e-mail address. I will also end any thread of comments that are repetitive. Because I moderate comments, I can’t keep reacting to repeatedly inaccurate or unsubstantiated claims. We don't give medical advice so we won't respond to questions asking for it.
Overall, this was an easy-to-follow summary. But there was a clear difference between this and a competing Boston Globe story, which did a better job offering context and analysis.
This Boston Globe blog post gave its audience a more thorough understanding of an emerging approach to virtual colonoscopy than the Wall Street Journal.
Longer, but overall not any better, than the coverage from the competing LA Times story. Not thorough enough to explain what this preliminary research actually means for readers–which is not much at this point.
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Gregory D. Pawelski posted on December 16, 2010 at 2:47 pm
I was well aware that myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) can be caused by treatment with chemotherapy. I was rudely reminded three years ago that radiation therapy can cause it too (treatment-related MDS or secondary MDS). Treatment-related MDS is often more severe and diffult to treat than de novo MDS (unknown changes to the bone marrow). I lost my brother-in-law (my wife’s brother) to MDS after he received permanent seed implants for “early” prostate cancer treatment (he was in his ’70s). Urologists can hardly hold themselves back and are out with all sorts of treatments. Sometimes, while a life may be saved, a life may be taken. I have experienced for the second time in my life, the issue. It does happen, but no one emphasizes that point.