Many if not most businesses have gone digital in one way or another. When it comes to digitization, health care dawdles behind banking, travel, car making and packaged goods. Approximately 70% of American hospitals still fax and post patient medical records. The COVID-19 pandemic is finally stimulating change. “Confronted with...
The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) initiated 2 randomized trials in 1993. The trials included conjugated equine estrogen (CEE) in postmenopausal women with a prior hysterectomy and CEE plus medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA) in those with intact uterus. The CEE + MPA trial closed after 5.6 years when it was found that...
A study presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and published online by the NEJMindicates Exemestane, which is now used to prevent recurrences of breast cancer, can also reduce the risk of it occurring in the first place. To read the full text you can go...
“Before the advent of sentinel node biopsy essentially all women with invasive cancer had to have a complete axillary lymph node dissection…. So in the course of less than 15 years, we have gone from 100% of women with invasive cancer having a complete dissection to around 10% – that...
The American Joint Commission on Cancer or AJCC has a staging system for all cancers including melanoma. Using melanoma thickness, the presence or absence of lymph node metastasis and presence or absence of systemic (body) spread, the staging system will place you in a Stage that corresponds to a percentage...
The study out of MD Anderson reporting ‘double the mastectomy rate’ for patients treated with accelerated partial breast irradiation compared to whole breast irradiation, has created a tremendous amount of angst in the lay and medical press. Studies such as these that rely on large retrospective databases can provide interesting...
