The benefits of screening have been oversold, and the harms glossed over. The basis of cancer screening programs is to find cancers before they cause symptoms in the belief that this will always change the outcome for the better. But, we are also learning that is not...
“We do ourselves a disservice when diagnoses as wildly different as a grade 4 glioblastoma multiforme (a brain tumour that is virtually 100% fatal) and prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (a prostate condition more likely to make you pee frequently than to kill you)...
Once ideas become accepted in health it is hard to change them. Yet knowledge presses forward and what was once thought to be the case may be shown not to be. Our understanding of cancer is evolving but the system is locked into a very 1970’s approach. The overarching...
There is a general impression that medicine is constantly changing. In fact medicine is very conservative and change which challenges conventional thinking (as against using new drugs) can take a long time to be adopted. One major change though may be upon us. A...
In 1971, then President Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer with the aim of eliminating the disease in time for the bicentenary in 1976. A measure of how we are doing can be seen in projections that by 2050 there will be over double the number of cancer deaths and...
