Tag Archives: Cancer
Estimated Lifetime Gained With Cancer Screening Tests
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 11th November 2023The title of this piece is that of a paper published by JAMA Internal Medicine. It is available at the end of this article. If you are a long-time reader of this site, you will appreciate that I have long been skeptical about the utility of screening for cancer. This view may seem odd to…
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Cancer Statistics 2023
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 16th January 2023At the start of every year the American Cancer Society issues the latest cancer statistics. This year the data were released in two publications, both of which are found at the end of this article. Some of the salient features of the data are discussed below. I’ll start with prostate cancer which seems to eternally…
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Screening for Prostate Cancer – Again
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 19th December 2010USA Today which has a hard enough time just reporting the news is now dispensing medical advice: The news that Sen. Ron Wyden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer should be a reminder to men over 50 to be screened for the disease. They don’t seem to have looked to see what the scientific basis for that…
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The Ultimate Problem
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 19th February 2010The article below was originally published in 1983. I think it’s still relevant to any current discussion of euthanasia. It also appears under the Seminars in Nephrology Editorials. Mr. Lincoln (not his name) was a 54-year-old man with metastatic prostatic cancer and chronic renal failure. He had been on dialysis for a number of years…
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Screening for Prostate Cancer – Yet Again
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 20th March 2009It seems to be impossible to drive a stake through the heart of this issue. The current New England Journal of Medicine has two more studies and an editorial on the subject. One (Mortality Results from a Randomized Prostate-Cancer Screening Trial) concludes “that prostate-cancer screening provided no reduction in death rates at 7 years and…
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Early Diagnosis of Cancer
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 23rd December 2008Wired.com, of all places, has an excellent article about the early diagnosis of cancer: Why Early Detection is the Best Way to Beat Cancer by Thomas Goetz. The problem is that early detection is a way to beat cancer, but it almost certainly is not the best way. First of all the article is very…
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