Preventive medicine is a rapidly growing field. Testing that detects diseases in early stages, treatments that prevent diseases before they occur, and behaviors that make diseases less likely all hold the promise to keep us healthy and let us live longer. Unfortunately the field is also increasingly marred by tests and services that are recommended to patients without any scientific evidence that they work, or worse, despite much evidence that they are useless.
That's why I've long been a dis...
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Seattle TV News Story Gets Worldwide Attention on Inflammatory Breast Cancer
(Thanks to my patient J.R. for pointing me to this story.)
A little over a month ago a Seattle TV station broadcast a news story about inflammatory breast cancer. You can read the story or watch the video on the station's website. Since then, interested viewers have emailed the story to friends and acquaintances and the video has been viewed over ten million times. This has drawn welcomed attention to inflammatory breast cancer, a very ag...
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Fighting Prostate Cancer by Doing Nothing
I wrote in March about the controversies regarding prostate cancer screening, and I made the point that, unfortunately, it is still not clear whether or not diagnosing prostate cancer early saves lives.
This week's Los Angeles Times Health Section features a fascinating article by Susan Brink...
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The Surgeon General’s Report on Secondhand Smoke
U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona released today a major review of the scientific evidence on secondhand smoke: The Health Consequences of Involuntary Exposure to Tobacco Smoke. This subject was last reviewed by the Surgeon General's office twenty years ago, under Dr. C. Everett Koop.
The comprehensive study examined the link between secondhand smoke and a large number of diseases to determine if th...
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American Death Rate Drops Sharply
The National Center for Health Statistics released the statistics on the number of deaths in 2004. The results document the biggest drop in the American death rate in almost 70 years.
The findings are summarized in this AP article.
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The center said drops in the death rates for heart disease, cancer and stroke accounted for most of the decline. "We were surprised by the sharpness of the decrea...
Raloxifene (Evista) as Effective as Tamoxifen (Nolvadex) for Breast Cancer Prevention
The National Cancer Institute Study of Tamoxifen and Raloxifene (STAR) Trial has just concluded. It was one of the largest breast cancer prevention studies ever. It found that raloxifene, which is usually used for osteoporosis, is as effective as tamoxifen in preventing breast cancer in post-menopausal women who are at high risk of breast cancer. Raloxifene also had fewer side effects.
This study has generated much press attention and is sure to impact the lives of thousands of women who are cu...
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The Controversies of Prostate Cancer Screening
The March 21 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine has a pair of excellent articles that highlight the unresolved questions in routinely testing men for prostate cancer: Viewpoint: Limiting Prostate Cancer Screening and Viewpoint: Expanding Prostate Cancer Screening. (The abstracts of the article are available by clic...
Calcium and Vitamin D Supplements: Still Modestly Beneficial
Last week's New England Journal of Medicine article publishing the results of a large National Institutes of Health (NIH) study on the effects of calcium and vitamin D supplements on risk of bone fracture and the risk of colon cancer has generated much media attention. The results were disappointing to some, but I believe that they help make our expectations of calcium and vitamin D more realistic.
You can review...
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Preventive Care — Separating Facts from Myth
This article published yesterday in the Los Angeles Times features a great summary of the current scientific evidence about preventive care. (Registration is required by the Times to read the article, but is free.) Some of what is known may surprise you. The annual physical examination -- for example listening to the heart and the lungs, feeling the ...
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Low Fat Diet Does Not Prevent Breast Cancer
This very large study of the effects of diet on the incidence of breast cancer was just published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association and has received much media attention, including this article in the Los Angeles Times. The study is...
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