In Memoriam: Lisa Boncheck Adams “…I search for powers to rise above, get out, fly away… The words of disease become words my brain gravitates to. The ebb and flow of cancer, Of life. And so too, Inevitably, Of death….” –Lisa Boncheck Adams Yesterday a woman of great courage died. Lisa Boncheck Adams chronicled her experiences of...
Read More
Or Patient-Centered Cancer Care: IOM’s recommendations Last week, we looked at the recent Institute of Medicine’s report and wrote the post about “How the US Got Its Cancer Care Crisis“. This week we get more practical. With specific recommendations you can use! The general recommendations include: (1) becoming engaged patients. (2)...
Read More
Did you know… In a study conducted in 2012, 69% of patients diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and 81% of those diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer did not understand that chemotherapy was not at all likely to cure their cancer? That a national survey showed physicians asked patients what they want in their care only ½ the time? That patients ask...
Read More
So often people who undergo chemotherapy hear something like this from their family, friends or other well-wishers, “Thank goodness that’s over, now you can get on with your life. You can get back to normal.” Although it’s true that chemotherapy is over, the road that the patient is on is not smooth. There are important changes that caregivers and...
Read More
Growing up, Colleen Bronstein spent all summer at her family’s summer home at the beach and when she married they had a pool and visited the beach house twice a year. Fair skinned, freckled and Irish she loved the outdoors. Knowing the Signs “I had an itchy spot on my back for a year or so and when I went to see my family doctor about something...
Read More
There are two phrases making the rounds that describe you, a member of the growing Medivizor.com community. One is “e-patient” and the other is “smart patient.” What is an e-patient? Who created the phrase? Published in March of 1996, Health Online: How to Find Health Information, Support Groups, and Self-Help Communities in Cyberspace, first...
Read More
Almost 10 years ago, secondhand smoke was determined to be a Group A carcinogen by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Since then evidence has grown supporting this classification. The reasoning is based on the content of secondhand smoke (SHS). SHS is a mixture of fine particles and over 50 chemicals that are known or probable cancer causing...
Read More
Angelina Jolie’s opinion piece in The New York Times , May 14, 2013, has taken social media by storm. If you haven’t heard, she shared her decision to have a double mastectomy after learning that she “carries a faulty gene BRCA1.” To learn how women and men who have had breast cancer feel about the op/ed, we turned to the Breast Cancer Social...
Read More
The New York Times article “Cancers Share Gene Patterns, Studies Affirm” published on May 2, 2013, and several other news outlets, described the work being carried out by The Cancer Genomic Atlas (TCGA). The TCGA, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is a research network consisting of more than 150 researchers at institutions across the...
Read More
Looking for research on metastatic breast cancer? This can be a problem. It was precisely for this reason that Dian (CJ) Corneliussen-James started a non-profit called METAvivor. “It was out of outrage,” she says. For those who don’t know, people who have Stage IV (4) cancer have metastatic disease. Metastases means the spread of a cancer from...
Read More
Ready to play Hide and Seek? Or are you just ready to hide? Most people feel like hiding when faced with the numbers that health and medical professionals use daily, statistics. So we’re going to start slowly and cover different mathematical concepts you might have heard. This will be a series of posts so if there are any math concepts that you...
Read More
A recent study by researchers at Loyola University found that as many as 63% of prostate cancer websites cannot be read or understood by someone who hasn’t completed high school education. Why is this important? Well, one of the study’s references suggests that as many as 90 million adult Americans have literacy skills that test below high school...
Read More
