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Dr. Ward's Newspaper Columns
This article is about the things that get between you and your doctor. It is about a work place where doctors are expected to rise above the daily grind and how patients can help....
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The following are some reflections and musings from my 20 years of caring for patients with breast cancer. I hope you will find them informative and interesting....
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I recently met someone who had lost a husband to violence. In seeking grief counseling for herself and her children, she sought out a support group specifically geared to families suffering in the wake of homicides or suicides. The discussion allowed me to reflect, for myself, the differences between grief of an acute and sudden loss, versus the grief that I so often see in patients and families with cancer. And though I do not wish to lessen her grief, the loss brought on by cancer seems so much more complicated....
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The human papilloma virus was little more than a footnote when I studied virology in college. They caused warts: common warts, plantar warts, flat warts, anal warts, and genital warts. The warts came and they went. Disgusting, but not interesting. And though genital warts were contacted through sexual contact, there were much more "sexy" STDs to talk about. Then, in 1983, the year I graduated and started medical school, two strains of HPV were implicated in cervical cancer....
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This time of year, it is customary to talk about the skin cancer malignant melanoma. There are a couple of good reasons for this. First and foremost, it is summer time and the biggest risk factor for melanoma is sunburn. Second, beachwear is ideal for checking skin for funny-looking and changing moles. But there is another reason to talk about malignant melanoma during the summer....
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As this article is published I will be at the American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting (ASCO) in Chicago. This meeting will draw over 20,000 oncologists from around the world to share the latest advances in the war on cancer. It always holds promise of something new and exciting. However, if a recent report, commissioned by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and performed by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) is to be believed, "the system for conducting cancer clinical trials in the United States is approaching a state of crisis."...
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Once in a while the origin of a cancer eludes us. The primary tumor, the starting place, may be overgrown by metastatic cancer, thus hiding it from identification. Or, maybe, the primary tumor is growing much smaller than the metastases and isn't identifiable yet. On a rarer occasion, the immune system may have caught up with the primary cancer, eradicating it, but the metastatic sites proved beyond the immunity's capabilities....
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To every baseball fan April means opening day. The season has just begun, every team is a contender, and even in Seattle where we've never played in a World Series, hope springs eternal. But when baseball season starts, my thoughts invariably return to Dan. When I was an intern I would spend a few spare moments at Dan's bedside watching baseball. Dan was a fourth year medical student at the University of Minnesota. He would never graduate. Dan was dying from testicular cancer. This column is inspired by Dan's story....
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It might have been predicted that as health care reform began its way through a legislative process that is often compared with a sausage grinder, something in the lofty and distinct goals of simultaneously providing health care coverage for all Americans and reigning in health care costs would have to give. What has given the most is the goal of reigning in health care costs....
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It has been pointed out to me that whenever I have written about colon cancer, I have written about screening, prevention and colonoscopies. I have been remiss because there is an exciting story to tell. In the last 20 years, we've gone from one drug to five and the cure rate for stage III cancer has jumped from 40 to 66 percent....
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