Medical oncologists often find ourselves needing to advise people who do not look or feel sick to take chemotherapy. This concept, of course, is what we call adjuvant therapy — using chemotherapy in healthy people as an adjunct to surgery to increase the cure rate from surgery alone. I’ve been thinking about the concept of…
Comments closed(on why anyone would choose to be an oncologist) Oncologists are often asked our motivation for entering the specialty. My standard response is to smile, and state that I followed a calling. But to explain that calling is a longer story that I’ve never shared. Twenty years later, here is my first attempt to do…
Comments closedupdate 11/2020: recipient of an Honorable Mention Award in the 2020 Writer’s Digest Writing Competition (print/online article category)! My patient is middle-aged, morbidly obese, with undiagnosed (until now) alcoholic cirrhosis, and a vaguely documented history of cardiac disease—per the chart “noncompliant” with medications. “Noncompliant” in this case turns out to mean he had no insurance…
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