Word: chemo
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...most agonizing choices a patient with a life-threatening illness has to make is when to put quality of life ahead of length of life. Case in point: chemotherapy after breast-cancer surgery. Although the side effects of chemo (among them nausea, fatigue and hair loss) can be brutal, the treatment does work: patients who go through it will, on average, live longer. So I was surprised to read in the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine that only 29% of breast-cancer patients actually take their doctor's advice and get chemotherapy after surgery. Even more striking...
...divergence between recommendations from the National Institutes of Health and what is seen in clinical practice." The NIH guidelines, developed by experts in the field and released in November 2000, found "substantial" benefit from chemotherapy for both premenopausal and postmenopausal women up to age 70 and recommended post-surgical chemo in all cases in which tumors were greater than 1 cm in diameter...
...begins self-medicating with prescription drugs and drinking heavily. "She's the whole world to me," he tells the camera in a rare serious moment, and it's no exaggeration: you can't imagine the gentle, trembly rocker managing five seconds without her support. Sharon invites MTV into her chemo sessions and her sickroom with typical brazenness ("Sharon, how's your a__hole today?" she jokes. "Oh, much better, thank you!"). Yet you get a stronger feeling than last season that the cameras are on a leash. Nobody cries--though the family mentioned plenty of tearful moments in their recent...
...awful wait after a patient starts chemotherapy and before she finds out if it's working. That may change. Italian researchers have tracked the rate at which a radioactive tracer "washes out" of patients' tumors and found that those with low wash-out rates respond better to chemo. With the data, doctors can switch treatments early or use drugs to boost the body's ability to respond...
There wasn't much about my mastectomies and chemo to laugh about until I read Molly Ivins' take on the experience [MEDICINE, Feb. 18]. Regarding hair loss, I also prayed for God to leave me my eyebrows and eyelashes; I thought losing them would make me look really sick. As for not having breasts, put it this way: if you compare my body with my 10-year-old son's, between the neck and waist we look identical, except he is the one with nipples. Just to be here today, however, and to be able to write this make...