Word: oncologist
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Barbara Strong, 59, suffered because of such ignorance. Miami doctors refused the former nurse's pleas for medication when horrific cancer pain struck. After Strong rebelled and found a pain specialist, her regular doctor "went wacko...He said I would become addicted." So Strong stayed with the oncologist; eventually her pain got so awful she could barely move. "I wanted to be dead," she says. As a Christian, Strong couldn't go through with actually killing herself, but she did consider an alternative: "Jack Kevorkian, where...
...emotional challenges of terminal illness without the physical demands of agony. They listened to jazz; she offered spiritual guidance; they continued to decorate their East Harlem apartment with mosaics. "The quality of my life definitely improved," Cummins said, "and that goes hand in hand with prolonging it." Even his oncologist enthusiastically welcomed Shaiova's pain treatment. "He's happy about it," Cummins said. "He's a great doctor, but he's just not trained in pain management...
...Gans, who never married, doesn't have anyone to help guide her. Though she likes her doctor as an oncologist, he is fairly brisk during their appointments, as HMO-era doctors must be. Even when she was first told she had a terminal illness, the doctor and staff gave little comfort. "They don't want you crying," Gans says. A nurse had two words for her: "Calm down." Eventually Gans found a support group, Gilda's Club, named for comedian Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer. When Gans arrived for the first meeting, she saw that it was called...
Just as the title doctor becomes part of a physician's name, so the role becomes part of his identity. Advanced esophageal cancer, diagnosed three years ago, forced oncologist Dan Frimmer to retire at age 58. The cancer doctor had become a cancer patient, but 25 years of medical practice prevented him from viewing himself as anything but a healer. "Of what value am I to people now?" he asked himself after his first round of chemotherapy and radiation, then answered his own question: "I could advise people from a different point of view--from the other side...
Researchers led by Louis Staudt, an oncologist at the National Cancer Institute, have been asking similar questions about lymphoma. In a paper published in the scientific journal Nature, they showed how lymphomas that look the same under the pathologist's microscope aren't necessarily identical. Staudt and his colleagues used DNA chips to see which genetic switches were being thrown in each of 40 different biopsy samples from lymphoma patients. By looking at specific genes involved in cell proliferation and immune-cell response, says Staudt, they determined that "two different kinds of tumors are hiding within the single diagnosis...