During my 30-year career in health care, I've worked with hundreds of community oncology practices. Most oncologists I've worked with have, for quite some time, intuitively understood that social determinants of health (SDOH) can significantly impact patient outcomes.
When they decided to launch a weekly breast cancer chat on Twitter, all breast cancer survivors and advocates Alicia Staley and Jody Schoger had was a hashtag and a dream.1
In the election this week, voters said Yes to measures to legalize recreational cannabis (marijuana) in Arizona (60%), New Jersey (67%), and Montana (57%). Measures to legalize medical cannabis passed in Mississippi (68%) and South Dakota (54%). Patients with advanced cancer battle debilitating symptoms of pain, nausea, and anxiety, among others. Many patients have grown fearful of taking opioids despite experiencing severe cancer-related pain, because of the ongoing opioid epidemic.
November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month, a time to turn our attention to an issue that already warrants our focus year-round.
In March 2020, as the scope of the coronavirus pandemic became evident, the effects of a public health crisis rippled throughout every industry and facet of daily life.
Researchers from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai was recently awarded a U54 grant ($3.9 million over the first two years as a part of a five-year research proposal) to establish a NCI/SeroNet Center for Serological Excellence at Mount Sinai with a focus on lung cancer.
One of the more complex tasks that I performed in my medical oncology practice was enrolling patients on a clinical trial.
Back in the 1960s, the American Cancer Society first began promoting the Pap smear as an effective means of cervical cancer screening. A decade later, early detection of breast cancer through mammography became mainstream.
Oncology practices face difficult challenges while delivering care in the middle of COVID-19, as they care for patients who are at higher risk for this potentially deadly disease. While there is still much to learn about how COVID-19 impacts various patient populations, early studies of COVID-19 patients with a history of cancer provide some insight.
“It's the prices, stupid,” Uwe E. Reinhardt and authors famously wrote in their 2003 article describing the cause of high health care spending in the United States.1 Since then, multiple large analyses have confirmed that the prices of labor and goods, including pharmaceuticals and administrative costs, more so than differences in utilization, are the primary drivers of high health care spending.2,3
