Is breast cancer becoming more survivable? Let's talk screening.

Is breast cancer becoming more survivable?

A surgeon removes the melanoma. The margins are clean. The scan is clear. And then you sit across from the patient and you both know the part nobody says out loud, which is that the tumor on the pathology slide was never the thing that was going to kill them. The recurrence is. For years the onl

Replying to @Brandi Colvin - Smith There is money to be made when people are sick. There is also money to be made when people are healthy. What's the balance?

Nobody talks about a leukemia that makes your white blood cell count go down instead of up. Hairy cell leukemia starts in your B cells, the part of your immune system that builds antibodies, basically the factory that prints the wanted posters for germs. Except this factory gets a stuck order, kee

Why haven't we cured cancer?

Your doctor can prescribe the exact drug that saves your life and you still might not get it for six weeks. Follow me, because almost nobody explains this part. Here's the wall. Insurance requires prior authorization, which is basically a permission slip from a company that saves money every single

Whats your secret to dealing with scammers?

Your immune system already found your cancer. It walked up to it, then turned around and left. Follow me, because the reason is stranger than the cancer itself. Your T cell is a security guard, and every guard has an off switch on its chest called PD-1. It's there so your immune system never attack

We built a therapy to hunt cancer cells, and then somebody pointed it at lupus. CAR-T is basically a wanted poster for your immune system, you pull out a patient's own T cells, teach them exactly what to hunt, and put them back in. In cancer the target is the tumor. In lupus the target is the B cel

I get asked this in clinic almost every week now. "Is my weight loss shot going to give me cancer?" The fear is reasonable. There is a thyroid cancer warning printed on the box. It came from rodent studies where GLP-1 drugs caused thyroid C cell tumors. Rodents are not people, and human data

She was 42. No family history. No lump. No reason to think about breast cancer yet. That was the problem. She thought she had eight more years before it was her concern. For almost fifteen years, the guidance told women like her to wait until 50. Then in 2024 the US Preventive Services Task F

A patient told me she stopped her laxative because of two kiwis before bed. I nodded politely and assumed placebo. Then I actually read the trials. The constipation data is better than I expected. In 2023, the American Journal of Gastroenterology published a multicenter randomized crossover tria

A patient comes in exhausted. Bruising for no reason. Catching every infection that passes through the house. The blood counts come back and everything is low at once. Red cells, white cells, platelets. All of it. That is aplastic anemia. Your bone marrow is the factory that builds your blood

He had one bad bleed. A single trip to the OR to stop it, and he walked out thinking the hard part was over. A month later he could not climb his own stairs without stopping halfway. His labs told the story his energy already had. His iron was on the floor. Here is what almost no one explains

She finished chemo and thought the hardest part was behind her. Then her oncologist told her that her bones were thinning and her strength had dropped, and she asked me the question I hear constantly. What kind of exercise actually helps. Here is what most patients are never told. Not all

Your body has a repair crew that most people never think about until something goes wrong. Platelets are tiny cells that rush to the site of any injury and plug the leak before you even notice it. A paper cut, a bruise from bumping into a table, a scrape. They show up, stick together, and stop t

Most people believe a little sunshine keeps their vitamin D where it should be. It usually doesn't. Here is what actually has to line up. UVB light has to hit bare skin at the right angle, which basically means midday sun. Glass blocks it, so sitting by a sunny window does nothing. Sunscreen blo

One of my patients trained for a marathon for a year. She did everything right. Then she started feeling exhausted halfway through her long runs, dizzy on the stairs, wiped out for days after a race. Her doctor ran labs. Her iron was on the floor. Here is what almost no runner knows. Every ti

Honey for your memory sounds like something your grandmother would say. Turns out there's actually a trial behind it. Back in 2011, researchers in Malaysia took 102 postmenopausal women and split them into three groups. One group got Tualang honey every day. One got hormone therapy. One got noth