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Sunday, January 11, 2004The 2,000 people, the worried well, who come each year to Memorial Sloan-Kettering's cancer prevention center will learn that many cancers can, in fact, be prevented, and that it is up to them to have the appropriate medical tests and to live right. For their $2,000 fee, most of which is paid by health insurance, they may be steered to smoking cessation sessions, or watch a cooking demonstration and hear a talk by a nutritionist. They will learn the early signs and symptoms of cancer and they almost certainly will have a cancer screening test. Are those services worth all of that money? Probably not: But, some ask, how can an honest message be communicated to the public about what can be done? "I am concerned," said Dr. Donald Berry, a statistician at M. D. Anderson. "Most of what this is about is research. I think we're really early on in the cancer prevention area. Knowing what to do, knowing what the risk factors are and knowing when to intervene and how to intervene — we're not there yet." He and others worry that many people greatly exaggerate their cancer risk and have inflated expectations of what science can do to protect them. ....Dr. Otis Brawley, associate director for cancer control at the Winship Cancer Center at Emory University, shared Dr. Gallo's view. "To be politically correct as a cancer center you have to be interested in prevention," he said. The government expects it and so do patients, he added. "It is like a lot of things in medicine where we have implied success where actually there is very little." ..."The person in the street greatly exaggerates their risk of cancer," Dr. Berry said. One thing a cancer prevention center can do, he said, is let people know their real risk and the real effect of measures that many think will give them cancer, or protect them from it. "We can be letting them know that changing their lifestyle may change their risks, but not by much," Dr. Berry said. "We can be letting them know that while hormone therapy may increase the risk of breast cancer, it does not increase it much." But, Dr. Berry, we can't charge them $2,000 a head just to give them advice! posted by Sydney on 1/11/2004 01:10:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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