Wednesday, July 31, 2013

HEALTH - New Medical Definition for 'Cancer' ?

"Doctors Propose New Cancer Definition to Avoid Unnecessary Treatments" PBS Newshour 7/30/2013

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  Now we turn to changes in how we think about cancer and how we choose to treat it.  It comes from a panel of doctors advising the National Cancer Institute.

In a paper in "The Journal of the American Medical Association," the doctors recommended changing the very definition of what's often seen as the earliest signs of cancer.  For example, a diagnosis of noninvasive abnormal cells in the breast would be renamed so that the words cancer or carcinoma are not part of the description.  The idea is to avoid unnecessary treatment.

The recommendations were published on the same day another medical panel recommended annual CAT scans for people at higher risk of developing lung cancer.

For more on these findings, we turn to Dr. Barnett Kramer of the National Cancer Institute and Dr. Larry Norton of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

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