Lymphoma

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More from Siddhartha Mukherjee

More from Siddhartha Mukherjee's magnificent biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies:

The overwhelming burden of mass market cancer books

Mass market cancer memoirs and similar books are rarely blessed with good titles. In fact they are almost uniformly asinine. Searching the word 'cancer' at Amazon, I got 48,000 hits. I searched the first 600 for the standouts.

Keep in mind:
- No sacred cows here, dumb is dumb.
- Ridiculing the title should not be taken as ridiculing the book.
- They say don't judge a book by its cover but if that's all I'm judging, we should be fine.

Reading PET scans at 70 mph

As though there weren't enough ways to be wrong, doctors reading medical images now have a new way to fuck up the quality of your health care: Mobile MIM, the first iPhone app FDA-approved for "viewing images [such as CT, PET and MRI scans] and making medical diagnoses."

Mukherjee's majestic cancer prose

A beautiful and sickening, utterly convincing and heartbreaking passage from Siddhartha Mukherjee's magnificent biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies:

Unfriending your physician

Are you Facebook friends with your doctor?

If you are, you are in the minority. Results from a recent survey of a few hundred French doctors who have profiles on Facebook revealed that most are reticent about having you as a friend and in fact, 85% of them would automatically deny a friend request from a patient.

Cancer of the Breast Implant?

Ten years ago, I made a decision to follow up my mastectomies with silicone breast implants. I was making my decision “back in the day” when insurance companies would pay for several opinions and more than one consultation. I remember meeting with my plastic surgeon THREE times regarding my implant choice. I went with silicone - bad choice. They had to be removed in less than a year when I began to develop many strange symptoms (one of which was hair loss). After two years of wearing prostheses, I re-integrated breast implants into my body and life with a pair of saline implants.

"Floxed" Again

My poor mom! She has a cold. She has Lymphoma. And if that isn’t enough, her doctors “floxed” her.

A week ago, she was running a low-grade fever, so I placed a weekend call to her oncologist. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he immediately prescribed her Avelox, without ever seeing her, without determining whether she had a bacterial infection. This is on top of 2 months of prescribed Prednisone, a corticosteroid drug that she was prescribed to help control the side effects from her cancer treatment.

2011 Resolution: Let cancer's harmful legacies fade away

I have an enormous extended family. It's so big, one of them could get sick and die and I wouldn't know about it until well after the fact.

Sure enough, one of my fifty-plus second cousins died of pancreatic cancer last week. He chose not to tell anyone outside his closest circle of friends, only gradually letting in the occasional family member he trusted as he neared the end. Such was his wish.

Cancer is personal, and each deals with it in his or her own way.

In the pipeline: Brentuximab vedotin (SGN-35)

Today's featured lymphoma treatment in the pipeline is the antibody drug conjugate brentuximab vedotin.

Major landmark tonight in the long fight against cancer and big tobacco

On January 1, 1971, at 11:59 PM, almost exactly 40 years ago to the minute, Phillip Morris USA ran an extremely brief ad on US television for its Virginia Slims cigarettes, showing little more than the famous slogan, You've Come A Long Way, Baby.

It was the last promotional TV spot for cigarettes ever to run on American television.