Being diagnosed with cancer at any age is a terrifying thing, but for young people, a cancer diagnosis can mean falling into a unique treatment limbo. Young adults are often faced with receiving treatment among children in pediatric wards, or with elderly patients in more traditional oncology wards - and ...

I have to admit it. Even today, I find interpreting statistics for patients very difficult; not because I don't understand the concept of relative and absolute risks, hazard or odds ratios, or survival rates. It's because in the end, they do not apply at an individual level. Too often in ...

Federal health officials said there will be enough supply of a children’s leukemia drug released in the next couple of weeks to alleviate a shortage. The drug, methotrexate, is used to treat children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, a type of blood cancer. Hospitals across the country are running low on ...

As experts alter course on guidelines for cancer screenings such as mammograms and the prostate-specific antigen test, the general public is understandably confused. Women at age 40 wonder if they should have a mammogram to look for breast cancer or wait until 50, as one U.S. organization suggests. Men of ...

When Jenny Morrill, who has been battling ovarian cancer since 2007, went to the hospital for her scheduled chemotherapy treatment in June, the nurse greeted her with both good news and bad. “She said, ‘The good news is that you’re doing really well on this drug Doxil. The bad news ...

An essay by Peter Bach, M.D. Twenty years ago, I helped save a man’s life. I met him in the emergency room of the hospital, just a year after I finished medical school. His cardiac monitor, the first thing I noticed, showed fast and irregular beats with bursts of a ...