Fall Issue 2009

Chronic inflammation causes cancer. Find out how and what's being done about it. 

While cancer is often characterized as invasive, many tumors get their start with the help of a different kind of biological invader, one that slipped quietly into the body years earlier. 

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Fall Issue 2009

What is multidisciplinary care, and where can patients get it?

Clay Dale hadn’t heard anything about a treatment concept called multidisciplinary care. All he knew was that time mattered—his rectal tumor was classified as stage 2A and had already reached the outer wall of his colon. And he wanted as many specialists as possible to scrutinize his case.

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Fall Issue 2009

There's now something to take aim at in triple-negative breast cancer. 

"I’ve basically lived my entire life knowing I was going to get cancer," says Nancy Truesdale, a 42-year-old teacher from Key Largo, Florida. “It was just a matter of when.” Having lost her mother to ovarian cancer and her grandmother to breast cancer, Truesdale knew her cancer risk was high. So she wasn’t surprised when, in July of last year, a routine breast exam revealed a lump in her right breast.  

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Fall Supplement 2009

In 1985, cancer survivor Fitzhugh Mullan, MD, published an article about his own cancer experience called “Seasons of Survival: Reflections of a Physician with Cancer” in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Mullan identified what he called the “seasons” of cancer survivorship: acute survivorship, which involves diagnosis and initial treatment; extended survivorship, a time of watchful waiting with celebration, uncertainty, and transition; and permanent survivorship, the season of gradual confidence that there would be a future free of cancer.

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