In my practice, we typically encourage average-risk individuals to get a colonoscopy by age 40, but even sooner if anything suggests they may be at higher risk. This includes a family or personal history of colorectal cancer, a personal history of inflammatory bowel disease, and hereditary syndromes such as Lynch syndrome and familial adenomatous polyposis.
I was diagnosed in 2017 during a colonoscopy (age 35 at the time). It was stage IV by the time it was seen, in my case the disease was in the sigmoid colon. Even with the...
A discussion among physicians on how oncology is changing and will likely continue to evolve in the wake of the coronavirus. Testing, chemo, and other treatment steps currently considered to be standards of care will change, and things like telemedicine will change what options doctors have in working with patients.
I’ve got a set of scans and a follow up this week, so will see how Mayo Clinic has adapted their approach in response to this crisis.
This talk from Jonathan Lim gives a good overview of how the newest treatments for cancer work — radiation/chemo, targeted therapies, immunotherapy, and ecDNA.
I wrote about my experience with immunotherapy and how it’s different in The Infinity Machine a couple months ago, but this video gives a good animated visual example of how it works.
Tyler Cowen’s recent piece in Bloomberg makes the case that technology is helping, not hurting the cause of containing the pandemic. The openness of the web was certainly instrumental in forcing transparency on the part of the Chinese government.
Scientific information about the coronavirus has spread around the world remarkably quickly, mostly because of the internet. The virus has been identified, sequenced, and tracked online, and researchers around the world are working on possible fixes. The possibility that the failed ebola drug remdesivir may help protect against the virus is now well known and the drug is being deployed....
This one is part book review and part reflection on some personal experience, a chance to write about some science related to a harrowing past experience.
A couple of years ago I had a run in with genetics-gone-wrong, a life-altering encounter with cancer that would’ve gone much differently if I was older or had the run-in in the wrong decade. The short version of that story (which I still plan on writing more about one day on this blog) is that I made it through the gauntlet. A stage IV diagnosis, 6 months of chemotherapy, and 2 major surgeries, and...
Anki is an open source framework for creating your own flash cards. A neat system for helping your kids with classwork, or even just testing yourself on topics.
Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and...