BACK of the BOOK
Heard in the Blogosphere
ASH
@ASH_hematology
Huge thank you to
@RepBillFoster
for visiting
#GenomeEditing16 to
better understand the
challenges in the field!
Alok Khorana, MD
@aakonc
May your p values turn >0.05 but only after
reviewer 2 asked you to adjust for multiple testing.
#AcademicCurses
Charles Ornstein
@CharlesOrnstein
New word: “anecdata” Definition: A number of anecdotes
when, taken together, are considered data.
Goran Matijasevic, PhD
@goranm
To turn Healthcare System into Learning System, it will take
patients to say “count me in” and share data.
We Won’t Cure Cancer
“Cancer isn’t space travel. The growing cancer epidemic is not a
problem that medical science is about to solve. In fact, it is a problem
we are about to make worse. The better we get at keeping people
alive, the older they will get, and the more cancer there will be in the
population. … [Our elected officials] should be mindful that, although
cancer research is producing astonishing science, many more lives can
be saved by doing the boring stuff, like getting people to stop smoking,
eat healthfully, exercise, and put on sunscreen. And they need to
prepare policies that deal with a future where more, not fewer, people
have cancer. It’s not as inspiring a task as promising the moon, but it
will do a lot more good.”
—Jarle Breivik, MD, PhD, EdD, professor of medicine at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of
Oslo, on the misguided Cancer Moonshot in The New York Times
Digitizing You and Me
“Right now, we do willy-nilly testing and we have profound waste:
very high false positive rates for mammograms and [prostate cancer]
tests and on and on. It’s part of one-size-fits-all medicine. We’re
going to develop a whole new body of medicine that is much more
intelligent. I consider precision medicine digitizing you and me: Getting
extraordinary, deep, rich data about each person so you can come up
with better prevention, screening, and treatment. … We have too many
treatments out there today that have marginal efficacy that are being
applied widely. We need to develop treatments that are far more likely
to succeed in a smaller swath of people.”
—Eric Topol, MD, from Scripps Translational Science Institute, on adopting new technology
for precision medicine in Stat News
Navneet Majhail, MD
@BldCancerDoc
#whenonservice strength of AM coffee is inversely
proportional to time taken to finish rounds.
Eve Crane, MD, PhD
@evemariecrane
When Stopping Cancer Treatment Isn’t Giving Up
New research showed that, during their last
month alive, three out of four cancer patients
younger than 65 received too-aggressive
treatment. A much smaller portion received
comfort-based hospice care instead. Caregivers
and palliative-care physicians discuss the
decision of when to stop aggressive cancer
treatment with NBC News.
“It was a whole new way of thinking to wrap our
minds around. No more ‘fight mode.’ We finally
felt like we were allowed to live. … I was able to
be his wife versus being the one pushing all the
meds. I was only given two more months with
him, but I would say they were some of the best
months I had with him.”
—Amanda Evans-Clark, a woman whose husband
died of colon cancer at the age of 31, after she and her
husband decided to stop treatment
Follow ASH and ASH Clinical News on:
@ASH_Hematology, @BloodJournal, and
@ASHClinicalNews
Facebook.com/AmericanSocietyofHematology
“There’s nearly nothing harder than being faced
with a patient who’s begging you not to give up
on them.”
—Monica Malec, MD, palliative-care specialist at the
University of Chicago
“There are hundreds, if not thousands, who
undergo too much therapy and too much suffering for every one person that we have who
ends up having a miracle. When you’re dealing
with young people, in their 40s, 50s, even 60s,
it’s just so difficult to accept that this person is
going to die.”
—Otis Brawley, MD, chief medical officer of the
American Cancer Society
@ASH_Hematology
ASHClinicalNews.org
ASH Clinical News
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