Comparing apples and oranges in lung cancer

A few years ago, Japanese lung cancer researchers electrified us with results that a new drug combination, cisplatin irinotecan, worked better than the established regimen of cisplatin and etoposide.

The findings were not replicated in America, and a formal comparison of the results was just published this week.

This research is kind of boring in the sense that it will not change practice, but it offers a fascinating look inside the world of clinical research.

I hope you find this post very peccable

"Back formations" means taking a word, subtracting a suffix, and making a new word.

The one I thought of spontaneously was "sheveled" out of "disheveled," though there are many others.


I preserve below a large web list of these back formations.  Some are pretty funny.  Enjoy.

 

E-cigarettes

Nice article today in WSJ about e-cigarettes, the tobaccoless nicotine devices sold on the internet and at 7-11.

It's just a matter of time before a patient asks about them.

Here's what I think: if they were to take the propylene glycol out of the mixture, there would be less to talk about.  Evidently propylene glycol is safe to eat, but do we know if it's safe to breathe, in high amounts, over long periods of time?

Peyronie's disease breakthrough: Coenzyme Q-10?

Perhaps someone can explain the connection between Coenzyme Q-10 and why it should work in Peyronie's disease, but there seems to be some efficacy here, according to a study out this week.  Finally, medical progress we can all be happy about!

Hitch takes chemo

Shock: News photographer discovers medical records--at town dump!

This story was a little anxiety-provoking: a Boston Globe photographer was taking his trash to the dump, where he happened upon a stack of discarded medical records 20 feet by 20 feet large!

We should follow this story to check the HIPAA consequences.  They say there is no funding to enforce HIPAA--this should be a good litmus test.

Are you sure you know what your medical records disposal service does with your waste paper?

Update: can a machine review abstracts for clinical relevance?

Every day, Pubmed, the US Government-run collection of the world's medical literature, adds new publications to its database.  Practically speaking, this means about 5,000 abstracts a day, except Sunday.  So six days a week, 5,000 abstracts a day translates to 30,000 a week or about a million a year.

Robot prostate surgery has fewer postop complications

We haven't seen too many direct comparisons of robotic prostate surgery with traditional surgery. This week, we have a retrospective comparison from Belgium that suggests that postop complication rate and recovery time is better with the robot than with traditional radical prostatectomy.


I think patients are most concerned about long-term complication rates, and we have precious little information about that so far. 

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