The oncologist
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Shortly before his death in 1995, Kenneth B. Schwartz, a cancer patient at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) founded The Kenneth B. Schwartz Center at MGH. ⋯ However, insensitive joking is offensive and distressing, and experience suggests a variable acceptance of humor by patients with life-threatening illnesses, making humor a high-risk strategy, and it can be a pejorative maker of an adversive power differential. The medical literature contains little on humor, and very little research has been conducted on this common aspect of human communication. Through an examination of physician and nurse experiences, the role of humor in medicine is reviewed.
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Review Comparative Study
The current situation: erlotinib (Tarceva) and gefitinib (Iressa) in non-small cell lung cancer.
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Cancer is a prevalent disease in our aging population; however, few oncologists are familiar with caring for oncogeriatric patients. Surgery is presently the treatment of choice for most solid tumors, but it is frequently delivered in a suboptimal way in this patient subsetting. Undertreatment is often justified with the concern of an unsustainable toxicity, while overtreatment can be related to the lack of knowledge in optimizing preoperative risk assessment. ⋯ A validated instrument such as the CGA allows a comparison of series, predicting short-term surgical outcomes more precisely, and offers appropriate information when consenting elderly patients. Preoperative Assessment of Cancer in the Elderly is a prospective international study conceived and launched to outline the fitness of elderly surgical patients with malignant tumors. This paper reports on preliminary results and analysis from the ongoing study.