Fox News Viewers Report Peppered with Right-Wing Bias, and Other Links
Are Fox News viewers misinformed? John Lott says no.
2010 by the numbers: We ate less red meat. We ate fewer veggies. But drank more wine.
Breast cancer — the surgeon matters. “The variation by surgeon in treatments accounted for 15 percent to 35 percent of cancer occurring in the opposite breast in the next five years and 13 percent to 30 percent of recurrences over 10 years.”
UK: Hospital competition works. The policy resulted in 3,354 life years saved.
I’m sure the surgeon matters. Don’t doubt it for a minute.
Sounds like the country went in the wrong direction on health last year.
It’s interesting that breast cancer reoccurrence is a function of the surgeon. It makes sense that the more skillful the surgeon, the better the likelihood of getting all the cancer.
Competition works. This is news?
The breast cancer press release sure reads like another agenda piece. The abstract of the breast cancer paper it summarizes says that the sample included women diagnosed between 1985 and 2000. Note that a paper in 2000 by Tartter et al. said that “Many patients treated with breast conservation undergo reexcision to obtain clear margins although the relationship between clear margins and local recurrence remains controversial.”
Here’s another quote from a 1999 paper by Anscher et al:
The optimal extent of breast surgery required for patients treated with conservation surgery and radiation therapy has not been established. To achieve breast preservation with good cosmesis, it is desirable to resect as little normal tissue as possible. However, it is critical that the resection does not leave behind a tumor burden that cannot be adequately managed by moderate doses of radiation. It is not known whether microscopically positive surgical margins are detrimental to patient outcome.
Since medicine couldn’t agree on the importance of tumor margins for the entire time of the sample, it seems rather silly to highlight variations by surgeon (in an effort to support centralized control of medical practice) rather than by medical practice based on the best existing information. Even siller is the advice to women to choose “providers” who do a high volume of procedures, margin or no margin.
Instead, why not simply say that it looks like those who argued that all of the tumor should be removed and then some seem to have been correct. So were those who increased medical costs by having patients go in for reexcision and those who valued getting the tumor out over cosmetic results.