Scanning – Tumors and G+

Scanning – Tumors and G+

So I’m at work catching up on scanning some slides of human squamous cell carcinoma tumors, SCC61. Actually they are xeongrafts in mice legs. The hematoxylin and eosin stains (http://goo.gl/Sq9Eq) make it easy to identify cancer (the purple part, the pink part is muscle). While I’m scanning each slide, I was also catching up on G+. I click on a post from Buddhini Samarasinghe that she warns is long but worth the read (http://goo.gl/tiZtc). It’s an interview with Dr. Otis Brawley about his book, “How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America”.

He works at Grady hospital in Atlanta, is currently chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, and graduated from the University of Chicago. Grady sounds like Cook County hospital in Chicago (think ER TV show, now called Stroger), you wouldn’t want to go there but a lot of cops do because they are very experienced in GSW-trauma. Chicago is still the #1 segregated city (http://goo.gl/Vyio8). …the abstract, scholarly term “health disparities” acquires a very real smell of a rotting breast.

Here is the problem: Poor Americans consume too little healthcare, especially preventive healthcare. Other Americans-often rich Americans-consume too much healthcare, often unwisely, and sometimes to their detriment. The American healthcare system combines famine with gluttony.

I don’t want to quote the whole article but I ♥ the Wayne Gretzky quote, “You miss every shot you don’t take”.

There’s so much of the article that resonated with me. I do cancer research. I work in an urban hospital where I see firsthand, the disparities he speaks of. I know breast cancer survivors and our group does breast cancer research. Previous post on breast MRI. http://goo.gl/VSrU4 He’s taken heat about PSA testing but it is something we talk about at work quite often and agree with him.

Anyway, enough babbling. Read the post from Buddhini Samarasinghe

#ScienceEveryday #CancerResearch