Breakthrough or Wishful Thinking?

In a week when we're flooded with stories from a major research conference like the American Association for Cancer Research in San Francisco, it's a good time to review some rules-of-thumb when it comes to assessing medical reporting. The American Association of Clinical Oncology's web site has some helpful tips here to help you decide if what's being reported is really a breakthrough or more  wishful thinking. 

Olympic Marathoner

American marathoner Emily LeVan will be running in Sunday’s Women’s Olympic trials in Boston, one day before the 112^th  Boston marathon.  She’s a past woman’s winner of the Boston Marathon. The trials have special meaning. After she qualified for the trials she found out her 4 year old daughter, Maddie, has acute lymphoblastic leukemia. So the emergency room nurse, mother, marathoner and organic farmer almost dropped out of the trials. In the end she decided that would be the wrong message to send her daughter so she and Maddie have been training together, Maddie rides along in jogging stroller. Read more about her story here. 

Emilyl LeVan's web site is called TwoTrials.  

Read more about the Women's Olympic Trials in Boston here and an interview with Emily here.

Validating Colonoscopy Techniques

While a colonoscopy is a defined procedure, no two doctors performs a colonoscopy exactly the same. There's always a little bit of art to snaking the probe through the colon and analyzing the video of the visual tour. An effort is now being made to identify the best techniques.  Particulars of thousand of colonoscopies including  length of colon examined, number of polyps found and removed, and amount of time used to remove probe is being collected  and stored in a huge database.  Read more about the project here.