"The Politics of Cancer Revisited," by internationally renowned authority on cancer causes and preventions, Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., backed by meticulous documentation, charges that the cancer establishment remains myopically fixated on damage control--diagnosis and treatment, and basic genetic research with, not always benign, indifference to cancer prevention research and failure of outreach to Congress, regulatory agencies, and the public with scientific information on unwitting exposures to a wide range of avoidable causes of cancer. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the American Cancer Society (ACS) are also accused of pervasive conflicts of interest, particularly with the cancer drug industry.
Written by a highly regarded historian of science, this meticulouly researched, eminently fair, and very provocative book attempts to answer the question: Why, given all the time and money spent on cancer research, can't we get consistent answers to the most fundamental questions about prevention and treatment?
"Finally, Cancer-Gate tells you, the reader, how to fight back by arming yourself with the information you need to protect your family from everyday carcinogens, and how to become an activist in the war against cancer."--Jacket.
When Eric Wendel was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 1966, the survival rate was 10 percent. Today, it is 90 percent. Even as politicians call for a "Cancer Moonshot," this accomplishment remains a pinnacle in cancer research. The author’s daughter, then a medical student at Georgetown Medical School, told her father about this amazing success story. Tim Wendel soon discovered that many of the doctors at the forefront of this effort cared for his brother at Roswell Park in Buffalo, New York. Wendel went in search of this extraordinary group, interviewing Lucius Sinks, James Holland, Donald Pinkel, and others in the field. If there were a Mount Rushmore for cancer research, they would be on it. Despite being ostracized by their medical peers, these doctors developed modern-day chemotherapy practices and invented the blood centrifuge machine, helping thousands of children live longer lives. Part family memoir and part medical narrative, Cancer Crossings explores how the Wendel family found the courage to move ahead with their lives. They learned to sail on Lake Ontario, cruising across miles of open water together, even as the campaign against cancer changed their lives forever.
This timely volume responds to the epic impacts of cancer as a global phenomenon. Through the fine-grained lens of ethnography, the contributors present new thinking on how social, economic, race, gender and other structural inequalities intersect, compound and complicate health inequalities. Cancer experiences and impacts are explored across eleven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Senegal, the United Kingdom and the United States. The volume engages with specific cancers from the point of primary prevention, to screening, diagnosis, treatment (or its absence), and end-of-life care. Cancer and the Politics of Care traverses new theoretical terrain through explicitly critiquing cancer interventions, their limitations and success, the politics that drive them, and their embeddedness in local cultures and value systems. It extends prior work on cancer, by incorporating the perspectives of patients and their families, ‘at risk’ groups and communities, health professionals, cancer advocates and educators, and patient navigators. The volume advances cross-cultural understandings of care, resisting simple dichotomies between caregiving and receiving, and reveals the fraught ethics of care that must be negotiated in resource-poor settings and stratified health systems. Its diversity and innovation ensures its wide utility among those working in and studying medical anthropology, social anthropology and other fields at the intersections of social science, medicine and health equity.
The commercialization of the breast cancer movement is challenged in this analysis of how breast cancer has been transformed from a stigmatized disease and individual tragedy to a market-driven industry of survivorship.
An unprecedented constellation of experts—leading cancer doctors, policymakers, cutting-edge researchers, national advocates, and more—explore the legacy and the shortcomings from the fifty-year war on cancer and look ahead to the future. The longest war in the modern era, longer than the Cold War, has been the war on cancer. Cancer is a complex, evasive enemy, and there was no quick victory in the fight against it. But the battle has been a monumental test of medical and scientific research and fundraising acumen, as well as a moral and ethical challenge to the entire system of medicine. In A New Deal for Cancer, some of today’s leading thinkers, activists, and medical visionaries describe the many successes in the long war and the ways in which our deeper failings as a society have held us back from a more complete success. Together they present an unrivaled and nearly complete map of the battlefield across dimensions of science, government, equity, business, the patient provider experience, and more, documenting our emerging understanding of cancer’s many unique dimensions and offering bold new plans to enable the American health care system to deliver progress and hope to all patients.
Focused on Botswana's only dedicated oncology ward, Improvising Medicine renders the experiences of patients, their relatives, and clinical staff during a cancer epidemic.
A study of the development and rejection of vitamin C as a treatment for cancer, this text also explores the evaluation process of such a contentious treatment. Based on social, economic and financial considerations, it sees these decisions as political rather than objective assessments.
