Cancer and ageing

NICE has said no to Abiraterone. Don't rail at NICE. At least, not only at them. They follow rules and those rules restrict NICE's remit.

This month is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. (BCAM) Deep sigh. This is the annual high point of my cancer awareness scepticism, stimulated by breast cancer charities and their crappy business model that muddles awareness for health, with their brand recognition and market share. See legions of my previous posts….

Yesterday, the BBC news website presented a bowel cancer awareness story, originated by Cancer Research UK, entitled ‘Bowel cancer awareness stubbornly low’. Their tone was a tad patronising - the BBC’s, not CR-UK’s – using the phrase ‘stubbornly low’. ‘Stubborn’ as in ‘asses’, I suppose. Ah yes! The stupid British public.

As usual, I was listening to the Today programme, on Radio Four this morning and Catherine was on. Catherine Foot works at the King's Fund. James Naughtie was interviewing her and for the first time I can recall, there was a major cancer story that actually mentions older people with cancer.

Here’s a random Prostate Cancer Awareness Month fact.

Here’s a good way to test what a cancer charity is up to.

If you use numbers to make an argument, as advocates in prostate cancer do, it helps sometimes to look for the men the numbers represent. Older men are missing.

The National Cancer Survivorship Initiative is rumbling along, part of the Cancer Reform Strategy, the policy prism through which light from the Department of Health and the serried ranks of voluntary sector cancer charities shines on cancer care.

The initiative exists to improve life with and beyond cancer for all survivors. But are the complexities of survivorship approached equally, as they should be, for all men with prostate cancer?

I’m not sure, I’m really, really not sure that they are.

Ah yes! The sound of doctors whistling in the dark to keep their spirits up.

It is meant to be reassuring but ‘you’ll die with it, not of it’ must rank as one of the least useful phrases known to medical science. It is true, epidemiologically speaking, in medical science - but it is not useful in patient care. It’s the least useful phrase known in patient care.

It's trotted out to men diagnosed with prostate cancer.

A recently published paper contains what the medical authors claim is the first attempt at producing guidelines for hospital specialists on the medical management of older men with prostate cancer.