GRACE: enjoy it

Linda's Team, May 28, 2013.  Photo Joe Mortimer

 

These are the hardy souls who stayed to sample my BarBQ

 

 

I am trying to wrap my brain around a new source of cancer information.  I was alerted to it by Dr. Rivkin, who seem likely to absorb much of my spare time  for many months  to come!  (I am emphatically not complaining.)  Anyway, the thing I am writing about is a web site called GRACE: Global Resource for Advancing Cancer Education.  You can get at it by directing your computer to www.cancerGRACE.org.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t cover ovarian cancer – yet.  I suspect that adding ovarian to GRACE  is what we are about. How I am going to help is beyond me, but I will try.  You should take the time to look at GRACE.  It will give you a renewed sense of how complicated cancer treatment is, and how hard society is trying to make it work.

 

The thrust of GRACE seems to be the providing of information to cancer patients.  I suspect, however, that it could do at least as much good if it somehow force-fed first line docs (”primary care physicians”) with news from the research world.  They are busy with sick people all day long, day after day;  it is thus perhaps understandable that they don’t read  all the medical journals on the shelf.  Heck, all I did was teach (and do a little research), and even so I found I had trouble finding time to read so much as the ABSTRACTS of the articles I should have read.  But I know that news of new cancer treatments diffuse slowly.  For instance, it was shown long ago that a drug – Proscar – reduces prostate cancer incidence by 25% - but it still is rarely prescribed. 

 

Anyway:  give GRACE a look.  It beats watching Mariners baseball.