colon screening a la fantastic voyage

Check Cap may provide an alternative to conventional colon screening techniques in the near future. An ingestible, disposable capsule that requires no laxative preparation, Check Cap takes low-energy xrays while traveling through the colon and is naturally passed with excreta. The device is currently under development in a joint venture with General Electric.

improving doctor-patient communication

It is of obvious importance for health-care providers to communicate well with patients and their family members. The ONCOTALK faculty at the University of Washington offer a series of teaching modules that are designed to help doctors do just that. Downloadable videos available.

Effectively conveying bad news to patients is particularly important in practicing cancer medicine. In the above video, faculty at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine teach residents how to do this through role playing exercises. The late Robert Buckman, MD, PhD, was instrumental in developing instruction about bad news delivery (see his SPIKE video), as well as about communication sensitivity in general (see a collection of Buckman videos on MD Anderson's Clinical Communication Skills page).

sniffing out cancer

Dogs have long been assumed to be sensitive to some human diseases. And as shown in this video, lung cancer seems particularly amenable to detection through the scent of subjects' breath. A recent article by Ehmann and associates in the European Respiratory Journal reported that family dogs, trained rather easily for such detection, achieved sensitivity and specificity rates in excess of 70 and 90 percent, respectively, in differentiating cancer versus non-cancer breath specimens. While the ability of dogs to do this may be remarkable, researchers stress that the major implication of these findings is that lung cancer patients carry distinctive markers in their breath (also see Gever.)    

what is colonoscopy?

The standard procedure for detecting colon cancer is colonoscopy, but much of the population has little understanding of what one is and what it involves. These questions and many more are effectively addressed through videos provided by numerous treatment centers and support organizations. Those displayed above were prepared by MD Anderson (see YouTube MD Anderson playlist for "colonoscopy" videos).

young adult colon cancer and Lynch Syndrome

 

Although colon cancer is known as a condition affecting post-50 year old people, it does occasionally occur among younger adults. The top video highlights Candace, a 41 year-old mother of five, whose early symptoms were dismissed by practitioners. The bottom news story addresses the primary genetic basis for early adult colon cancer, Lynch syndrome, as it affected one Ohio family. Also hear a recent interview with MD Anderson's Eduardo Vilar-Sanchez, MD, PhD, on the link between genes and colon cancer.

devices for locating online multimedia

In addition to conventional online search techniques, such as googling via key word or tag, there are other alternative strategies which can keep instructors, practitioners, and students abreast of emerging multimedia in an efficient manner. One excellent technique is to create a Google Alert, which e-mails news alerts on the query term(s) to subscribers on a regular basis. The video shown above was recently brought to attention by way of my alert for "colon cancer."

Another productive technique making for almost effortless search is to create an iGoogle page embedded with gadgets such as RSS feeds, which automatically relay the latest items added to the website. The above video was brought to my attention through the NCI Benchmarks feed on my iGoogle page for cancer multimedia.