I can go to the Treasury Department’s website and find out with certainty what the national debt is to the penny, today. I can go to any ATM, withdraw money from my own account, and get an immediate balance. And with a few touches on an iPhone, I can identify my exact location anywhere in the States, search for restaurants within a half-mile radius, have a meal, and submit my review of the restaurant afterwards. All of this is enabled through information technology and it has played a dramatic role in changing our society.

Unfortunately, our current healthcare system…

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“Personalized Medicine” is a 21st century approach to diagnosing and treating diseases using technologies like genomic sequencing to understand the nature of diseases at a molecular level. The concept that is increasingly making its way as a patient-centric approach into clinical research and care, and, over the next few years will increasingly become more included in the public dialogue. In fact, Rep. Patrick Kennedy introduced HR 5440 – the Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act of 2010 last week to help bring this approach to the forefront of health care.

Historically, medicine has based diagnosis on symptoms…

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As LIVESTRONG president, Doug Ulman, mentioned in his most recent blog for the Washington Post, it is more important to get healthcare reform right than to get it done fast. But to do this, it is just as important to understand the different policies in each bill and to have your voices heard.

But part of the challenge with understanding healthcare reform is the enormity of the bills and the policies they will enact. The bills can be upwards of 1000 pages. It is no small feat to go through the bills and understand their impact. During…

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The stimulus bill allocated $1.1 billion towards comparative effectiveness research, or CER, to improve national strategies in health care.

Last week, a forum was held in DC by the Friends of Cancer Research to discuss CER as a component of the health care reform discussions. The meeting was held in tandem with the release of the report “Improving Medical Decisions Through Comparative Effectiveness Research: Cancer as a Case Study.” This report was developed by a number of experts and organizations, including the Lance Armstrong Foundation, as an outline for CER development policies to improve individual and population health. The…

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Our bodies are well adapted to protecting us against foreign microbes like bacteria and viruses. Our immune system is designed to recognize a foreign molecule, like a protein from a virus, and create antibodies against these proteins to attack and destroy the virus. However, in the case of cancer, the invading cells come from our own bodies. So our immune system doesn’t recognize the cells as different from healthy, normal cells and, therefore, does not attack the cells. But in the growing field of cancer immunotherapy scientists are trying to devise ways to “trick” the immune system into recognizing…

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