Tell a Friend that March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month

It’s March 1, the first day of a busy Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month.

It’s time to celebrate our successes and then push even harder to end suffering and death from colon and rectal cancer.

For the tenth year, Congress has declared March to be Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, and we’ve come a long way in those ten years.  From a disease that everyone was too embarrassed to talk about, we’ve seen colonoscopies on TV, explanations of how screenings prevent colon cancer illustrated with mashed potatoes and peas, and Blue Stars of Hope popping up everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

The Food and Drug Adminstration is requiring that manufacturers of Reglan® (metoclopramide) to add a boxed warning to its label.  Long term or high dose use can lead to tardive dyskinesia, involuntary and repetitive movements of the body, even after the drug is discontinued.

FDA will also require the development of a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy, or REMS, that will provide a medication guide for patients to explain the risk. Read the rest of this entry »

Salmonella Outbreak Update

The Food and Drug Administration has a website where consumers can search for information on foods recalled because of potential Salmonella contamination.

You can search by brand name, UPC, product description (for example, crackers with peanut butter), or any combination of the three.

The FDA has traced the source of Salmonella Typhimurium outbreak to peanut butter and peanut paste manufactured by the Peanut Corporation of America in their plant in Blakely, Georgia.  The FDA recommends that consumers avoid all commercially-produced food made with peanut butter until more information is known about the extent of contamination.

Are men and women with severe cancer pain treated in the same way?

Although both sexes reported the same level of worst pain in a past week, men were more likely to have a prescription for high-potency pain medicine and receive higher doses of morphine.

Women being first evaluated at a cancer pain clinic reported more pain “right now” and higher average pain during the past week.  However, a review of their medical charts showed they were getting  less morphine and had higher average pain scores than men.  They were more likely to say that their pain was poorly controlled. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today President Bush vetoed H.R. 6331, the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act, which was approved by Congress last week.

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