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If you saw news coverage of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. meeting this week with key senators on Capitol Hill, you witnessed something of a modern miracle.
No, not a Republican having friendly conversations with Democrats. The real miracle is Roberts meeting with Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the pivotal Judiciary Committee that must vote on his nomination.
Specter is bald now from treatment for Stage IV Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymph symptom. Stage IV is the most advanced kind,Men's Big Pony Collection, meaning it has spread to another organ. Yet there sits Specter, on the job and on the ball.
One reason: Death rates from Hodgkin's disease have dropped 60 percent in the past 30 years, according to the Mayo Clinic. Doctors have said whether or not Specter, 75, ultimately is cured, he should be OK for several more years thanks to chemotherapy, steroids and his overall fitness when he was diagnosed in February (he played squash daily).
This week, like every week, brings such telling tableaux in the fight against cancer, along with news of more treatment advances. Not all of them make headlines and perhaps that is the best news -- we're so used to incremental gains that sometimes they go by unnoticed.
Among wins this week:
-- Researchers in England have unraveled a cancer-causing protein that could lead to treatments for liver cancer. The work by scientists at the University of Nottingham shows that the protein, gankyrin, interferes with the natural process by which cells normally die before they become cancerous.
-- Most women with a history of benign breast lumps need not worry they are at increased risk for developing breast cancer. That finding comes from a Mayo Clinic study reported in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.
Some benign lumps do carry such a risk,Women Nike Free 3.0, however, and in that case treatment with tamoxifen might make sense, the study said. Because more than 1 million U.S. women a year have benign lumps, this distinction ought to be widely reassuring.
-- A type of testicular cancer responds just as well to one day of chemotherapy as three weeks of radiation treatment, a new study found.
One dose of the drug carboplatin also is less toxic than the three-week radiation regimen for stage 1 seminoma, according to the study in this week's British journal The Lancet. Seminomas are one of two main types of cancer of the testes.
The image of testicular-cancer survivor Lance Armstrong surging toward his seventh straight, career-capping Tour de France win comes to mind.
-- Scientists have figured out why humble yeast cells -- the kind that cause bread to rise -- can survive an onslaught of chemotherapy. If they can locate a similar mechanism in human cells and activate it, that could lessen the toxic effects of chemotherapy on non-cancerous cells, according to cancer researchers in the United Kingdom.
Not all was sweetness and light on the consumer-health beat this week, of course. Consider the damning study that found too many U.S. hospitals still cannot get the basics right.
In up to 30 percent of cases,Women's, hospitals blew life-saving calls such as giving aspirin to heart-attack patients -- something we thought everyone who watched TV ads already knew.
The information came from two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The Washington Post quoted Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health, the leader of one of the studies, as saying the uneven care shows "you can't use any simple metric to say if they do well in one area, they do well across the board. Hospitals vary. They do well in one way but not necessarily in others."
More information is at hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.
Ending the way we began, on a positive note back at the Supreme Court. It was widely speculated that William H. Rehnquist, the chief justice, would call it a career when the court's term ended this summer. The media camped out on his doorstep, certain that an 80-year-old battling thyroid cancer would have the common sense to get the heck out of the way.
"I'm not about to announce my retirement," Rehnquist announced last Thursday, tired of being hounded. Politics and policy aside, this 50-something correspondent found that downright invigorating.
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