Today was mostly centered on our Community and Preventive Medicine class, which means we covered important but often common sense information. Alcohol is bad. Smoking is bad. Exercise is good. Nutrition is important (though hard to pry out of a patient without eliciting a recall or sample bias).
TIL: Statistically, a given population is better served by an alcohol abuser developing a metastatic cancer than a benign one. It's a rather dark point, but because alcohol is one of the only high risk substances that, on average, does more damage to the people around the abuser than to the abuser his or herself, it's better that he or she develop and die from a more fatal disease than survive to put more people at risk.
An enormous Taiwanese research study showed that 15 minutes of modest exercise a day adds 3 years to a person's life expectancy.
The US Preventive Services Task Force is finalizing a new standard screening test (like colonoscopies and mammograms) for early detection of lung cancer in high risk individuals. As 85% of lung cancer is associated with cigarette smokers, this would be the chief group affected by this recommendation. The test itself would be a low dose CT scan which has been shown effective in finding early stage rumours. Lung cancers have a very poor prognosis, but are much easier to treat if caught early, so this could have a big impact.
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