In the last 24 hours the duty by the US medical writing corps has been particularly glum. News yesterday that Senator Ted Kennedy has brain cancer of a notably aggressive and ominous type sent medical and science writers to one of their most necessary tasks: explaining a disease when the disease is not the news – the person (or people) with it is. It’s pure explanatory journalism performed as a public service, and often as a sidebar to the primary stories being written by political, entertainment, or general asssignment reporters.
Expressions of support, with hearty declarations that Senator Kennedy is a fighter, get due play. But without any doctors offering much hope, medical writers must share with readers what such experts say about the prognosis of malignant glioma and the implications of it in the left parietal lobe. Doing so does not match the wrenching task of doctors who sit with patients and their families face to face to explain hard facts, but it does raise similar emotions and demands to be both honest and sensitive. Reporters do so for readers who may be driven to ponder the details. Thus one finds many stories with intricate passages on brain architecture, the types and subtypes of cells involved, forms of malignant glioma, pathways of drugs, and anatomical challenges facing surgical efforts.
Stories:
AP Lauran Neergaard writes flatly, in her first sentence, this is the worst kind of brain cancer ; Chicago Tribune Jeremy Manier writes the situation is “dire, not hopeless” and that’s true. The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote movingly during his fight against another sort of cancer that even when median survival times are dreadfully brief, there is almost always a distribution tail showing that, for some, life will continue for many years and with cures not unknown ; SF Chronicle Sabin Russell has a different slant with his first quote, in the 2d graf, “Cure is out of the question” and he provides extensive info on the tumor, brain cell types, and options ; Boston Globe runs in full a statement from Mass. General and the Senator’s own doctor, plus a story by Brian C. Mooney (prognosis variable at best, ominous at worst) and the graphic (hi res) above ; LA Times Thomas H. Maugh II drives declaratively into a plain-facts description of what it is, what it probably means ; Boston Herald Jessica Fargen provides, in essence, a detailed fact sheet ; NYTimes Lawrence K. Altman, Anahad O’Connor “bleak prognosis” ; ABC News Allyson T. Collins has the hed “…Very Bad News” and derives hints of the tumor’s speed from Kennedy’s recent left carotid surgery ; Bloomberg Avram Goldstein, John Lauerman ; Reuters Maggie Fox breaks malignant gliomas into subtypes, some bad and others worse ; Time Alice Park ; Newsweek Tina Peng moves the ball forward a bit, reporting (in a Q & A with a specialist) on the latest research and experimental therapies ;
USNews & World Report‘s health editor, cardiologist and former NIH director Bernadine Healy, has a unique perspective – her own long and so far successful, perhaps even victorious, battle against malignant glioma of the left parietal lobe. All malignant gliomas, she writes, are not created equal ;
Much more is out there.
Pic – Boston globe illus, hi res.
-CP
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