Author: Suzanne B. Robotti

Suzanne B. Robotti

Suzanne is the President and Founder of MedShadow, and the Executive Director of DES Action USA.  MedShadow’s mission is to preserve quality of life by ensuring everyone has access to the risks, benefits and alternates to using drugs to manage healthcare. Read More

Billboards, TV ads and Internet pop-ups are increasingly promoting lung cancer screenings. Despite the touted benefits, should you go and have one done? Should you get screened for lung cancer? It certainly seems like it. Billboards, TV ads and pop-ups have increasingly appeared on my computer screen telling me that it could save my life. At the risk of bringing down the wrath of the arbitrary cancer gods, it won’t save my life. I’m a never-smoker. While I was raised in an envelope of secondhand smoke (every relative near and far smoked), I’ve lived as an adult in a smoke-free…

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My father’s grandfather, Francis Colgate Benson, was a pioneer in the treatment of cancer with radiation. He became a surgeon before the turn of the (last) century. By the end of WWI he became fascinated with the new field of radiology and worked on curing cancer with radiation. He died before America entered WWII. There is no way of knowing for sure, but family lore — and logic — has it that he died from the long-term effects of radiation exposure. As did Marie Curie, it’s believed. The pioneers of radiation didn’t realize the power they were working with and…

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Studies Link Regular Use of Aspirin to Macular Degeneration Two observational studies link regular use (three months) of aspirin to macular degeneration even if that use was TEN YEARS ago. Reported on NYTimes Well Blog, “Aspirin Use Tied to Rare Eye Disorder,” 12/18/2012. “It may be like smoking and cancer, where some people who have stopped years and years ago then get cancer,” Dr. Klein said. “It may seem out of the blue, but there’s something about latent exposure that carries forward.” A correlation such as this does not definitively prove causation. I can’t tell from the article how much aspirin…

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