There is a “reasonable” article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle on the general application of active surveillance in the management of cancer (not just prostate cancer but other cancers too).
The journalist makes the common mistake of communicating the idea that active surveillance and watchful waiting are the same thing — which of course they aren’t. On the other hand, the article is otherwise “fair” and it is good to see more information about active surveillance as a method to manage many types of cancer appearing in the lay media.
Filed under: Diagnosis, Living with Prostate Cancer, Management, Risk
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It’s totally baffling that a journalist who’s devoted more than an hour or so to background research on active surveillance could confuse it with watchful waiting. Hopefully she’ll publish a correction.
Dear Richard:
I hate to tell you this but I am aware of plenty of urologists (let alone oncologists and radiation oncologists) who fail to distinguish accurately between active surveillance and watchful waiting. And this distinction is certainly not drawn out accurately on most web sites. I don’t think we should be so quick to blame a poor general journalist who may have simply been asked to write that story at a couple of hours notice.
I don’t know about the correction, but I did e-mail her, thank her for doing the story, and gently draw her attention to the distinction, while also providing her with an expert to consult with in San Francisco if she wanted to check out my corerection. Education of the general public (and the media) is a slow process.
Thank you, Mike. You know more about media habits than I do, but would a respected newspaper, such as the SF Chronicle, really give a journalist a couple of hours’ notice to write up such an important subject? That’s a sobering thought.
Gently draw her attention to the distinction? Hopefully your tact will work better than my email to her. …
Maybe this is the time and place to discuss expectant management?
Mike is absolutely correct on the misuse of the phrase watchful waiting in the medical community. We should also not jump to quick conclusions; reading the article (including the second page), it is obvious that the journalist did an extensive research on the subject and deserves better recognition than a statement that she spend an hour worth of research.
The article also points out that active surveillance may lead to a significant increase in stress, but I am not trying to judge whether or not this stress level is higher than the stress of a patient who was treated and is nervous about recurrence.
I am informed by the author, Victoria Colliver, that in fact this article on the SFGate web site is just one in a series of three articles, and that a second article deals very specifically with active surveillance for prostate cancer (and makes it very clear that this is not a passive management strategy).
She mentioned that to me as well. The problem is that the article mentioning the erroneous statement “… patients, choosing active surveillance — also known as watchful waiting” was published on August 15, after her August 14 article, which makes the distinction between AS and WW puzzling, to say the least.
Richard … Who knows … Journalists suffer from people called editors and copy-editors who often move peices of one’s carefully craafted story around and change words and sentences because they think they know better. It is also possible that they changed the order of the articles to fit available space. I gave up trying to understand some of it years ago.