Here’s what you need to know about PathologyOutlines.com this week:
1. USCAP 2023
Visit us next month at USCAP, Booth #112! We look forward to meeting you.
2. Mastodon Account / Social Media
Follow our PathologyOutlines.com account on Mastodon, a Twitter alternative, at med-mastodon.com/@pathout. The header on PathologyOutlines.com has icons for all of our social media accounts in the upper right corner, next to the Search box.
3. Curing Cancer Network: American Cancer Society – Updated Mission Statement
The American Cancer Society has updated its mission statement, which now reads as shown below:
“The mission of the American Cancer Society is to improve the lives of people with cancer and their families through advocacy, research, and patient support, to ensure everyone has an opportunity to prevent, detect, treat, and survive cancer.” See https://lnkd.in/gbKwWdS6.
The prior mission statement was “to save lives, celebrate lives, and lead the fight for a world without cancer.”
While I don’t know the details regarding the change, I am pleased with this new, more rational mission statement that reflects that cancer is an inherent part of our biology that cannot be vanquished. I had previously criticized the phrase “world without cancer”:
“The human body is composed of a myriad of interacting networks positioned at critical states, which is required for network flexibility to enable embryonic development, the inflammatory response to trauma and infection and the capability for our species to evolve to a changing environment. However, the tradeoff for maintaining these critical states is that cancer, a type of catastrophic systemic failure, is inevitable. We can reduce its incidence, we can detect it earlier and we can treat it more effectively but attaining a “world without cancer” (American Cancer Society, accessed 13Nov20) is not possible.”