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A Mandate for Physician Activism in the War Against Tobacco
Margaret M. Barnes, MD
Arch Fam Med. 1997;6(3):215-217.
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MY WAKE-UP CALL TO ACTIVISM
As a radiation oncologist I have stood on the sidelines of a modern-day holocaust—the systematic elimination of more than 425 000 citizens of this country each year by an insidious evil—tobacco. During my residency in the early 1980s, I stood by and marveled at the varied pathological features that one smokingrelated cancer (ie, lung cancer) could cause: ataxia, aphasia, hemiplegia, and disintegration of the personality associated with brain metastases; swollen heads, bloated facies, and cyanotic lips of patients with superior vena cava syndrome or Cushing syndrome (from paraneoplastic corticotropin production) or, conversely, the profound fatigue of Addison disease induced by adrenal metastases; fatigue, starvation, nausea, and depression brought on by hypercalcemia from bone metastases; cachexia; syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone; the terror brought on by hemoptysis, air starvation, cardiopulmonary failure, and cor pulmonale as primary and metastatic chest tumors wrapped around, insinuated between, and bored
. . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]
Author Affiliations
Philadelphia, Pa
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