Events

Why Oncology Needs More Common Sense and Less Cheerleading — A Case for a Centre for Sense in Oncology

Lecture Description

This talk will walk the audience through various hypes, spins, conflicts, and biases distorting the practice of oncology, and provide recommendations on how to control or correct these issues. The aim is to educate the audience on how to detect such issues in oncology, develop a sense of cautious optimism (not all is bad, but not all is wonderful either), and inspire all to work toward an objective, common sense-driven approach to cancer control — both locally and globally. Although the examples will be oncology examples, lecture participants from any discipline of medicine or from public health will find the talk useful or applicable. Discussions will involve regulatory standards, policy, trial designs, trial reporting practices, research waste, and media hype.

Speaker Bio

Bishal Gyawali, MD, PhD is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences, a scientist in the Division of Cancer Care and Epidemiology, and a clinical Fellow in the Department of Medical Oncology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He is also an affiliated faculty member at the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and previously served as a medical consultant for the not-for-profit Anticancer Fund in Belgium. He is on the editorial and advisory board for multiple medicine and oncology journals, and has authored or co-authored more than 70 peer-reviewed articles. His areas of academic interests include cancer policy, global oncology, evidence-based oncology, financial toxicities of cancer treatment, clinical trial methods, and supportive care. He is an advocate of "cancer groundshot" — a term he coined to imply that investment should be made on proven high-value interventions in cancer care that are easy to implement globally and are affordable.

Dr. Gyawali tweets at @oncology_bg.