Living, as we all are, in the shadow created by COVID-19, I am deeply concerned for the patients I treat in our community health center in Clarkston. My worries, however, are not solely for the reasons one might suspect. We are doing everything possible to protect our patients from the coronavirus, like seeing as many people as possible through telehealth services. This remote access, though, as beneficial as it may be in this pandemic, cannot adequately protect them from a disease like cancer.
Many of the patients I see come from high-risk population groups. As the National Cancer Institute has reported, members of non-White racial and ethnic groups are more likely to be underserved when it comes to healthcare and less likely to have access to the screenings that can detect cancer and enable early, more-effective treatment. They could be speaking about the people who walk through our doors every day. I speak six languages, but our clinic serves a patient population that speaks more than 30. We are doing what we can to make sure patients get the tests they need, but I know firsthand too many heartbreaking stories of people who are going to die younger than they should because of a tumor that went undetected.
And now the effects of the coronavirus are making a difficult situation worse. Across the country, the number of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and cervical cancer screenings have dropped significantly from what they were before this pandemic hit. Communities already more vulnerable to cancer mortality are now faced with additional hurdles to getting screened. Health officials are already predicting a rise in cancer mortality over the next 10 years due, in part, to this slowdown in screenings.
Credit: Dr. Gulshan Harjee
Credit: Dr. Gulshan Harjee
This moment in time heightens anticipation for additional tools to detect cancer. The science available to us to detect breast cancer, or colon cancer, or cervical cancer are exceptional and save lives, but it’s not enough. There are dozens of deadly cancers for which there are no available screenings.
I’m encouraged that medical technology may provide us with help in the not-too-distant future. Innovative companies like GRAIL and Thrive are engaged in clinical trials of tests that can detect many cancer types from a single blood draw. These tests have the potential to greatly improve our early detection capabilities and save countless lives (particularly for those with stomach, liver, and myriad other cancers that have no available early detection).
I want to be ready to put this multi-cancer blood test to work in our community health center once it becomes available, so I’m hoping that policymakers and other key stakeholders are ready to work expeditiously to make such an innovation widely accessible. State-of-the-art cancer detection must be a tool I can utilize for the hundreds of people of all races and ethnic backgrounds who walk through our door each year.
As a cancer survivor myself, I see my own past in the fear and anguish of those in my examination room who learn they have this life-threatening disease. I’m worried that COVID-19 and the necessary social distancing it has wrought will lead to more of these personal tragedies. I can only hope that our society is invested in developing and distributing potentially lifesaving solutions to address this threat.
Dr. Gulshan Harjee, M.D. is founder of the Clarkston Community Health Center, an internist, a civil surgeon, immigrant, and breast cancer survivor.
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