C. Confalonieri

TL;DR: The quality of the diagnostic and therapeutic process of 1262 newly diagnosed breast cancer patients was evaluated in 63 Italian general hospitals over the period March 1983 - April 1984 and most of the patients discovered their own lesion, which was a nodule in 83 % of the cases.

TL;DR: Although there was broad agreement about recommended treatment protocols, staging by standard methods was recorded in only 44% of patients, assessment and reporting of side-effects was considered in only 49% of all treated patients, follow-up data were available for only 54% of living patients, and the dropout rate from chemotherapy protocols was 35%.

TL;DR: The findings support the use of double blind methodology whenever possible when assessing subjective endpoints and encourage further studies aimed at defining the clinical relevance of a wish bias in medicine.

TL;DR: The quality of diagnostic and therapeutic care was examined in a series of 380 consecutive newly diagnosed cases of primary lung cancer seen in 20 Italian general hospitals between January and June 1987, showing a lack of progress in the treatment of lung cancer over the last decades seems to have resulted in widely varying practice patterns.

TL;DR: The discussion focussed on the limits of organizational measures and efforts to determine widespread improvement in care for a disease such as lung cancer for which real therapeutic gains are still hard to achieve.