Cancer surveillance

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Cancer not only ravages the lives of individual patients and their families but also attacks the society as a whole. According to Dr Lamon, primary care physicians must respond to the public's expectation for economical, quality health care by addressing the need for a specific effort to prevent cancer or minimize its morbidity. Surveillance, “a case-finding rather than population-screening approach,” affords them an effective tactical weapon to deploy against selected cancers in selected patients. In this article, the author defines the criteria on which the feasibility and success of this approach hinge.