Medical students met their match

Excerpts from the Globe's blog on the Boston-area medical community.

Graduating medical students ripped open envelopes at noon Thursday that contained their futures. Known as "Match Day," it was the day 15,206 medical school seniors across the country learned where they will be going and what specialty they'll embark on once they get there.

At Harvard Medical School, in line with figures from recent years, 44 percent of its 180 graduates will be going into primary care, including family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology. A third of all students will be training in internal medicine. The next closest specialty was emergency medicine, where 8 percent of students are headed.

At Tufts University School of Medicine, primary care was the choice of 49 percent of graduating students, while 18 percent are going into surgical specialties. Five percent of the students will go into military residencies.

Massachusetts's two other medical schools, Boston University School of Medicine and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, did not have figures Thursday, but at UMass, primary care traditionally dominates the choices.
ELIZABETH COONEY

The United States faces a shortage of cancer specialists by the year 2020 as aging baby boomers become increasingly cancer-prone and medical schools can't train enough new oncologists to keep up with them, according to a national survey released this afternoon.

The report from the American Society of Clinical Oncology forecasts a 48 percent increase in need for cancer treatment by 2020, while the number of oncologists will rise by only 14 percent, leaving a need for 2,550 to 4,080 more cancer specialists nationwide.

"This is a problem for the whole cancer care delivery system and everyone who is involved with it," said Dr. Michael Goldstein of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who chaired the society's Workforce in Oncology Task Force. "The whole work force is going to be challenged 10 to 15 years from now."
SCOTT ALLEN

Dr. Paul Goss, director of breast cancer research at Massachusetts General Hospital, is leading a trial of the breast cancer drug Tykerb, which won federal approval last week for women with advanced cancer that can no longer be controlled by Herceptin.

Goss' study of 3,000 breast cancer patients who have recently undergone chemotherapy will explore whether Tykerb should also be given to millions of women who are in the early stages of cancer. Goss's TEACH trial (Tykerb Evaluation After Chemotherapy) will help the Food and Drug Administration -- and drugmaker GlaxoSmith Kline -- determine just how effective the drug is in women whose cancer has not spread to other parts of their bodies. Goss said Tykerb may be even more effective than Herceptin, which is credited with extending the life expectancy by more than 1.5 years for women who suffer HER-2 positive breast cancer. SCOTT ALLEN