By Alvaro Carrascal, MD, MPH

These days we hear a lot about health disparities, cancer disparities, health equity, etc. What is this all about? And why do these terms seem to be more discussed now?

MedlinePlus, the National Institutes of Health's website for patients, describes health disparities as "differences between groups of people. These differences can affect how frequently a disease affects a group, how many people get sick, or how often the disease causes death."

For the World Health Organization (WHO), health equity is "the absence of unfair and avoidable or remediable differences in health among population groups defined socially, economically, demographically or geographically."

Essentially, health equity is about everyone getting a fair shake when it comes to health and healthcare. More...

By Michele Szfranski, MS, RD, CSO, LDN

When I talk with people who have gained weight during their cancer treatment, they are often shocked. For people who lost considerable weight before their diagnosis and then felt better once their treatment started, weight gain can be a welcome change. But more often I speak with people who were at a healthy weight or overweight before treatment and did not realize that their treatment might cause some weight gain. More...