Fire Both Barrels

For just the fourth time in the past 10 years, the National Cancer Institute last week called for an immediate change in the way doctors treat a particular type of cancer. The disease in question is cancer of the cervix, located at the opening of the uterus. Researchers at the institute recommended attacking moderately advanced cases with a combination of chemotherapy and radiation rather than the current standard of radiation alone. This new thinking is based on the results of five as-yet-unpublished studies of 1,900 women with cervical cancer, which show that simultaneous chemotherapy and radiation reduced the women's risk of...