I came to know them as a perfect couple, as physician investigators, teachers, and lifetime partners. This clearly was a couple I had to get to know if I wanted to better communicate in my field of cancer screening and prevention.īy the end of the workshop, we initiated some of the most important collaborations of my career and simultaneously began one of my deepest friendships. In the following discussion period, the two of them criticized my talk and gave persuasive suggestions about risk communication based on their research. I noticed a quiet couple sitting near the back of the room. It is in the context of cancer statistics and risk communication that I first met Lisa about 25 years ago, when I spoke about the NCI approach to breast cancer risk at an NCI press office-sponsored workshop on communication of cancer research results to the public. She also served along with Steve on the Board and the Scientific Committee of the annual International Preventing Overdiagnosis meeting since its inception in 2013. She co-authored another important book on that topic entitled Overdiagnosis: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health. Lisa is also internationally known for advancing the related research area of disease overdiagnosis and its resulting overtreatment. They extended this concept with a fact sheet used by the National Cancer Institute to provide guidance on the benefits and harms of lung cancer screening with low-dose computed tomography (LDCT), based upon the National Lung Screening Trial. The couple pioneered the concept of the “drug box” to explicitly provide an easy assessment of the balance of benefits and harms of medications. In that context, they co-authored the seminal book Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics and also created a website of interactive risk charts to put cancer in context, which is still used by the National Institutes of Health ( ). Lisa and Steve virtually established health-related numeracy as a research discipline. Since 2011, they have been co-directors of the Center for Medicine in the Media at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. She and her husband, Steve Woloshin, have been international thought leaders in research on communication of medical information for the public, health professionals, the media, and policymakers. She was extraordinary in her rigor of thought, intellectual integrity, warm humanity, humor, and love of life. L isa, 55, was a bright beacon leading the way in the field of risk communication as well as evidence-based shared decision-making. Lisa Schwartz, professor of Medicine and of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School died on November 29 after a seven-year struggle with cancer-a terrible loss to all who knew her.
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