Tag: George Beauregard

The Vocabulary of Survival

Feb 26, 2026

By GEORGE BEAUREGARD

From 2018 to 2022, I served as a physician executive in a large health system on Long Island. During that period, I became acquainted with the Provost and Executive VP of the New York Institute of Technology. One of the university’s divisions is the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYCOM), one of the largest osteopathic medical schools in the country. I saw an opportunity to provide medical students with a high-level introduction to “population health”—something not typically offered in medical school curricula and something they would certainly be dealing with in some shape or form upon completing their residencies and fellowships. With the support of the Provost and the medical school Dean, I designed an elective course for fourth-year students at NYCOM called ‘Population Health 101’, a four-week rotation through my Population Health Management division. The course was very popular amongst the students, and my staff enjoyed having students shadow them.

More recently, an opportunity arose for me to return to NYIT and present at a NYCOM’s ‘Clinical Practice Reflections’ session, a bi-monthly assembly where patients share their experiences with health care systems with students. The CPR is not an academic lecture. Its goal is to share the nuances of real patient experiences and their perspectives in their interactions with the health care system. In doing so, NYCOM hopes to highlight the importance of a caring, empathetic physician and aspects of health care delivery that are often overlooked.

After arriving, making my way to the lecture hall, and getting familiarized with how the technology worked, I watched the medical students filing in from the rear doors of the large auditorium.

Some were wearing the short white coats that serve as the indicator of their rank in the hierarchy of medicine. Many greeted their classmates with smiles and warm embraces, suggesting that they hadn’t seen each other for a while. They looked young, energetic, relaxed, and happy.

As someone who is some forty-plus years removed from his medical school days, I felt like I needed to make a connection with this audience at the start. So, my opening remarks were along the lines of the shared experience that is the first couple of years of medical school. Like mine was back in the mid-eighties, their lives are defined by volume. The volume of information. The volume of coffee. And the volume of sheer anxiety about whether they can completely memorize the entire Krebs cycle, the origin and insertion of every muscle in the human body, the Bundle of His, Purkinje Fibers, the Renin-Angiotensin System, the optic chiasm, the corpus callosum, the Loop of Henle, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Section members in the beautiful biological symphony that is the human body.

I pointed out that they were learning the vocabulary of medicine. And the vocabulary of survival. The how.

That opening seemed to resonate with the 600-plus students, as many of them were nodding their heads in a manner that suggested “Yep. This guy had to know this stuff, too.”

Shifting Sands Part 3

Jan 28, 2026

By GEORGE BEAUREGARD

Fifteen months ago, I wrote in The Health Care Blog about the “incoming tide” of early-onset cancer.

At that time, the global rise in the incidence of early-onset cancer in younger people that had occurred over three decades had been noticed and was being monitored by researchers, scientists, and other healthcare professionals. Articles on research discoveries in this topic sporadically appeared in top medical journals such as Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet.

From 2005 to 2011, some early warning articles surfaced in generalist publications in mainstream media outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Those stories were framed as tragic “one-offs” or medical mysteries. Following a landmark study published by the American Cancer Society (ACS) in 2017 (1), the narrative shifted from “anecdotal” to “epidemic”. In 2020, the death of actor Chadwick Boseman, who was diagnosed with colorectal cancer at the age of 43 catalyzed mainstream media reporting on the situation. Chadwick died one month before my son, Patrick, who was 32 years old. Patrick was featured in a WSJ article in January 2024.

Since then, other reputable national publications like Time magazine and The Economist, and major media news outlets have featured stories about the growing situation. Stories about it have even appeared in some popular supermarket tabloids.

Over the past year, articles about the potential causative roles of diets high in ultra-processed foods, obesity, environmental factors, sedentary lifestyle, and a gut bacterium’s genotoxin remnant mutagraph, so-called Colibactin, have appeared.

The recently released ACS report Cancer Statistics, 2026, presents a jarring “good news, bad news” dichotomy and has garnered wide attention. The good news: overall, five-year survival rates for people with cancer have increased from 50 percent to 70 percent since the mid-70s. A 40 percent increase. Certainly a cause for celebration. (Mary Lasker would be smiling.)

But a dark reality persists.

The Dartboard Toss and the Algorithm

Dec 16, 2025

By GEORGE BEAUREGARD

How A.I. could have personalized my 2005 cancer journey

I don’t think I’m in the minority of Baby Boomer physicians when it comes to my curiosity and ambivalence about the progressing application of A.I. in medicine. But that curiosity isn’t just prospective, it’s retrospective too. In 2005, I became an outlier who perhaps needed something other than the standard of care for a disease.

During the fall of 2005, I first saw a single drop of blood hit the toilet water while I was urinating in my bathroom. After hitting the water, the rose-colored bead slowly sank, twisting and contorting, dissipating like a puff of smoke. The evidence was fleeting—gone in seconds. If I were a spectator rather than the source, I might have admired its visual artistry. There was no associated pain.

A single thought ran through my mind: Did I just pee blood? I thought I had perhaps imagined it.

I was 49 years old and didn’t have what were considered risk factors for kidney or bladder cancer: smoking, obesity, advanced age, high blood pressure, or exposures to cadmium, trichloroethylene, or herbicides. But I was adopted and lacked any knowledge whatsoever about my family history. Did I have a grim genealogy? What was perhaps significant, however, was that both of my adoptive parents had developed different types of urogenital cancer. That led me to speculate that environmental factors related to materials in our house and/or the land it sat on or around it had perhaps played a role.

I tried to dismiss any concerns, but the adage “painless hematuria is cancer until proven otherwise” ran through my mind in chyron-like fashion.

The episodes continued and worsened, prompting an ultrasound, the report of which read: “…a soft tissue density is seen in the base of the bladder toward the right. While this could represent thrombus, I cannot rule out a primary mucosal lesion. The lesion measures approximately 4 X 5 cm in diameter.”

I consulted a urologist colleague, who performed a cystoscopy. His comment about what he saw: “As you know, you have a mass in your bladder. I got a very good view of it. It’s pretty angry-looking, so I suspect it’s not benign. I tried to remove as much as I could. It would’ve been pretty risky to scrape deeper and risk puncturing your bladder. I know I didn’t get all of it.” A TURBT soon followed. The pathology showed a high-grade urothelial carcinoma extensively invading the lamina propria and muscularis propria. There was multifocal lymphovascular invasion, so I probably had a more advanced subgroup than the localized SEER stage.

At that time, the relative five-year survival rate for stage II muscle-invasive bladder cancer was about 45 percent.

Overwhelmingly, bladder cancer is an age-related malignancy. So, there I was, 49 years old, with a cancer whose median age of incidence—septuagenarians— was much older than mine. A WTF moment.

One that started me thinking about how much time I had left.

So, I had cancer, but in some ways felt cautiously optimistic. I had access to Boston-based academic centers and specialist colleagues who were willing to see me quickly, and good insurance.

But getting the diagnosis was only the beginning. I saw three expert urologists, each of whom recommended a radical cystectomy, small bowel resection, and construction of an orthotopic ileal neobladder. Convergence. Certainty for me.

Between Hope and Grief: A Medical Memoir of Father, Son, and Family

Mar 19, 2025

By GEORGE BEAUREGARD

This piece is different from the typical “health-care industry” topics covered in this forum.

My Sunday morning routine usually involves getting a cup of coffee and downloading the most recent editions of magazines on my iPad.

The cover of the February 13 edition of Time magazine immediately caught my attention because the title read “OUR CANCER MYSTERY. WHY IT’S NOW STRIKING US SO YOUNG’’. Four people are on the cover: their names, cancer types, and age at diagnosis displayed. 18 to 40. I imagine that the majority of readers might describe their expressions as neutral and composed, their posture calm.

But I see what exists below the restrained surfaces. Something I am all too familiar with. Disbelief. Worry, Bewilderment. Uncertainty. Sadness.

Although overdue, a major news magazine had finally put it out there, front and center. A call to action.

On September 14, 2017, I was standing in a hospital room in Boston, when my previously healthy son, Patrick, then 29, received the shocking news that he probably had stage 4 colorectal cancer, which further tests confirmed. That grave diagnosis came with a bleak 14 percent relative 5-year survival rate. Like the cognitive simulation of Schrödinger’s cat, my beloved son’s life now lay in a sealed box, with a hammer hovering over a flask of toxin. Would it fall, smash the vial, and kill my son? I could only be an observer. I desperately wanted to be the one in the box instead of him.

Fatherhood and medicine are integral to my identity. Throughout the three years during which he received superb care at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston, I had to be his father first, offering emotional support with love and hope. The physician adviser part was a secondary role.

Despite his indomitable spirit, positivity and best efforts, Patrick took his last breath on September 6, 2020, in his childhood home, Although relieved that his suffering was over, I was caught in immense sorrow, not yet realizing that eventually acceptance would slowly weave itself through the grief, and I would gain a nuanced understanding of “before and after.’’

As I mentioned in my 12/6/2024 piece in this forum, I hadn’t thought very much about early-onset cancer during many of the years that I was in clinical practice and as a physician executive.( I had categorized my experience with bladder cancer at 49 as an anomaly.) But that has changed in the past few years, during which the rising incidence of cancer in younger adults has been, first, in the scientific and medical literature and then sporadically in the broad national news, especially since the summer of 2023. But millions of people still have no idea that this is happening.

Writing is how I express myself best, so in early 2020, I started writing to help myself navigate what was happening to Patrick. As the global phenomenon of early-onset cancers expanded, I felt compelled to tell my son’s inspirational story and raise awareness of early-onset cancer and the need to dramatically expand screening for it. Over three years, I wrote a book titled RESERVATIONS for NINE: A DOCTOR’S FAMILY CONFRONTS CANCER, published earlier this month and timed to CRC Awareness Month. A labor of love and grief, it’s a book about family, love, loss, science and spirituality. Craig Melvin, NBC’s TODAY Show co-anchor, graciously wrote the foreword. Three months after my son passed away, Craig lost his 43-year-old brother to the same disease.

Many books have been written about cancer. From a patient undergoing treatment, to a family member or other caregiver, to a doctor treating a patient, to a researcher looking to change the trajectory of those being diagnosed and treated. But this one is unique. Part memoir and tribute, interspersed with journal entries by my son and others in my family. Part medical saga, the book aims to educate the public about the dangerous global rise in early-onset cancers, and to help provide a roadmap by example of loved ones going through cancer battles, and a call to action to the medical community to get ahead of this crisis.

My son’s life shouldn’t be defined by cancer, but, rather, how he responded to it. Most inspirational was how he became a strong public advocate of screening and funding for cancer research.

I hope that readers of THCB can find the time to share the messages of this book with family, friends and colleagues.

Thank you, Matthew and THCB for providing this forum to present my story.

My website is https://www.georgebeauregard.com and you can buy the book there or on Amazon. My appearance on the Today show is here.

George Beauregard, DO is an Internal Medicine physician whose experience includes 20+ years of clinical practice as well as leading organizations strategic and clinical initiatives

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