Philip Strax

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Philip Strax

Philip Strax (born January 1, 1909 in Brooklyn , † March 9, 1999 in Bethesda (Maryland) ) was an American medic. He was a pioneer in breast cancer screening with mammography .

Strax was the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe and studied medicine at New York University Medical School with a degree (MD) in 1931 and was then a resident doctor in Manhattan and radiologist, most recently at Park Avenue Radiology. He later lived in Hollywood (Florida) .

His preoccupation with breast cancer began after his first wife Bertha Goldberg Strax died of it in 1947 at the age of 39. In the early 1960s, he was instrumental in a study of 62,000 women between the ages of 40 and 64 in New York, which convincingly demonstrated that early screening (mammography and manual examination in half of the patients, no preventive medical examination in the other half) reduced breast cancer mortality rates significantly (by one third). The study was conducted from 1963 to 1966 on behalf of the Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of Greater New York. Before the end of the study, he founded two clinics for the early detection of breast cancer in New York, one of which was the Guttman Institute (taken over by Sloan-Kettering in 1996), and the first mobile examination unit in New York City. He also founded a screening clinic in Fort Lauderdale , Florida (Strax Institute). In some cases, he received little or no payment for the investigation. In addition to the x-ray examination, he attached importance to manual examinations and training of patients for self-examination.

In 1988 he received the Kettering Prize with Sam Shapiro .

Fonts

  • Early Detection: Breast Cancer is Curable, Harper Collins 1974
  • Make Sure You Do Not Have Breast Cancer, St. Martin's Press 1991

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Sam Shapiro, Philip Strax, Louis Venet: Evaluation of Periodic Breast Cancer Screening With Mammography: Methodology and Early Observations , Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Volume 195, 1966, No. 9, pp. 731-738