The Best Breast Blogatorials

Drawn from the author's web site where he posts a monthly blogatorial, this breast cancer expert tackles the major controversies in multiple specialties that deal with prevention and early detection of breast cancer. Over the course of 5 years of writing these blogatorials, the author compiled the 47 best essays that stoke the fires of controversy. His recurring theme is, "Dogma is the enemy of good science."

With selections taken from the author's monthly blogatorial, these essays are a "gloves off" approach to major controversies in multiple specialties that deal with prevention and early detection of breast cancer. Exposing inconsistencies and illogical conclusions as a function of human bias is a common thread in the editorials, stoking the fires of controversy in radiology, screening epidemiology, research breast imaging, breast pathology, surgery, pharmacologic risk reduction, risk assessment and genetic predisposition testing. In short, the topics cover the broad spectrum of everything "up front" (no chemotherapy or radiation therapy).  Over the course of 5 years of writing these essays, the author has compiled 47 into a single volume that demonstrates, once again, "Dogma is the enemy of good science."

Alan B. Hollingsworth, MD is a physician and author, who has served for the past two decades as medical director of Mercy Breast Center, a screening and diagnostic facility at Mercy Hospital in Oklahoma City. He received his MD with Distinction from the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine in 1975 where he was elected First vice-president of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. He completed a residency in general surgery at the University of Oklahoma that included a one-year fellowship in surgical pathology at UCLA. He limited his practice to breast cancer surgery in the 1980s and was the founding medical director of Oklahoma's first multidisciplinary breast clinic at his alma mater where he was also named the First Holder of the G. Rainey Williams Chair in Surgical Breast Oncology. In 1993, he became one of the first physicians in the country to launch a formal risk assessment program, later adding genetic testing when it became available in 1996. Today, his practice is limited to risk assessment, genetic testing and multi-modality screening for high-risk patients. He serves on the Editorial Board of The Breast Journal as well as contributing his own editorials and invited responses to online and print journals. Paralleling his medical career, A. B. Hollingsworth is the author of several non-medical books, starting in 2001 with the publication of Flatbellies, a coming-of age story first released by a sports publisher then re-released in softcover by W. W. Norton and Company (New York/London). This best-selling story of a high school golf team striving to win the state championship was reviewed in USA Today and later voted as one of the "Top Ten Golf Books of All Time" by a panel of twelve East Coast sportswriters, published in the Washington Times. The sequel, University Boulevard, also published by Norton, took the boys to college where they encountered the turbulent years of Vietnam and campus unrest. Most recently, Killing Albert Berch was released by Pelican Publishing Company/Arcadia, a work of investigative journalism over the course of five years. In this true crime story, Dr. Hollingsworth solved the mysteries surrounding the 1923 murder of his 30-year-old grandfather, ostensibly for hiring an African American in an all-white town at the historical peak of Klan enthusiasm. He continues to work on both fiction and non-fiction projects.