User talk:Lynn.Kelsey

WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:18, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Lymphoma
Hi Lynn,

There seems to be a bit of a debate about what to do with the Non-Hodgkin lymphoma article. NHL is 39 separate diseases, and the main thing that unites them is that back in the 1930s, they knew how to treat "Hodgkins" but not any of the other lymphomas -- so "Hodgkins" and "non-Hodgkins" were created as sort of euphemisms for "treatable lymphoma" and "untreatable lymphoma."

The patient support groups and media sources, which lag substantially behind the science, still use this term, but researchers, physicians, and major health agencies have basically abandoned it. (Wouldn't you rather your doctor figured out exactly which kind of lymphoma you had, instead of being told "Well, it's one of the thirty-nine, but we don't need to worry about the little fiddly details"?)

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that another editor has removed your recent expansion to the NHL page, but I think that some of the information might fit into the main Lymphoma page. Alternatively, if you strongly believe that the NHL page needs to be expanded, then you might like to look at Talk:Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and leave a message about why you think an article about an increasingly obsolete concept needs to be expanded. (I think that most, but not all, of the editors so far have preferred to send readers off to the main Lymphoma article as soon as possible, but WP:Consensus can change on Wikipedia.)  WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:18, 1 April 2010 (UTC)