Losing weight is hard — success might signal that something else is wrong. As anyone who has been through medical training will tell you, some little scenes just stick with you. I had been seeing a patient in our resident clinic in West Philly for a couple of years. She was in her mid-60s with diabetes and hypertension and a distant smoking history. She was overweight, and had been trying to improve her diet and lose weight since I started seeing her without much luck. One day she came in and was delighted to report she had finally started shedding some pounds – about 15 in the last two months. I enthusiastically told my preceptor that my careful dietary counseling had finally done the job. She looked through the chart for a moment and said… yeah… is she up to date on her cancer screening? A workup revealed adenocarcinoma of the lung. She did well, actually, but the story… you know… stuck with me. Click here to subscribe: null Get more medical news analysis at https://www.methodsman.com/ or https://www.medscape.com/ #weightloss #cancer #epidemiology