How does cancer epidemiology differ from cancer medicine?
Epidemiology in this context refers to cancer research. Cancer epidemiologists don’t treat cancer patients (as oncologists do), we study the associations of potential exposures with the risk of developing cancer, or the probability of dying from a particular cancer. Where oncologists work with a single patient, we study these possible effects in populations. Sometimes it’s 100 people, sometimes it’s hundreds of thousands of people. Ultimately, cancer epidemiology is just another application of epidemiologic research principals to a particular disease. Cardiovascular epidemiologists, nutritional epidemiologists, and enivronmental epidemiologists generally use the same basic principals in order to research the likelihood of developing particular diseases as they pertain to certain exposures. If you would like a decent book on the topic, see “Cancer Epidemiology” by Hans Olav-Adami. Quite a decent text. For an excellent introduction to epidemiology, see “Epidemiology” by Leon Gordis, or t
