Not even cancer patients require "as much work in terms of coordinating experts and resources, " said Jonathan Fine, a pulmonologist in Norwalk, Conn.

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Too often, "the abnormality on the screening test has become the disease, " says Peter Bach, a pulmonologist and epidemiologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

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Benzine saw his primary care physician, a nutritionist, a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, a gastroenterologist and a psychiatrist -- all of whom had to sign off.

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"It potentially could be a very serious issue, " says Andrew Shorr, a pulmonologist at Washington Hospital Center who consults for Pfizer, which makes rival drugs.

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She reached out to the wife of a college friend who is a pulmonologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who in turn referred Parles to Dr. John Wain, a surgeon there.

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Dr. David Palat, a pulmonologist who works on sleep disorders, told me that a technician had scanned the data I had generated that night nowadays, of course, sleep data are recorded by computer, rather than on a ream of paper and had analyzed the information so that it could be presented in a series of tables.

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