Two surgeons recently scrubbed in for the same patient. Her story appeared in The New York Times – one of the first times a national audience has seen what this choice looks like in an operating room.

She had come in for a painful inguinal hernia. One of us, a general surgeon, repaired it. Then, at her request, the other, a gynecologic oncologist, removed her fallopian tubes.

The first procedure relieved pain she already had. The second was chosen by the patient to proactively reduce her roughly 1% lifetime risk of a cancer long known as "the silent killer." It took a few extra minutes. But the small time investment represents one of the most consequential shifts in our approach to eliminating ovarian cancer.

2 in 5 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer only after an ER visit

In July, researchers writing in BMJ Oncology reported that 2 in 5 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer only after symptoms become severe enough to require an emergency room visit.

The ratio is alarming because it means that the window for early diagnosis had already closed. Women diagnosed in the emergency room face a threefold lower odds of having early stage, potentially curable disease.

Many had felt unwell for months: bloating, abdominal pain, a constant need to urinate. The kind of vague, "ordinary" symptoms that women learn to dismiss month after month and year after year. The kind of symptoms that many doctors chalk up to chronic urinary tract infection or too much gluten. But for women ultimately diagnosed with ovarian cancer, these symptoms are the "calling cards" of a disease that has already spread to millions of tumors covering nearly every surface of the........

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