Opinion: I’ve seen the rise in colon cancer cases. As doctors, we must take young people more seriously.

It was movie night on a Friday in the summer of 2020 when my phone rang.I had been watching “Black Panther” with my son when one of my friends called to see if I had heard the news about actor Chadwick Boseman. With a sense of foreboding, I asked what he meant.After a pregnant pause, he responded: “Mark, he died.”And the reason my friend was calling me — a gastrointestinal oncologist — was that the cause of death was colon cancer.I stared in disbelief at the s