LOS ANGELES - October 3 - Brave New Films ran a full page ad in today's New York Times that features an open letter from 2,768 doctors calling on Senator John McCain to issue a full, public release of his medical records.  The ad is on page A7 of today's paper.

See the ad here: http://gobnf.org/i/trm/nyt_ad.pdf

The ad features the names of thousands of doctors and statements from Rachael A. Clark, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School, Ronald Bronow, M.D., former Chief of Dermatology at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Richard Sagebiel, M.D., former Director of The Melanoma Center at UCSF, and Robert Buxbaum, M.D., Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School.  "I feel it is critical that people understand how quickly and fatally melanoma can recur, sometimes with decades of remission preceding a rapid decline," Dr. Clark states in the advertisement.  Dr. Sagebiel is quoted arguing that McCain's restricted disclosure in May was "not enough to render a serious judgment on this incredibly important matter."

Earlier this week, CNN Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta discussed the May disclosure, telling The Huffington Post: "We were given three hours to go over 1,200 pages of records. That is a lot to go through. It was very sort of cloak and dagger and I'm sure they had their reasons. Given that I had my medical training, I was able to hone in on what it thought was important more quickly. But the pages weren't numbered, so I had no way of knowing what was missing... As a reporter I can only comment on what I saw but I can't say by any means that this was complete... As far as the secretiveness of it, what they said to us is that you can't take anything out of the room, but you could make notes. So it was a lot to go through in a short period of time."

John McCain has had four incidents of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.  In 2000, The Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale described the melanoma resected from McCain's left temple as a Stage IIA cancer.  However, the Armed Services Institute of Pathology reviewed the same slides and observed that there appeared to be two lesions, suggesting the occurrence of a satellite metastasis and a Stage IIIB cancer.  The 10-year survival rate for a Stage IIA melanoma is 64 percent.  For a Stage IIIB melanoma, the rate drops to 38 percent.