`No progress in cancer care? Really?
That’s the question I am struggling with following an interview I did with a radio network last week, and which will likely be released a couple of weeks from now. I was asked to respond to the premise offered by a book author who is a well-known professor at a major academic medical center, exclaiming that our treatment for cancer is based on “Slash, burn and poison” and that our cancer research efforts are currently substantially misdirected.
Instead, the professor says, we should admit that we have not made meaningful progress in treating cancer, and that our research is too directed to the end of the cancer cycle (namely a couple of months improvement in life expectancy for those with cancer) and in fact should be focused on the “first cell.”
It’s a refrain I have heard before, as early as my beginning engagement in treating patients with cancer in the 1970s. “Slash, burn and poison”—or similar words—were legion at that time. Surgery, radiation and chemotherapy were toxic, had substantial side effects, often ineffective and not offering much hope beyond a small number of cancers such as Hodgkin Disease which was showing excellent responses … Continue reading →