Tuesday, August 30, 2011
COUNT ME OUT
I just finished reading The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It won the Pulitzer Prize last year.
I am amazed that I finished it. It is a great book.
From that experience, I came away with one abiding notion. In the field of cancer treatment in all of history, the most radical practices were maintained for years, decades, centuries, with the naive cooperation of patients who believed that what was being done for them would help them.
In actuality, almost all of it was experimental and often wrong. Even today, doctors will perform lethal procedures for the benefit of research and for a few short days, weeks or months of a miserable life.
Look at this. The author describes the conflict between the best treatment and the most radical new approaches.
Now it is hot chemo. What next?
Count me out.
First of all, I am a cancer survivor. A designation that I don't much like but there it is.
I was presented with several options for prostate cancer treatment. I took radiation.
It presented the least invasive procedure and it was meted out over a long period of time with lots of room for checking the results and making adjustments, if necessary. I could even stop it if I wanted.
I bought the services of an old lion of oncology who looked at my slides and ruminated about my options. He told me that if I was "surgery averse" I should never take that option unless it was life or death and, maybe, not even then.
Not only was it the most radical of all the approaches, it was frequently wrongly done and there was no path of return. Once your prostate or anything else is cut out, along with a lot of other useful stuff, there is no going back.
I think it is a scandal, what they are doing.
The politics of cancer within the medical fraternity is astoundingly self centered.
Yadda yadda yadda.
Count me out.
