If you have followed this blog, you already know that my favorite pastime is to rant about prevention, especially, cancer prevention. Today’s post is not an exception: I have recently realized that being an oncologist in the U.S. is like being a soldier armed with a BB gun against an enemy with nuclear power (i.e., cancer).
Have you seen the PBS documentary “The Emperor of All Maladies”? I remember how in part III of the documentary, the young oncologist in West Virginia explained to a stage IV lung cancer patient, “Your disease is not curable, but it is treatable”. This is the truth; however, I cannot imagine myself saying these words to another human being (luckily, I do not have to, my mom re-channeled my intent of becoming a medical doctor into this of becoming a researcher). “Your disease is not curable, but it is treatable” is the euphemism of a death sentence.
The battlefield into which our oncologists are pushed is depressing, gruesome, and cruel. There are not too many success stories to cheer about. And this is so, because the oncologists and our health care system in general are too late in addressing the cancer problem. Addressing this problem should start PRIOR to diagnosis, not after diagnosis.
Oncologists should be mostly prevention specialists. They should evaluate the patient’s risk of cancer based upon thorough family, social, and occupational history, they should be able to screen for early signs of cancer, and advise on how to adopt a lifestyle that minimizes the risk of cancer. For the past years I have heard a range of estimates that prevention may eliminate from 1/3 to 2/3 of all cancer cases with what we already know.
Of course, we still need to work on perfecting the current treatments and discovering new ones. However, what is highly frustrating to me is how cheaper and effective approaches to cancer treatment have been neglected and not followed upon. To a great extent, the current predilection of developing expensive (and at the same time, ineffective and highly toxic) therapies is due to our aversion to embrace alternative leads to cancer treatment. For example, all so called “immunotherapies” today are pale and partial versions of a therapy started in the 1890s by William B Coley in the U.S. Did you know that FDA refused to grandfather this type of cancer treatment in the 1960s? Did you know that the American Cancer Society helped with this decision? How about the recent “revelations” that vitamin C might be really effective as an anti-cancer therapy, or the development of oncolytic viruses, some of which have been in use for decades but not is the U.S.?
The U.S. oncologists will continue feeling as if they are fighting nuclear powers with BB guns, if we do not:
A. stop spending most of the taxpayers' money on cure, start spending more money on implementing cancer prevention and developing early cancer detection tests,
B. give the knowledge of healthy lifestyle, including diet, to our young medical students (so that at least they do not offer sugar treats to their cancer patients in the future),
C. become more open-minded to alternative approaches of healing and allow research on these approaches.
Have you seen the PBS documentary “The Emperor of All Maladies”? I remember how in part III of the documentary, the young oncologist in West Virginia explained to a stage IV lung cancer patient, “Your disease is not curable, but it is treatable”. This is the truth; however, I cannot imagine myself saying these words to another human being (luckily, I do not have to, my mom re-channeled my intent of becoming a medical doctor into this of becoming a researcher). “Your disease is not curable, but it is treatable” is the euphemism of a death sentence.
The battlefield into which our oncologists are pushed is depressing, gruesome, and cruel. There are not too many success stories to cheer about. And this is so, because the oncologists and our health care system in general are too late in addressing the cancer problem. Addressing this problem should start PRIOR to diagnosis, not after diagnosis.
Oncologists should be mostly prevention specialists. They should evaluate the patient’s risk of cancer based upon thorough family, social, and occupational history, they should be able to screen for early signs of cancer, and advise on how to adopt a lifestyle that minimizes the risk of cancer. For the past years I have heard a range of estimates that prevention may eliminate from 1/3 to 2/3 of all cancer cases with what we already know.
Of course, we still need to work on perfecting the current treatments and discovering new ones. However, what is highly frustrating to me is how cheaper and effective approaches to cancer treatment have been neglected and not followed upon. To a great extent, the current predilection of developing expensive (and at the same time, ineffective and highly toxic) therapies is due to our aversion to embrace alternative leads to cancer treatment. For example, all so called “immunotherapies” today are pale and partial versions of a therapy started in the 1890s by William B Coley in the U.S. Did you know that FDA refused to grandfather this type of cancer treatment in the 1960s? Did you know that the American Cancer Society helped with this decision? How about the recent “revelations” that vitamin C might be really effective as an anti-cancer therapy, or the development of oncolytic viruses, some of which have been in use for decades but not is the U.S.?
The U.S. oncologists will continue feeling as if they are fighting nuclear powers with BB guns, if we do not:
A. stop spending most of the taxpayers' money on cure, start spending more money on implementing cancer prevention and developing early cancer detection tests,
B. give the knowledge of healthy lifestyle, including diet, to our young medical students (so that at least they do not offer sugar treats to their cancer patients in the future),
C. become more open-minded to alternative approaches of healing and allow research on these approaches.
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