Sunday, November 13, 2011
Theatre of War
“Cancer is, in truth, a variety of diseases. Viewing it as a single disease that will yield to a single approach is no more logical than viewing neuropsychiatric disease as a single entity that will respond to one strategy. It is unlikely that we will soon see a ‘magic bullet’ for the treatment of cancer. But it is just as unlikely that there will be a magic bullet of prevention or early detection that will knock out the full spectrum of cancers.”
Richard Klausner
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Do you think it would help if they came up with different terms for the diseases? I.E. instead of Prostate Cancer and Lung Cancer we called them (just making up something as I go) Prostate Degenerative Disease and Lung Fungus (I know these sound silly because I have no medical background, but the point is removing cancer from every type). They are very different I agree having my own mother die from a brain tumor really allows me to have insight on how different a brain tumor is (you loose memory, cognitive function, ability to use the bathroom) versus lung cancer (how my grandma died) which was painful, but she never lost her memory, ability to use certain things (like the bathroom) until really really close to the end. Sorry to be so morbid!
ReplyDeleteA pretty interesting point. I think they could do a better job of naming them, such as naming an organism, with a genus and species. Though, in trying to think of an example, that might also become too complicated as you would end up with 8 words to describe specifically what was happening to each person.
ReplyDeleteAs you pointed out, each different cancer affects people differently, but even each single cancer works differently in each person. So two women who have breast cancer have completely different pathological reports. Now, there are staging and grading systems that help describe all these, but like I said earlier, this gets very lengthy (For example, if you wanted to get really specific, you would have to say a woman had stage 3, grade 4, BRCA-1 +ive, BRCA-2 -ive, Estrogen +ive, and maybe a few other things I'm not thinking of right now, breast cancer; and a change in any one of those labels could mean a completely different course of treatment).
In conclusion, I don't think the names need changing, I think that more public education is needed on what all those different little labels I just threw out mean, so that people can read their biopsy report and better understand what it actually means for them.