Quoted message said:In article <[email hidden]>,
tert in seattle said:Quoted message said:tert in seattle <[email hidden]> wrote:
> So far this story doesn't add up but I don't have all the details so
> I'll wait before saying more.
>
> The NCI treats people for free on clinical trials. She'll have to
> travel to and stay in Bethesda, MD though. Here's a link to Stage IV
> breast cancer trials.
>http://www.cancer.gov/search/ResultsClinicalTrials.aspx?protocolsearchid=
2400267That's the best thing I've seen yet. :-)
IME experimental/research treatments are having better outcomes than
current "traditional" treatments.That may be your experience but standard therapy is better than
experimental therapy overall. That's why it's standard.<cough>
Very, very untrue!
Standard therapy is what insurance companies will pay for.
I'd suggest you do some research as to why that is currently not a good
thing.
I work in cancer research so I believe if either of us needs to bring
himself up to speed on the topic it's you.
I know most people don't understand statistics so I'm just going to say,
IN GENERAL, and ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL, the odds of getting some benefit
from standard therapy are greater than the odds of going for experimental
therapy right off the bat. If standard therapy doesn't work, then go
experiment all you want. This approach comes from the fact that our
understanding of which therapies will work in which patients is still
pretty crude (but it's getting better).
That being said, if you are being treated on a research protocol, you
will likely be followed more diligently than if you were getting standard
therapy. That means if something goes wrong there's a better chance of
it being caught and properly diagnosed early. This has been studied ...
I don't have a cite handy but I can dig around. It's also more evidence
for the theory that we gain much more from early detection & prevention
of disease than from intensive therapy once it's in an advanced state.
If you're talking about alternative medicine, with diet, enemas, vitamins,
chinese herbs, acupuncture, visualization, auras, heat therapy, etc etc
etc, I don't know much about all that. I know that acupuncture is great
for some stuff but I don't know about cancer. In general alternative
medicine has not been taken seriously enough to go up against standard
surgery/chemo/radiation in double blind phase 3 clinical trials. I'm
guessing it's because the preclinical data are not there. In other words,
if it doesn't work in a petri dish or in mice, it's never going to find its
way into clinical trials. So we say it is not going to work better than
standard chemo or radiation or surgery even though we're not 100% sure.
Are there problems with this paradigm? Definitely. I do think
alternative therapies should be studied more aggressively and I
definitely think there should be a lot more serious consideration
given to the affect a person's mind has on the body, and to integrating
mind into the model of medicine far more than it is in Western medicine
today.
I truly wish there were natural, noninvasive ways to treat cancer -- I
know what chemo, radiation, and surgery do to people. But I'm also a
rational thinker and I understand science and statistics (I also understand
cultural bias and take that into account) and in the balance I have to
say that there's a reason why standard therapy for cancer is what it is,
and while there are holes in that reason, it's a better reason than, for
example, why 90% of computer desktops run Windows.