taylorswift I am heartbroken to hear that your mom has to face a battle with cancer. Like millions of others, I adore your mom, and I want to wish her well in beating the disease. My own mom has an inoperable aortic aneurysm and is not expected to live more than a few months. For me, a victory would be keeping her alive for a year. Even though your mom will probably have a much better outcome, I still understand the unbearable stress of seeing someone you love face such a challenge. I want to be in control and change the outcome, and sometimes life limits our power.
I have learned a lot about the medical system and biology over the last few years, and one of my biggest surprises is that the system we have today treats symptoms more than it treats diseases or their causes. The system also tries to create an illusion that doctors have all the knowledge about disease and that the only treatments worth considering are those the doctors allow as the "standard of care". This is a highly regulated system in which doctors are only allowed to talk about drugs offered by big drug companies and approved by the FDA. This means even if the doctor knows about an alternative therapy that is not approved, he more often than not cannot even talk to you about it. And the sadder truth is that more often than not the doctor does not even know about the alternative.
From patients' perspective, they are usually terrified by their disease, and they simply trust the doctor to do what is best for them. For a disease like cancer - where the track record of medicine over the last 20 years is very bad - I think that is not the path I would pursue if I had the disease. A person with the resources would be very well served by hiring medically-trained science advisors who could really spend significant numbers of hours reading the literature, studying trials under way, and considering alternative therapies for which there is no natural sponsor. Doing these activities in a comprehensive and competent way takes a significant amount of time, and the truth is doctors will never spend significant hours to look at the edges of the system. They do not have the time, and they do not have any license to think outside the box. I want to give you specific examples of these ideas so you can begin to form your own opinions.
Consider the idea of reading the literature. I recently read a study done in animals using a readily-available over-the-counter antioxidant, and amazingly the antioxidant stopped all metastasis of cancer for the diseases studied. You will find situations like this where the substance cannot be trademarked, is readily available, is low risk, and which has no natural sponsor in the commercial medical system. Lack of a natural sponsor means very little additional research gets done timely (because no one has financial incentives to research it in humans), and no drug company has any incentive to tell you about it or sell it. A science advisor can find such gems for you, whereas your doctor will never look for things like that. If you can find therapies that are low risk, but potentially high gain, you stack the odds in your favor. This complements your medical treatment. No one knows if that antioxidant works in humans or if it works in a specific type of cancer. But if the risk of the therapy is low, even a low probability of a dramatic positive outcome may make it a very smart risk to take.
Regarding trials under way, the one everyone is talking about is the Duke trial on a modified polio virus. Right now it is confined to the worst kind of brain cancer, but they may be opening it up to other types of cancers. Unlike other therapies, this one holds out the promise of really curing the cancers it treats. It's a radical therapy with amazing early results.
As you can probably tell I am very opinionated. I could go on and on for a long time on this subject, but probably this is not the place to do it. None of the above is a recommendation to try any specific therapy. Rather, the above is to help you understand how a technically-trained individual who works outside the official medical system can help the patient to see a much broader horizon and to make much more informed decisions on their treatment options. And most patients never realize that they do have this option, particularly at an early stage in the disease when they can better affect the outcome. The choice is between being silent and accepting of what the official system tells you, and being a little bit sassy and digging for a deeper truth. If any of your people want to contact me through Tumblr, I am happy to share references to the above. I pray that you are able to stay strong during the stress of your mom's treatment and recovery.
