Too often, people with incurable cancers pursue therapy beyond any hope of benefit — except, perhaps, to the pockets of Big Pharma.
From the PERSONAL HEALTH section of The New York Times
As the elderly man with an incurable cancer lay dying, he told his son he had only one regret. Rather than enjoying his last weeks of life with the people and places he loved, he had squandered them on drug treatments that consumed his days and made him miserable. .. Read more …
Our aggressive, expensive approach to cancer is doing more harm than good
From the Blogs at SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
I can’t quit dwelling on medicine’s flaws. I recently reviewed Mind Fixers by historian Anne Harrington and Medical Nihilism by philosopher Jacob Stegenga, which critique psychiatry and medicine as a whole, respectively. In this post I’ll discuss The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s history of cancer medicine.
In spite of its grim subject, Emperor became a bestseller when it was published in 2010 (as well as winning a Pulitzer Prize and inspiring a PBS series), and with good reason. Mukherjee is a gifted writer, and his status as an insider, a professor of oncology at Columbia, gives his book a compelling personal dimension. He keeps you riveted with stories about patients, including his own, desperate to be cured, and physicians, including himself, desperate to cure them. Read more …
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/cancer-medicine-is-failing-us/