Our aggressive, expensive approach to cancer is doing more harm than good
- By John Horgan
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/