What they won't tell you...

"Being Mortal" (Atul Gawanda) is an excellent book.

But you might live a long time after treatment. Not so for an aggressive cancer.

I'd tolerate some discomfort for a 50% chance of surviving. I could soon forget the pain but enjoy being alive.

A 1% chance would be different.

I bought this one last summer >:-}...

...Jim Thompson

It's pretty hard, Depending upon the type oc cancer, You get near leathal doses of cancer drugs. Some people don't even survive that.

Cheers

Pain? Pain is tolerable. Nausea, loss of appetite leaves you with pondering "existing" versus "living"... I'm now down to 135#.

John McCain... yep, they killed him... I could see it in his face the first day he resurfaced.

Me, I may well survive... each day a little less side effects... but it's a nasty trip. ...Jim Thompson

A big part of the equation is advanced age. McCain is 81, recovery is slow to none at that age, so whatever damage the cancer treatment has done to es sential tissue is very slow to heal, degrading his health in the process. H e's at the point where medical intervention for even minor ailments is bord erline ineffective.

Are you drinking the liquid meal replacements like Ensure Plus? If you drink it ice cold, it's like water.

Sadly, much of present day cancer treatment involves trying to kill the cancer faster than the treatment kills the patient.

Sylvia.

Ensure also has a product line with HMB added, Ensure Enlive. HMB has been shown to help cancer patients maintain body mass, prevent wasting.

It's painful, rather than sad. The therapies are brutal, but some of them w ork often enough to be worth the discomfort. Not every cancer specialist ha s enough sense to say that a particular treatment hasn't got enough prospec t of success to be worth the discomfort, and the greedy ones are influenced by the fact that they get paid even if the patient dies.

The treatment is more debilitating than disease.

It seems to be taking a long time to get to treatments that attack only the cancer, and leave the rest of the body alone.

Sylvia.

Clinicians are sequencing the cancers (but the cancer genome isn't uniform and is evolving fairly rapidly) and their patients healthy cells, and there are some schemes to get the patient's killer T-cells trained up to attack the cancer rather than the patient's healthy cells, but they do seem to be expensive.

Medicine is now about where electronics was 100 years ago. Amazing stuff will happen in the next hundred years.

Twaddle. Electronics is essentially a branch of physics, and medicine hangs off biology - higher organisms are spectacularly more complicated than anything electronic we build so it's a moronic comparison.

says that there are 86 billion neurones in the human brain.

This is just a clueless statement that is disrepectful to the state of the art in medical treatment and the progress being made.

Medical treatment deserves a lot more disrespect than it gets. It's a lot closer to mindless empiricism than it ought to be.

Maybe in the USA, I don't know. There, it also is related a lot to commercial exploitation, I hear.

Sloman's not in America.

the

lot closer to mindless empiricism than it ought to be.

not altogether in reality either. But he's to a fair extent right on this o ne. It's often not based on evidence because the evidence is so often too b ent to be useful, and doctors are well aware that a research result does no t mean reality. So it often falls back on what they found worked before and what other doctors do. Unfortunately a good bit of it is much worse than t hat too. The level and degree of reality of evidence varies a lot by topic.

NT