Medical researchers in general and
cancer researchers in particular, are not particularly
well-known for swallowing their pride. Regardless of the summary
failure in all fields of cancer research – cancer, in essence,
being demonstrably “un-researchable” – they hang on to a future
promise, when one day, all will be hunky dory. A few
headlines will suffice:
- Physics not biology may be key to beating
cancer [New Scientist 11/01/2013]: Cancer research swallows billions of
dollars a year, but the life expectancy for someone diagnosed with cancer
that has spread to other parts of the body has changed little over several
decades. Therapy is often a haphazard rearguard action against the
inevitable. And the search for a general cure remains as elusive as ever.
Recognising this depressing impasse, the US National Cancer Institute
(NCI) took a bold step in 2008 by deciding that the field might benefit
from the input of mathematicians and physical scientists, whose methods
and insights differ markedly from those of cancer biologists. First,
though, we need to get away from the notion of a cure, and think of
controlling or managing cancer. Like ageing, cancer is not so much a
disease as a process. And just as the effects of ageing can be mitigated
without a full understanding of the process, the same could be true of
cancer. Many accounts misleadingly describe cancer as rogue cells
running amok. In fact, once cancer is triggered, it is usually very
deterministic in its behaviour. Primary tumours are rarely the cause of
death. It is when cancer spreads around the body and colonises other
organs that the patient's prospects deteriorate sharply.
- Are we
losing war on Cancer? [Times of India 04/11/2012]:Most Americans thought a cure for cancer would be
discovered within five years — emulating the technological
success of landing a man on the Moon. But more than 40
years later, few experts talk of a single cure for the 200
known types of cancer. Douglas Hanahan, director of the
Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in
Lausanne. We are winning some battles in the war, but most
of the time we are losing them, essentially because cancer
is a disease of extraordinary complexity, he told the
meeting. THE INDEPENDENT
- Cancer
definition must be tightened: Scientists, New York Times,
July 30, 2013. “We need a
21st-century definition of cancer instead of 19th century
one,” said Dr. Otis W. Brawley, chief medical officer for
American Cancer Society. So, until scientists arrive at some
consensus-definition of cancer, we all have to accept for
the 19th and the 20th centuries cancer scientists had been
and have been, barking up the wrong tree.
- Doctors in US
prescribe radiation therapy for profits[Times of India, August
20 2013] : Doctors who have a financial
interest in radiation treatment centres are more likely to
prescribe such treatments for patients with prostate cancer,
Congressional investigators say in a new report. The
investigators, from the Government Accountability Office,
said that Medicare beneficiaries were often unaware that
their doctors stood to profit from the use of radiation
therapy. Alternative treatments may be equally effective and
are less expensive for Medicare and for beneficiaries, the
report said.
- Cancer, cancer Everywhere but
…[Bhavan’s Journal, November 15, 2013]: B.M.
Hegde, quoting reports from JAMA, revealed that “many of the
lesions detected during breast, prostate, thyroid, lung and
other cancers should not be called cancer at all, but should
be reclassified as ‘indolent lesions of epithelial origin’.”
Hegde further quoted Harold Varmus, the Nobel prize winning
director of the National Cancer Institute: “We are still
having trouble convincing people that the things that get
found as a consequence of mammography and PSA testing and
other screening devices are not always malignancies in the
classical sense (that they) will kill you.” The lesions
hitherto declared malignant have turned out, in retrospect
to be benign and the well-intentioned treatments have been
devastatingly malignant.