Two medical researchers meet in the university lab. Jim is excited. John is interested.
Jim: “I’ve found the cure for cancer! All we need are some clinical studies proving it works and the Nobel Prize in Medicine is ours.”
John: “Hey! I’m pumped. … But wait a minute, how can we do a clinical study that tests a cancer cure?” Continue reading
It’s almost 20 years since I met my first disappearing patient. A nurse in her early 40s, let’s call her Kate. Kate was diagnosed with breast cancer. As a nurse, she had seen the results of treatments for breast cancer. She was terrified, and determined. She was not heading for surgery, nor chemotherapy, nor radiation.
But Kate worked in a hospital. She worked with the doctors who diagnosed her cancer, and she worked with the surgeon, who wanted to schedule her into surgery “as soon as possible”.
The first thing Kate did was slow down. Continue reading
There’s strange secret modern medicine. One we all know, but we don’t like to think about. Let me give you a clue…
How many medicines can you name that CURE a disease? Continue reading
There is a forbidden word in medicine. This word is gradually disappearing, actively shamed, banned to the ‘alternative’ fringes of medicine, and replaced by newfangled, more fashionable terms. It is also being replaced, in many cases, by its opposite.
The forbidden word? CURE.
The word ‘cure‘ is disappearing from medical references and medical textbooks. It is even being replaced, in many cases, with ‘incurable’. Continue reading
What if we found a cure for cancer? Would we know? Would we recognize it? What if someone cured their cancer. Could we tell? Would we believe them?
We don’t try to cure cancers. We don’t try to cure cancer patients.
All of today’s treatments for cancer are designed to ‘kill’ cancer cells, not to cure the cancer, not to cure the patient. When the rounds of a cancer therapy are finished, the questions on everyone’s minds are ‘did we kill them all?’ and ‘will they come back?’.
No-one calls this a cure. A patient might say “I’ve been cured”. But no doctor would dare to declare a cancer patient “cured”. We don’t count people who are ‘cured’ of their cancers.
We don’t know how to recognize a patient whose cancer has been cured. Continue reading
