Cancer treatment / "Non"-evidenced based medicine / All or nothing?
IT'S ALL-OR-NOTHING
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for an individual patient, survival isn't a percentage
- to quote Nick Kurzon, a lymphoma survivor (click here for his whole story):
"… when I was diagnosed,… my odds of surviving… were also just over 90%...
Either I will survive or I won’t.
I won’t be 91% alive in 5 years: its all or nothing."
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as a result of this reality, antineoplastic therapy is conservative in application
- there are no placebo groups - new therapies are tried in comparison to conventional approaches
- new therapies are often first tried on patients where all else has failed
- the nature of the disease may be dramatically different at the point where the new drugs are added
- this approach could doom new treatments that could be effective if given earlier
- there may not be an opportunity to try something else (e.g., a patient with an acute leukemia may die within weeks if a remission is not induced)