Re: Cancer, What is the Problem?

I agree about the ACS and most other cancer charities, along with most public universities, marching lock-step with big pharma and the FDA.

There is an experienced, published, gynocologic oncologist investigator, practicing at one of the nation's premier cancer centers. He tells a patient that she has to be treated with taxol/carboplatin, that treatment with carboplatin only would be "a death sentence." And that if taxol/carboplatin doesn't work, she'll be crossed over to taxotere, a drug which is mostly if not completely cross resistant with taxol, for which his institution will collect several thousand dollars from the manufacturer of the drug, if and when she is treated with this drug. All, because the protocol IS the "gold standard," without even looking at the results of individualized testing.

It's time to set aside empiric "one-size-fits-all" treatment in favor of recognizing that many forms of cancer represent heterogenous diseases, where the tumors of different patients have different responses to chemotherapy. It requires individualized treatment based on testing the individual properties of each patient's cancer. Tweet