I have seen thousands of cancer patients through my 10 year career In Oncology. Only one patient that came into to see her prognosis had taken upon herself a completely natural path.. something called ... Three Feathers. ... to get rid of her breast cancer. She was extremely dedicated to the intense herbal diet and showed me the actual photographs of her Breast Cancer Tumor coming out of her breast! it was truly remarkable. but Big pHam has us by the balls.new reps with lunches Everyday! I cant keep up with all the new chemo drugs .... everyday theres something new and better in chemo Pharm..and the docs eat into it...I wish there were more reps coming arund with alternative approaches. I think the Oncology docs would listen. One ONC doc just started issuing mj cards.
I dream about the day a marijuana garden and lil dispensary would be onsite at the Cancer Center with classes on how to grow your own. That would be so awesome!
Well, the reality is that cancer is an extremely morphologically variable disease. It's to the point now where it's almost improper to simply label it "cancer" and walk away.
There is certainly usury going on in big pharma with regard to pricing structures for their various drugs--but the reason why you see MOST (not all, but most) new chemo drugs is that they are targeting a specific type of cancer cell. I realize that you, being in oncology, don't need to hear this--but I will say it for those who do.
When we're talking about cancer in the general case we're talking about one of your cells that has mutated in such a way so as to cause it to be highly proliferative. Typically the mutation occurs at one of several points in the DNA responsible for producing proteins which regulate cell growth, proliferation, and especially "checkpoints" for the cell growth process (where typically the fidelity of DNA replication necessary to create a daughter cell is checked prior to moving to the next stage of growth--think of this as a spot where your cell proofreads it's work before passing its DNA to a daughter cell).
The many different types of cancer arise from the following considerations:
1. Which cell type in the body was the one that originally mutated and became cancerous. Almost any cell can become cancerous, and we have many different cell types.
2. Where the mutation occured, and what precisely the new genetic code for the mutation is. Some mutations might totally cripple a cell regulation process, while others might only weaken them. There are many types of mutations that can occur and in different places--and of all these possibilities it's up in the air which DNA sequence the mutated portions will be replaced with. This makes a big difference in how the cancer cell acts and what types of treatments it will respond to.
3. What is the genetic makeup of the person? Maybe this person already had a weakend cell regulation DNA sequence relative to the rest of us. Indeed, some genetic mutations present from conception to birth (ie not of an exogenous nature) do cause cancers.
So when they make a new chemo drug these days, what they're typically doing is targeting a specific mutation from a specific cell type which applies to a specific portion of the population. The less directed, more general, chemo treatments are updated less frequently. These do not typically target specific types of cells, but instead inhibit mitosis in ALL cells. Another reason you are starting to see new chemo treatments that are directed is that stopping mitosis in ALL cells is really painful and shitty for a person receiving that treatment. It may even kill them or cause cancer to develop in a different cell type. So the field is trying to get away from that "shotgun approach" treatment and they're moving towards these more targeted medicines.
More and more we're seeing this incorporated with strides forward in nanotechnology. There is a chance we may see in our lifetime a chemo treatment that literally carries mitotic inhibitors ONLY to cancerous cells and leaves every other cell in the body unpoisoned. We're heading there now, and these type of targeted treatments are a big reason why.
Big pharma is just awful, but rest assured that--as it regards research--a lot of what is being done is being done for good scientific and medical reasons. There is CERTAINLY usury going on on the business end (and the scientific end is sometimes complicit in this), but I think its pretty clear that there are a lot of scientists, doctors, and people who are trying their very best to drive this boat in the direction it needs to go for the betterment of humanity. We have all lost someone to cancer, and while people with fancy suits and yachts might not give a shit--the fact is a great deal of the people doing the actual work here DO.
