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posts about #breastcancerovertreated more → 
Some Doctors Claim Breast Cancer Is Overtreated
New York, 12:34 PM
Sun Dec 20
19 posts in the last 24 hours
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Some Doctors Claim Breast Cancer Is Overtreated |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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Basically they are neutral videos or pamphlets that present to the patients all the costs and benefits from a certain procedure. It's intended to be separate from the physician's counsel, since he or she can't know everything about the patient's outlook on life, family, philosophies, or religious influences-- all things that can influence their treatment decisions. Also, it's kept separate because surgeons tend to recommend surgery, ya know?
It tends to be used most for things like prostate cancer treatment in older men, lower back surgery, lumpectomy vs. mastectomy for breast cancer, etc. All procedures that don't often have clear-cut science backing one exclusively over the other. Instead, they are situationally dependent.
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If my commute to work wasn't so short I would have called in to tell him that as usual, he was completely missing the point.
the sad thing is I hear people parroting him and Rush all day long... and believe it :(
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What is a non-threatening cancer exactly?
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Spontaneous regression of cancer is reported in virtually all types of human cancer, although the greatest number of cases are reported in patients with neuroblastoma, renal cell carcinoma, malignant melanoma and lymhomas/leukemias.
source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9891219
(and let's just imagine hyperlinks & paragraph breaks)
07/10/09
She died not long after from complications from a broken hip. I'm glad she didn't have to go through chemo.
On a related note: isn't the recommendation that breast cancer screenings stop after a certain age--like 80, because at that point, it would likely grow so slowly that it won't be what gets you anyway?
07/10/09
Non-threatening cancers include Kaposi's sarcoma (as long as you're not HIV+), a lot of skin cancers aside from melanoma or squamous cell carcinoma, cancers of the heart and the membranes that surround it, because your heart is super adaptive and the surgery to take it out is really risky.
Basically, things get called cancer or tumors if they're growing abnormally. It's the breakdown past that point that's crucial. Invasive cancer? Get that shit out. Small tumor that's just kind of hanging out? Up to the patient.
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But yeah, there is a suffering/benefit analysis taken by cancer patients. I understand the impulse to throw the kitchen sink at a tumor, but I can see the benefit of not doing so if that kitchen sink is only going to give you a few weeks, if not months, to live, miserably.
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