It's just not as lucrative a bu$ine$$:
"For cancer patients, breakthrough drugs are saving lives but wrenching souls" by Bob Tedeschi, November 4, 2015
Linnea Olson, an artist and shop owner in Lowell, Mass., knew the experimental drug she was given might save her life. She also knew it might kill her.
Don't hold your breath.
Olson, who had been diagnosed with a form of lung cancer, had exhausted conventional chemotherapy options several years ago when her oncologist told her about the drug — one that might successfully treat a mutation in her tumor. As one of the first patients to receive the drug, Olson said she had no way of knowing whether it would be toxic.
That might be the wrong way to go.
“But when you’re chased by a bear to the edge of a cliff, you jump,” Olson said.
The growing ability of medical science to pull patients back from the brink of death is a credit to targeted therapies, in which doctors search a person’s tumor for a genetic mutation that controls the disease, and deliver a drug to counteract the mutation.
All you have to do is put your nose to the Gritstone.
In many cases, the results have been nothing short of extraordinary. Some breast cancer patients treated with a drug called Herceptin, for instance, have been living cancer-free for more than a decade. But more typically, the effects of the drugs wear off after six or nine months.
For patients like Olson and others, the therapies have led to emotional exhaustion from facing death over and over again: repeatedly saying goodbye to loved ones, making preparations for the end of their lives, and dealing with uncertainty.
“There is just a resounding emotional thud when you are forced to acknowledge that the world will go on, but that it will do so without you,” Olson said....
Not to make light of it at all, but it is also a decision every blogger faces.
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Just to be clear, I'm not minimizing the issue of cancer at all. I wish it upon no one, not even banking and war-criminal scum. It's a basic fear most humans live with.
That being said, there is all the murkiness regarding causes and such when we are swimming in a soup of chemical, biological, and genetic poisons in the land, sea, and air (as opposed to say, global warming, where there is a$$ured certainty). Maybe it has something to with the court$.
