One thing that I found particularly interesting about the podcast was the advances in the way cancer is treated. That may sound simplistic and silly, but I didn't realize that only 20 year ago, a cancer patient was treated as a case, not a person. It has only been recently that doctors have started to treat cancer and all of the other symptoms that come with it. They have started providing psychological as well as medical treatment for cancer patients. They also talked about the slow realization (spanning almost 90 years) that a heavier dose of medication won't always fix the problem. They describe the kinds of procedures that were done to get rid of breast cancers. Doctors used to remove a woman's entire breast, many of the lymph nodes, and even tissue as far up as the underarm, all under the assumption that the more breast tissue that was gone, the less likely the cancer was to show back up.
I was interested in the discussion about breast cancer because I have always wondered why the Susan G. Koman foundation is a separate organization from the American Cancer Society. I guess it seems silly to me to pull money away from all cancer research in order to focus it on a type of cancer that has had huge leaps forward in finding a cure and quelling the symptoms, while there are still cancers out there that doctors still have little idea as to how to cure them, let alone what causes them. Don't get me wrong, I am all for cancer awareness, I just don't think that we should focus on just one type. Based on a chart put out by the American Cancer Society, approximately 19% of cases of breast cancer were fatal, while something like brain cancer has nearly a 60% mortality rate. Brain cancer is something that was actually brought up by Dr. Mukherjee, saying that ideally, he wants to see advances in the medical field's ability to deal with brain cancer because it's cause is widely unknown. I know I am not a scientist, nor am I an expert an any fields relating to this topic, I just see something that doesn't quite add up. Unfortunately, the interview only covered the advances in breast cancer, and did not really address (in a way that I understood) the differences between breast cancer and all the other types, except to say that they have found the genes that can cause breast cancer so it is easier to trace in a family in order to prevent it.
Overall, I feel much more informed on the subject than I did before, and even if I didn't get everything I'd hoped out of it, I still learned a lot.
Yeah! NPR 4 LYFE!
ReplyDeleteOn cancer: I mean I am not a doctor or anything but breast cancer is easier to detect early with a mammogram, and if it hasn't spread you can remove someone's breast and they'll be fine. Not so with brain cancer D:
Yeah, but that's my problem with it. Breast cancer is easier to detect and if it is detected early, even better. So, why does it have so many resources dedicated to it when there are cancers that don't have as high of a survival rate?
ReplyDeleteWell, also because it is a very common cancer. (The most common cancer among women.) And because mammograms are relatively cheap and easy to perform. (My mom's a breast cancer survivor so we got all the stats on this kind of thing.)
ReplyDeleteBut also there are some weird gender politics around breast cancer fundraising and turning everything pink and creating a sisterhood of cancer. Also breast cancer is seen as a blameless cancer unlike lung cancer (the 2nd most common cancer for both women and men) which if you get it everyone is all like "Dude you shouldn't have smoked."
So brain cancer is certainly deadlier but much more rare. So does it make sense to devote more resources to the deadlier thing or the thing that affects more people? IDK, I'm glad I'm not in charge of that.
But that's like another thing.