The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery by Dr. Jason Fung
This was well worth reading. It got technical in places, but was generally intelligble enough to follow.
After reading it I feel like I understand a lot better the way cancer is created: it's not some foreign invader, but a breakdown of complex cells back to the unicellular world. The analogy was that our bodies had become cities where people had different jobs and cooperated and followed laws, but cancer were the crazy mountain men who couldn't comform to society and tended to go on anti-social killing sprees. Wuhoo. In some ways, this is helpful, though. My body has just gone a little crazy whose doesn't from time to time?
The story was shocking and depressing, though, when I started to glom onto how incredibly immature the science of cancer research is. They've got some studies from 2018 that *might* be helpful... someday. There's new strategies in immunotherapy that help a handful of cancers - not my incredibly common type, though. There's some clever things going on with adaptive therapies and mathematical models... enough to rate a paragraph or two in a book about the future of cancer.
But my actual treatment? It's ancient brutality: cut it, poison it or burn it and it might work. The treatments I'm on are basically unchanged over 40 years as far as I can tell. They talk a lot about five year survival rates because 10 and 15 year rates aren't as pleasant to discuss. Basically, doctors don't actually know how to cure metastatic cancer, and don't even know how to KNOW if you've got metastatic cancer, either. (There's a presumption that the lymph node involvement means the seeds are loose out there, but they don't know how to find them and know this for a fact... I just get to wait and see what blooms... or doesn't, because I'm cured?) I guess I find out if I was cured of cancer when I die of something else?
So, grrr, this book was hard to read if you want to place your faith in science. Science appears to have been phoning it in for the past fifty years. But it gave me some vocabulary.
I asked my oncologist if she'd read it. She rolled her eyes and said "no". My oncologist is very very conservative: she says she's going to use the "tried and true protocols" and hit me with as much as I can handle since I'm strong and healthy. She loved my walking, she loved my blood work, she loved that I reported sailing through my first chemo. No adaptive protocols for me, she's going to try to poison fast growing cells everywhere and hope I'm wiped clear of those seeds. After reading this book I understand a bit better WHY she's being so brutal: there simply is no better understanding of how to do anything else.
After reading it I feel like I understand a lot better the way cancer is created: it's not some foreign invader, but a breakdown of complex cells back to the unicellular world. The analogy was that our bodies had become cities where people had different jobs and cooperated and followed laws, but cancer were the crazy mountain men who couldn't comform to society and tended to go on anti-social killing sprees. Wuhoo. In some ways, this is helpful, though. My body has just gone a little crazy whose doesn't from time to time?
The story was shocking and depressing, though, when I started to glom onto how incredibly immature the science of cancer research is. They've got some studies from 2018 that *might* be helpful... someday. There's new strategies in immunotherapy that help a handful of cancers - not my incredibly common type, though. There's some clever things going on with adaptive therapies and mathematical models... enough to rate a paragraph or two in a book about the future of cancer.
But my actual treatment? It's ancient brutality: cut it, poison it or burn it and it might work. The treatments I'm on are basically unchanged over 40 years as far as I can tell. They talk a lot about five year survival rates because 10 and 15 year rates aren't as pleasant to discuss. Basically, doctors don't actually know how to cure metastatic cancer, and don't even know how to KNOW if you've got metastatic cancer, either. (There's a presumption that the lymph node involvement means the seeds are loose out there, but they don't know how to find them and know this for a fact... I just get to wait and see what blooms... or doesn't, because I'm cured?) I guess I find out if I was cured of cancer when I die of something else?
So, grrr, this book was hard to read if you want to place your faith in science. Science appears to have been phoning it in for the past fifty years. But it gave me some vocabulary.
I asked my oncologist if she'd read it. She rolled her eyes and said "no". My oncologist is very very conservative: she says she's going to use the "tried and true protocols" and hit me with as much as I can handle since I'm strong and healthy. She loved my walking, she loved my blood work, she loved that I reported sailing through my first chemo. No adaptive protocols for me, she's going to try to poison fast growing cells everywhere and hope I'm wiped clear of those seeds. After reading this book I understand a bit better WHY she's being so brutal: there simply is no better understanding of how to do anything else.