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From Men's Journal:
Every time you walk into a physician's office, you run the risk of overtreatment: Tests you don't need, medications that are ineffective (or dangerous), procedures that cause more problems than they solve. In many cases the best thing for your health is to do nothing.
Make no mistake: A good doctor is, or should be, your most trusted resource if you're sick. If you're not sick and he wants to treat you anyway, that doesn't necessarily make him a bad doctor. But it does make him a player in a system that operates according to the unspoken and often unexamined assumption that more treatment is better for the patient. It's unquestionably better for the financial health of the stakeholders in the system: the doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, the health-insurance companies, and the hospitals. If you don't know how the game is played, the odds go up that you'll wind up the loser.
What do you people think, will people change if they know this?
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday September 24 2014, @07:28PM
I don't think you're right about us not understanding cancer. We've got a handle on what it is pretty well. It's your own body's cells that got a mutation in their DNA that disabled the "die when not needed" gene. Therefore, the cells continue dividing exponentially making a large tumor that sucks up energy from the rest of the body, and flakes of that tumor then go through the bloodstream and land somewhere else. This is called metastasis and if it happens makes the problem much, much worse.
Given that, we've got a number of logical treatments that are used in practice. We don't JUST have chemo. There is:
1. Surgery: cut the tumor or tumors out. Disadvantages: might not get it all, might die from surgery since it involves, you know, cutting your body open with a really sharp knife and all.
2. Chemotherapy: put poison in your body that kills cells when they divide. Works because cancer cells are distinguished by dividing very frequently. Disadvantages: healthy cells are also killed. That's why it's poison.
3. Radiation: Expose the tumor to radiation which kills the cancer cells because radiation kills things. Disadvantages: the radiation kills healthy cells, too
4. Immunotherapy: train the immune system to attack the cancer. Disadvantages: The immune system is DEADLY. Fucking with the immune system can result in REALLY bad things happening if you don't know exactly what you're doing. One woman in an experimental treatment died MINUTES after being injected with the treatment because her immune system decided her lungs were really bad things and just had to go.
Immunotherapy is the newest option and still mostly in clinical trials. So, yeah. The "establishment" isn't suggesting chemo only, although it is a very versatile therapy and so is recommended for a wide range of cancers (compared to immunotherapy which is only available for a select few cancers right now). There's other stuff out there. This is a really hard problem, but a lot of bright people are working on it.