[proudtobeanamerican1]

“a clerk at the GNC with a GED and a certificate in herbal bowelology he got mail order from The Center for Wholistic Healing”

In case anyone didn’t make it to the end of your rant, this is hilarious.

[aruanan]

In case anyone didn’t make it to the end of your rant, this is hilarious.

Thanks. I like to keep it light.

On a more serious note, having lost my father to anecdotalist self-treatment, I wish he had taken advantage of the state of the art medical treatments for non-small cell carcinoma. He remembered how he had seen people over the years respond to radiation and chemotherapy and didn't want to end up like them. Unfortunately, he did end up just like them, only much earlier than many of them did. Had he gone through with his initial series of radiation treatments he could have held the tumor back long enough to have tried Tarceva. I tried to tell him the goal of all these treatments was to hit the tumor in as many ways as possible to retard its growth, if elimination was not possible, so as to improve his quality of life and to give him a bit more time with those he loved. In the end he wished he had not been so hesitant, but by then it was too late.

My short essay, On Studying Cancer, though, was written about 9 years ago while in my doctoral program. I just updated the Google and PubMed hits for the various search terms.