Vanishing Act

When most people think of cancer, they don’t think of the disease vanishing without treatment. But that is exactly what new evidence is pointing to—cancers can vanish without treatment!

Don’t stop your treatment just yet though. So far, there is only data (from The Journal of the American Medical Association) that shows breast cancer and prostate cancer may disappear on their own. Furthermore, it’s tricky to decide if and when to stop treatments. On the brighter side, it is very promising that doctors and researchers alike are admitting that cancer does have the potential to go backward and stop. While there are still many skeptics, Dr. Robert M. Kaplan, chairman of the department of health services at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, states this about disappearing tumors: “At the end of the day, I’m not sure how certain I am about this, but I do believe it. The weight of the evidence suggests that there is reason to believe.”

Much more research is needed to fully understand the current state of cancer; however, its dynamic nature could lead to its own future demise.

To learn more:
Cancers Can Vanish Without Treatment, but How?

Rethinking Screening for Breast Cancer and Prostate Cancer

Image Credit: The New York Times and Dana Neely/Corbis

Maintenance Therapy

Even with huge sums of money funding cancer research, the newest prognosis is simply longer chemotherapy. Doctors want to treat cancer patients continuously with drugs in the hope that tumors can be kept under control. This maintenance therapy won’t cure cancer, but it does offer potential to keep it in check.

Maintenance therapy isn’t new, but its usage is growing. Given this fact, it would be beneficial to know the answers to the following questions:

1. Does longer-term use of drugs really prolong the lives of cancer patients?
2. Will longer-term use of drugs subject cancer patients to more side effects?
3. Will tumors become resistant to the drugs over time?
4. Do greedy drug companies simply want more people using their drugs for increased periods of time?

Many (if not all) of these questions cannot be answered—at least not yet. At the surface, there may be a good rationale for maintenance therapy; however, doctors and patients need to dig deeper before actively engaging in the treatment.


References
Pollack, A. (2009, July 20). Considering longer chemotherapy. The New York Times, p. D1.