The New York Times is running an article on how recent advancements in cancer treatments are changing the view that doctors and patients take towards the meaning of the disease. A diagnosis made just ten years ago that was likely to lead to a patient’s death is now just as likely to be treated within a framework of chronic disease management where the patient continues to live a full and active life. As medicine learns more about the biological structures that are responsible for tumor development, doctors are more able to develop long-term treatment plans that incorporate this knowledge. The model that many of these physicians now see as appropriate in guiding the overall view towards cancer treatment is the model employed for diabetes management: not necessarily curable, but completely treatable.

The basic idea that guides many of these treatments is that the increasing knowledge and research into the disease means that doctors can treat patients with a particular therapy until the patient no longer responds to it, and then just switch that patient to a different therapy that attacks the same problem in a new way. The hope is that this type of model of treatment, known as the “Hitchhiker Model,” can continue on until a true cure is found for an individual’s particular cancer. Even if a true cure is never made available, the creation of new therapies hopefully means that treatments can continue indefinitely.

The Times profiles a number of patients with cancers that until quite recently would have been seen as totally incurable and not at all treatable and yet, who continue to lead full lives. One of those profiled was Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Senator, and former presidential candidate, John Edwards, whose breast cancer has spread to her bones and her lungs, but whose doctors have discovered ways of managing her cancer that will never cure her of the disease, but should be able to control its spread and metastatic potential.

The article closes with a doctor stating that anyone who is given a terminal cancer diagnosis should immediately seek a second opinion at a major cancer center, because the experts employed there may be able to develop a more effective treatment protocol than is currently employed by most doctors.

Labels: cancer