Oncologist Quotes

I’ll start in the middle: Winter 2006: I’m sitting topless in the oncologist’s office on Valentine’s Day. Cancer is a bitch. It doesn’t give a shit about holidays.

The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care. I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.' I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research. Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be. Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit. So, I believed.

I’m an oncologist, not a podiatrist.” My skin unzipped. Those were the worst kinds of doctors. They never saved anyone.

I am an historian of warfare; I often describe my job as similar to that of an oncologist. I study that which kills and hope that one day humanity will find a cure.

It took him four months for him to die, three more than the oncologists had predicted. "Your dad's a fighter," they would say when we visited, which was a crock, because he'd already been soundly beaten. If he was at all aware, he had to be pissed at how long it was taking him to do something as simple as die. Dad doesn't believe in God, but he was a life-long member of the Church of Shit or Get Off the Can.

6. “I’ve done some research and…” I thought I should listen to my oncologist and my nutritionist and my team of specialists, but it turns out that I should be listening to you. Yes, please, tell me more about the medical secrets that only one flaxseed provider in Orlando knows. Wait, let me get a pen.

The smiling oncologist does not know whether his patients vomit or not.

To “stand there” at the bedside of a patient who is faced with death from cancer is anathema for oncologists.

Flynn is an oncologist now, a man who battles cells that simultaneously multiply and divide.

Apparently he had been an oncologist but had not detected the cancer in himself, a not-uncommon scenario. Humans often fail to see what is close to them and obvious to others.

It’s not a cold.” The doctor put the clipboard under his arm. “I just got off the phone with his oncologist. He fought it for years, but he stopped his treatment months ago. It wasn’t working anymore.

if there were indeed effective natural, alternative cancer cures known to—but suppressed by—oncologists, no oncologist, nor any friend, colleague or family member of an oncologist, would ever die of cancer.

Did anyone tell you what the MRI showed?” I asked. “No.” The buck had been passed, as it often was with difficult news. Oftentimes, we’d have a spat with the oncologist over whose job it was to break the news.

Oncologists and their patients are bound, it seems, by an intense subatomic force. So, albeit in a much smaller sense, this was a victory for me as well. I sat at Carla’s table and watched her pour a glass of water for herself, unpurified and straight from the sink. She glowed radiantly, her eyes half-closed, as if the compressed autobiography of the last five years were flashing through a private and internal cinema screen. Her

As a child Gottfried was very close to his mother, and his memories of those early years are sunny and warm. But before he turned ten, his mother developed cancer, and died in great pain. The young boy could have felt sorry for himself and become depressed, or he could have adopted hardened cynicism as a defense. Instead he began to think of the disease as his personal enemy, and swore to defeat it. In time he earned a medical degree and became a research oncologist, and the results of his work have become part of the pattern of knowledge that eventually will free mankind of this scourge. In this case, again, a personal tragedy became transformed into a challenge that can be met. In developing skills to meet that challenge, the individual improves the lives of other people.

Sometimes my patients will say, ‘Is it because when I was forty-five, I did X?,’” Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist, told me. “In those moments, people have intense fear and regret, and when you say it’s not that, it removes something they’re really worried about.

Once I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, I began to view the world through two perspectives; I was starting to see death as both doctor and patient. As a doctor, I knew not to declare “Cancer is a battle I’m going to win!” or ask “Why me?” (Answer: Why not me?) I knew a lot about medical care, complications, and treatment algorithms. I quickly learned from my oncologist and my own study that stage IV lung cancer today was a disease whose story might be changing, like AIDS in the late 1980s: still a rapidly fatal illness but with emerging therapies that were, for the first time, providing years of life. While being trained as a physician and scientist had helped me process the data and accept the limits of what that data could reveal about my prognosis, it didn’t help me as a patient. It didn’t tell Lucy and me whether we should go ahead and have a child, or what it meant to nurture a new life while mine faded. Nor did it tell me whether to fight for my career, to reclaim the ambitions I had single-mindedly pursued for so long, but without the surety of the time to complete them. Like my own patients, I had to face my mortality and try to understand what made my life worth living—and I needed Emma’s help to do so. Torn between being a doctor and being a patient, delving into medical science and turning back to literature for answers, I struggled, while facing my own death, to rebuild my old life—or perhaps find a new one. —

The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his friend won’t be coming back, and thus she won’t be paid for her time, or for her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity on her, he examines the golden threads in his mind, watches the matrix, follows the money until he spots a node, and tells her that if she’s outside Treasure Island at 6:00 A.M., thirty minutes after she gets off work, she’ll meet an oncologist from Denver who will just have won $40,000 at a craps table, and will need a mentor, a partner, someone to help him dispose of it all in the forty-eight hours before he gets on the plane home. The words evaporate in the waitress’s mind, but they leave her happy. She sighs and notes that the guys in the corner have done a runner, and have not even tipped her; and it occurs to her that, instead of driving straight home when she gets off shift, she’s going to drive over to Treasure Island; but she would never, if you asked her, be able to tell you why.

Then one night a report about breast cancer came on the news, all about mammograms and early detection, women talking about finding a lump in their breast. We were making dinner. We always turned the television off when we sat down to eat but we could watch it while we were cooking. That was the rule. “I have one of those,” she said to the television set. “You had a mammogram?” She shook her head. She wasn’t looking at me. “A lump.” I had been cutting up a head of broccoli and I put down the knife and washed my hands. “What did you do about it?” “I didn’t do anything about it.” “What did the doctor say?” She looked at me then. “The whole thing scared me to death.” “So what happened?” My brain insisted on hearing it in the past tense, I had a lump in my breast once. I couldn’t understand that this was something that was happening. “I thought I’d wait for you to come home,” she said. “You’re always so good at figuring things out.” “I’ve been home three months.” But she had found the lump a year before, and taped a gauze square over it when it started to leak. When I looked at her again I could actually see a disruption in the pattern of her dress. That’s how big it was. Once we started making the hopeless rounds of oncologist appointments, the past broke away. All the things I’d thought about myself before—I am an actress, I am not an actress, I was in love, I was betrayed—disintegrated into nothing. I made bowls of Cream of Wheat she wouldn’t eat and then scraped them into the trash once they turned cold. I managed the schedule of people who wanted to come and see her, her two sons and two daughters—one of those daughters my mother—my father, my brothers, all my cousins, all her friends. I made sure no one stayed too long. I sat by her bed and read to her.

Ah, that’s my favourite piece of advice,’ I said; though, oddly, it was my local shopkeeper rather than my oncologist who offered it to me. ‘What you need to do, dear,’ she insisted to me and Mum when I first made it the twenty yards to her store after Chemo 1, ‘is remove all stress from your life. Work, money, worries, everything. Let everyone else take care of that. You just concentrate on you.

Mine is not the first voice to suggest that as patients, as families, and even as doctors, we need to find hope in other ways, more realistic ways, than in the pursuit of elusive and danger-filled cures. In the care of advanced disease, whether cancer or some other determined killer, hope should be redefined. Some of my sickest patients have taught me of the varieties of hope that can come when death is certain. I wish I could report that there were many such people, but there have, in fact, been few. Almost everyone seems to want to take a chance with the slim statistics that oncologists give to patients with advanced disease. Usually they suffer for it, and they die anyway, having magnified the burdens they and those who love them must carry to the final moments. Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force.

I considered it an important step forward. Just the fact that the stem cells didn’t produce any bad side effects was a big deal. That they worked as predicted was, to me, impressive. And that they showed a hint of prolonging survival was amazing. We were treating a disease that has become the Mount Everest of challenges for oncologists. Every step upward gets us closer to our goal of better treatments for our patients. And the lessons learned along the way are relevant to the field of oncology as a whole.

I have never killed anyone, fictional or otherwise. I have no idea what it’s like to kill someone, but it seems like it would be horrible. One of my biggest goals in life is to get through it without knowing anything of what it’s like to kill another human being. People die. That’s true in novels, and it’s true in life. Dying is one of the very few things we all do. To deny or ignore the omnipresent reality of death seems to me a disservice to human beings. That said, acknowledging in my novels that death exists does not make me a murderer any more than acknowledging that cancer can be treated makes me an oncologist.

Since Frank was diagnosed eight week previously, I had spent my free time amassing an encyclopaedic knowledge of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. There was practically nothing left about it that I didn`t know. I graduated way past the booklets they printed for sufferers and onto the hard medical texts, online discussion groups for oncologists, PDFs of recent peer-reviewed studies. I wasn`t under the impression that this made me a good daughter, or even that I was doing it out of concern for Frank. It was in my nature to absorbe large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intelectuall dominance.

cellular activity in your tumor . . . well, prognosis can range from six months to . . . um, it’s difficult to say. Although certainly there have been some successful cases . . .” “Okay then,” I said, grabbing my bag off the back of the chair. “I’ll be in touch.” “Elizabeth! I’d really like you to meet with a counselor—” I left before he had a chance to finish, the taste of cold pennies on my tongue, as though I’d consented to chemo and already started injecting liquid poison into my bloodstream. Oncologists, nurses, radiologists, palliative care specialists: I was all too familiar with the cancer routine, and I wasn’t interested. Not one bit. My twin brother, Paul, once told me that there’s healthy denial,

The stories in this book link an ancient story with the children's stories. Rather than medical case reports based on certainty of what scientists currently understand, they are simply an attempt to be faithful to what I have heard. In this sense, they continue Jesus' commissioned work of revealing that there is a realm that we cannot yet fully understand. The greatest gift in my life has been in linking the ancient story and the children's stories to my own...As I sit by the beds of these children, I have seen God's love made manifest in this descending way. I have seen Jesus Christ come again and again and again to bring peace and to link the children's stories with His own.

People talk about Divine Order. The people who are really pumped up about Divine Order are the people who have had a sweet Divine Order in their lives. I know that my life is what I have made it. But my mom? Divine Order is the concept that every single thing in your day and your life is exactly how it is supposed to be. Divine Order for some people is, “Went to college, got married, had three children who are now senators and oncologists, had seven grandchildren, then I died peacefully sitting on a blanket in the middle of my flower garden.” That is a really nice Divine Order. Then there are people with a different Divine Order. “Went to college, married an alcoholic, had six kids, twenty-four grandchildren, lived in my car, and died choking on a pretzel in the parking lot of a dollar store.” The Divine Order people are the same as the “money doesn’t matter” people. The people who say “money doesn’t matter” are the people with shitloads of money. If you ask an old lady who lives in the middle of a drug-infested, violent, poor community that she can’t leave because she can’t even afford bread, she might say that money matters. She might say that she had five children, but two of them were killed on the streets, and if she had money, she could have relocated herself and her children when they were small and maybe her life would look different today. So does money matter? Yes. It matters a lot.

I think: it's the holidays. There are parties. I'm young. I've spent the past two years going to oncologists. I'm going to put on my party shoes. And I do go to one party, and I leave when people start to dance around a pole. Later I start dating the man whose party it was, and he remembers being glad I came, and casually tells me how he flirted his head off that night. I'm not in your country, I think. I haven't lived in your country for a while.

there were also intellectual reasons to investigate and try to understand his cancer. Steve’s particular kind of tumor is a rare one. According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), only about one thousand cases a year are discovered in the United States. As a result, research on pancreatic islet cell neuroendocrine carcinomas is not buttressed by the kind of massive database available to doctors studying breast or lung cancer, to cite two more common forms, or even other forms of cancer of the pancreas. (His own oncologist/surgeon admitted to me privately that not enough was known at that time to determine statistically what the best treatment should be—surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, something else, or a combination of treatments.) So Steve’s indecision about what to do was not completely off-base.

Interestingly, however, in recent years, research has pointed toward inflammation as much more important underlying cause of heart disease than high cholesterol. Inflammation, it appears, is what causes cholesterol in the blood to oxidize, forming the plaques that block blood flow. As with many other diseases, including cancer, inflammation lies at the root of the problem.

That was one of the reasons why Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center decided to work with Watson—to make widely available the level of knowledge of the hospital’s best oncologists to the world at large.

Few people have these conversations, and there is good reason for anyone to dread them. They can unleash difficult emotions. People can become angry or overwhelmed. Handled poorly, the conversations can cost a person’s trust. Handled well, they can take real time. I spoke to an oncologist who told me about a

twenty-nine-year-old patient she had recently cared for who had an inoperable brain tumor that continued to grow through second-line chemotherapy. The patient elected not to attempt any further chemotherapy, but getting to that decision required hours of discussion, for this was not the decision he had expected to make. First, the oncologist said, she had a discussion with him alone. They reviewed the story of how far he’d come, the options that remained. She was frank. She told him that in her entire career she had never seen third-line chemotherapy produce a significant response in his type of brain tumor. She had looked for experimental therapies, and none were truly promising. And, although she was willing to proceed with chemotherapy, she told him how much strength and time the treatment would take away from him and his family. He did not shut down or rebel. His questions went on for an hour. He asked about this therapy and that therapy. Gradually, he began to ask about what would happen as the tumor got bigger, what symptoms he’d have, what ways they could try to control them, how the end might come. The oncologist next met with the young man together with his family. That discussion didn’t go so well. He had a wife and small children, and at first his wife wasn’t ready to contemplate stopping chemo. But when the oncologist asked the patient to explain in his own words what they’d discussed, she understood. It was the same with his mother, who was a nurse. Meanwhile, his father sat quietly and said nothing the entire time. A few days later, the patient returned to talk to the oncologist. “There should be something. There must be something,” he said. His father had shown him reports of cures on the Internet. He confided how badly his father was taking the news. No patient wants to cause his family pain. According to Block, about two-thirds of patients are willing to undergo therapies they don’t want if that is what their loved ones want.

The oncologist went to the father’s home to meet with him. He had a sheaf of possible trials and treatments printed from the Internet. She went through them all. She was willing to change her opinion, she told him. But either the treatments were for brain tumors that were very different from his son’s or else he didn’t qualify. None were going to be miraculous. She told the father that he needed to understand: time with his son was limited, and the young man was going to need his father’s help getting through it. The oncologist noted wryly how much easier it would have been for her just to prescribe the chemotherapy. “But that meeting with the father was the turning point,” she said. The patient and the family opted for hospice. They had more than a month together before he died. Later, the father thanked the doctor. That last month, he said, the family simply focused on being together, and it proved to be the most meaningful time they’d ever spent.

When I think of Mr. Madani now, I am reminded of a joke I heard sometime after I was involved in his care: An oncologist walks into a funeral home, looking for his patient. The casket is closed. He opens it and is surprised to find it empty. “Where is my patient?” he asks the attendant. “I wanted to give him one more round of chemo.” “Oh, they took him to dialysis,” the attendant replies.

Cancer, in the realest way, can cost an individual their quality of life, even with a good prognosis.

There had been so many MoFo ladies—the librarian, the lawyer, the gastromancer who conversed with dead people via tummy rumbles, the psychic we underestimated (she’d told Big Jim that the human population was about to be wiped out, which had really killed the vibe of mini golf), the bodybuilder, the one who wouldn’t let me steal her earrings, the pet oncologist, the one from Zimbabwe, the one with six children, the one with dead mice in her pockets (Detective Turd eked them out, and she had to come clean about being an Indian python mom). These strange species of MoFo blew in and out of our lives like empty Cheeto® bags.

Fortunately, I have neither coronavirus nor asthma and lung photos are Ok. Today my family doctor again checked but didn't see the medical issue, whereas a few days ago, night doctors sent an emergency ambulance for a checkup but also found nothing. I do not trust the doctors since they made a grave mistake and failed to diagnose metastatic prostate cancer early, and now I am suffering from it. I am taking four Xtandi tablets of 40 mg per day. As a result, I have short breathing and difficulty breathing; I called several times the hospital assistant of the oncologist, who didn't take it seriously while I searched Google for the reasons and truth; I found the Xtandi link with its side effects that states the breathing difficulties and to contact doctors; it creates anxiety, indeed. Whatever any suggestions in this regard: Additional input; however, as a history of black magic by Qadiyyanis followers of fake Jesus that Europe is still unaware of their deeds; I don't exclude the new attacks by them; it is my belief they will face consequences of their crimes accordingly the worldly law and penalty of the Divine.

Sandy, I believe in this medication. But I also believe in you. You know, we describe treatment response as a bell curve. At the far end, there are always patients who exceed expectations. Why? Will alone cannot subdue disease, Sandy. But wanting to live and having a reason to do so—every oncologist will tell you that it matters, even though no one can tell you why.

The Cancer Center suffered from two hallmarks of organizations that are plagued with coordination snafus. First, powerful people ignore, dismiss, denigrate, and even undermine people and groups they need to mesh their work with. Oncologists saw themselves as being at the top of the pecking order at the center and the work of other specialists as secondary, trivial, or downright useless. They dismissed side effects, including fatigue, diarrhea, and cramps, caused by chemotherapy that they prescribed as “normal” and left it to patients to find specialists to treat such problems. Second, powerful people devote little attention to solutions for coordination problems. Executives, consultants, and physicians who launched the center gave lip service to collaboration across silos. Yet they focused on building strong teams and departments in areas such as brain tumors, breast cancer, and skin cancer—and ignored how to help the units work together.

Oncologists tend to start with the most effective chemotherapy they have for a patient’s cancer. Second-, third-, and fourth-line treatments may be less effective or carry more side effects. When cancer grows despite chemotherapy or when it recurs, the situation may become one of diminishing returns on a person’s investment of limited time and energy. Since most chemotherapy affects normal cells as well as cancer cells, these medications can take a toll on one’s general health—something I know you know all too well.” “I know this in my head, Dr. Byock,” Paul

(ASTRO). As the name suggests, this was based on the agreement of a panel of experts, who in the 1990s met and chose to define PSA failure after radiation therapy as three consecutive rises in PSA (taken at least three months apart from each other) after it reaches its nadir—the lowest point PSA reaches after treatment. (PSA nadir is a key concept in radiation therapy for prostate cancer. Because radiation’s effect is gradual, it may take two or three years for PSA levels to hit rock bottom. Some men reach this nadir much more quickly—within months—and some men take much longer—several years. Ideally, once PSA has reached its lowest level, it should stay put.) Although the ASTRO definition has proven useful, it has not been perfect, and not all radiation oncologists agree that this is the best way

to measure success or failure. One criticism has been that PSA increases are not always consecutive. A man’s rise in PSA with one test might be followed by a transient decrease in the next, followed by another increase. Although there may be recurrent cancer, under the ASTRO definition, this man’s treatment would still be considered a success—even though it’s just a technicality. “Fortunately, any astute radiation oncologist will not blindly follow the consensus definition in making treatment decisions,” comments Danny Song. A quirk of the ASTRO definition is that, over a short period of time after treatment, it really can’t tell us much. This is due to the gradual nature of radiation’s effects; cancer

oncologists met to discuss a replacement for the ASTRO definition. They decided to define treatment failure as a PSA level that has risen 2 ng/ml higher than a man’s PSA nadir (the lowest level it reached following treatment). This definition has been correlated more accurately with long-term results in all patients, and it takes into account such factors as hormonal therapy and the PSA bounce. Failure is now considered to occur when the PSA level reaches the nadir + 2 value. This is called the Phoenix definition. Still, it takes time to determine this value, so this equation should not be used to gauge the success of treatment in men with less than two years’ worth of PSA tests after radiation therapy. Furthermore, the consensus panel that developed this definition cautions,

PATIENT PROFILE: S.R. was diagnosed at age 48 with stage 4 non-Hodgkins B-cell lymphoma. Tumor was the size of a potato and choking off blood to the intestines. Underwent chemo regimen. S.R. used nutrition supplements in spite of oncologist’s hostility to the subject. S.R. was able to work throughout chemo, travelling to trade shows, though he did lose his hair. As of 2005, S.R. is in complete remission and has learned the value of good nutrition, living more joyfully, and faith in God.

Conversely, there are other services in which Medicare is required to pay whatever it is charged. For instance, Medicare Part B pays oncologists for intravenous cancer chemotherapy drugs administered in the office. The

Walt, is that you?” Is it? At this stage of our viewership, it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like the two death sentences our man receives in this hour—first from the oncologist, then from Krazy-8—have woken him up from years of slumber, and made him act in ways his wife couldn’t imagine. But as Breaking Bad moves along, we begin to see that this is who Walter White was all along, and it’s only his changed circumstances that have revealed him as a man capable of these things. The

I wanted to be a doctor because my grandfather was a doctor. But the deal was sealed while he was dying of a rare form of bone cancer. He was in unbearable pain. The only thing that we could do was to try to make him as comfortable as possible and wait until it was time for him to go. During his battle, he was treated by one of the best oncologists in the nation. He was very good at what he did, but he was so desensitized and dehumanized. He spoke to us like he was a robot, just there to deliver news. He was so cold. I know he was there to do his job and treat his patients, but I would never want anyone to have to deal with a doctor like that if I could help it. To be that detached from my patients and their families is foreign to me. Sometimes, you have to let them see that you sympathize and empathize to really show that you care and did all that you could do to help their loved one.” We

That first doctor’s visit was a chilling introduction to the world of bone marrow transplants. This particular doctor was all doom and gloom. She spent so much time telling me about the high mortality rate of having a bone marrow transplant that I half-expected her to end the appointment by handing me a shovel and telling me to go ahead and start digging my own grave. One thing that I understood very clearly from her words was that with the transplant, timing was everything. You don’t want to wait too long to do the transplant, but you also have to make sure that you time it so that you are ready—mind, body and soul—to take the risk of the procedure. Do you remember that dot on the graph that the first oncologist had shown me? The “if I do nothing, I have between one and two years to live” dot? If the transplant did not go well, if I contracted a serious virus after completely wiping out my immune system, then I could die within weeks or even days after the procedure.

Oncologists are pawns in an industry dedicated to developing drugs and assaying their effectiveness. Oncology is big business.

Although the oncologist was a prominent expert in his field, Burton remembers him “mainly for what he taught me about uncritical acceptance of believing that you ‘are doing good.’ The only way you can really know is if you ask the patient and you have a dialogue.” In collaborations, takers rarely cross this perspective gap.

Only one person was conspicuously missing from the (American Society of Clinical Oncology, ASCO) party - Dennis Slamon. Having spent the afternoon planning the next phase of Herceptin trials with breast oncologists at ASCO, Slamon had jumped into his rundown Nissan and driven home.

age sixty, Azopardi had an appointment with Richard Furman, an oncologist who ran the chronic lymphocytic leukemia research center at Weill Cornell Medicine.

It’s not a very hopeful sign when your oncologist gives you a goodbye hug—but that only went through my mind later. It was a hug of genuine sweetness and affection: two people comforting each other, like sisters parting before one left on a long trip to a distant land.

Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen, who is the CEO of biotech company Bionor Pharma, co-authored a scientific paper with UK oncologist and immunologist Angus Dalgleish, which claims SARS-CoV-2 has no credible natural ancestor and was created through laboratory manipulation beyond reasonable doubt. They claim Covid-19 was created by first using a natural coronavirus backbone and splicing a new spike onto it.

Just make sure she’s comfortable and gets to eat whatever she wants to eat. That’s it. That was the oncologist’s parting advice, the home care instructions for the love of Jack’s life. His wife was now like a goldfish brought home from a mall pet store. The goldfish that was confined to a small fishbowl that sat on a bedroom dresser. The little goldfish you imbue with so much love. You feed it first thing every morning. You talk to it. Develop a relationship. And then one morning, after less than a week of having the fish home, you find it floating belly up in its little tank. And you realize some part of you knew this would happen. You realize that every morning you fed the fish you were saying goodbye. You just didn’t know it at the time.

To expand on the above list, I think the most powerful strategy out there to avoid or treat cancer is to starve your cancer cells by depriving them of their only food source – sugar. Normal cells in your body can adapt to different energy sources, allowing them to use both carbs and fat for fuel. Cancer cells, on the other hand, do not express that metabolic flexibility and are only able to use sugar as an energy source. A man by the name of Dr. Otto Warburg was actually given the Nobel Prize in Physiology for this discovery over 75 years ago, and still virtually no oncologist actually uses this information! He discovered that cancer cells have a fundamentally different energy metabolism compared to healthy cells. He called his theory the “Warburg Effect,” which occurs in up to 80 percent of cancers.

Hodgkin may have been disappointed by what he thought was only a descriptive study of his disease. But he had underestimated the value of careful observation—by compulsively studying anatomy alone, he had stumbled upon the most critical revelation about this form of lymphoma: Hodgkin’s disease had a peculiar propensity of infiltrating lymph nodes locally one by one. Other cancers could be more unpredictable—more “capricious,” as one oncologist put it. Lung cancer, for instance, might start as a spicular nodule in the lung, then unmoor itself and ambulate unexpectedly into the brain. Pancreatic cancer was notoriously known to send sprays of malignant cells into faraway sites such as the bones and the liver. But Hodgkin’s—an anatomist’s discovery—was anatomically deferential: it moved, as if with a measured, ordered pace, from one contiguous node to another—from gland to gland and from region to region.

On an overcast morning in the winter of 1975, Bonadonna flew to Brussels to present his results at a conference of European oncologists. The trial had just finished its second year. But the two groups, Bonadonna reported, had clearly parted ways. Nearly half the women treated with no therapy had relapsed. In contrast, only a third of the women treated with the adjuvant regimen had relapsed. Adjuvant chemotherapy had prevented breast cancer relapses in about one in every six treated women.

oncos, meaning “swelling,” to describe cancer, as it was often detected as a hard nodule. From this root, the words oncology (the science of cancer), oncologist (cancer specialist), and oncologic (related to cancer) are all derived. Galen also used the suffix -oma to denote a cancer. Thus, a hepatoma is a cancer in the liver.

The term “hematologist oncologist” comes from exclusive styles of doctors Dr. Mohamed Aswad is one of the specialized hematologist oncologists.

In reality, competition didn't work well in a hospital setting. That wasn't a secret: one of the most praised economists of the twentieth century, Kenneth Arrow, had concluded decades earlier that the magic of markets didn't function for health care in the way it would for selling bread, cars, or plane tickets. Patients just didn't have the information to intelligently price health-care services, and more often than not their priority was getting the best care as soon as possible, not finding the cheapest oncologist.

It would also be up to the oncologist to determine during the surgery whether I got to keep my ovaries. Unlike a simple hysterectomy, an oophorectomy would deprive my body of estrogen and progesterone, plunging me into sudden, premature menopause with all its attendant horrors. If that happened, I could look forward to an increased risk of depression, anxiety, heart disease, arthritis, and bone loss. This was in addition to the usual side effects of menopause like hot flashes, fatigue, mood swings, and vaginal dryness, which were typically more intense for women who hadn’t started menopause naturally

If we attempt to explain crime rates (our dependent variable) by using police officers per capita as an explanatory variable (along with other controls), we will have a serious reverse causality problem. We have a solid theoretical reason to believe that putting more police officers on the street will reduce crime, but it’s also possible that crime could “cause” police officers, in the sense that cities experiencing crime waves will hire more police officers. We could easily find a positive but misleading association between crime and police: the places with the most police officers have the worst crime problems. Of course, the places with lots of doctors also tend to have the highest concentration of sick people. These doctors aren’t making people sick; they are located in places where they are needed most (and at the same time sick people are moving to places where they can get appropriate medical care). I suspect that there are disproportionate numbers of oncologists and cardiologists in Florida; banishing them from the state will not make the retiree population healthier.

More than 40 percent of oncologists admit to offering treatments that they believe are unlikely to work.

there is rarely only one way to treat a cancer successfully. As Keith Flaherty, a medical oncologist and the director of developmental therapeutics at Massachusetts General Hospital, explained to me, the best strategy to target cancer is likely by targeting multiple vulnerabilities of the disease at one time, or in sequence.

As a college student, my thinking was influenced by the work of O. Carl Simonton, the oncologist who taught people to use visualization to boost their immune system in order to fight cancer. In medical school, I became trained in the use of medical hypnosis and began to see the powerful effect it can have on healing the body.

The death of cancer is inevitable. It’s a question, not of if but of when, and when will be determined by what we do next. Do it now or do it later. Many are resigned to later.

Patients diagnosed with cancer and treated with our multisdisciplinary approaches are knocked down physically and emotionally, but they pick themselves up off the canvas and struggle on. They carry the reminders of the acute and chronic side effects from cytotoxic chemotheraly and radiation-induced skin and functional-organ changes. They endure the scars, complications and impairments imposed by the blades of surgical oncologists like me. Though sometimes they want to, they don't leave. They remain. They maintain. I respect the effort, the invincible spirit, and the patients, who don't give a damn about the odds or probabilities, they are going out swinging. We are tag-team partners in oncology, entering the ring to attack cancer with every move and method we know. Hell, I'll even throw a few chairs if it will help.

We should not be aiming for weeks of improved survival. Our goals should be higher. The public needs to see how far we have drifted from the original aims as oncologists and researchers and at what cost to the patient.

Whatever it is in oncologists that makes them want to be oncologists -- that crazy mix of fierceness, optimism, arrogance and compassion -- I get a contact high from it. It's like love at first sight, or touching something on fire. It's like making a choice and refusing to look back.

conventional oncologist is focused on ridding them of the weed through conventional means (such as surgery/chemo/radiation), while my job, as their integrative oncologist, is

Confusion and Dilemma *** “The criminals neither let investigation nor investigate crimes; indeed, it is it that authenticates itself an authentic proof of their involvement and conspiracy.” ― Ehsan Sehgal I live in a highly civilized country where human rights, equality, justice, and freedom of expression are core principles and laws. However, in my case, they have never been realized or practically evident. Even the European Union and the United Nations have ignored my requests for an investigation against the Dutch state, which has criminally neglected me and consistently remained silent for many decades. Human rights organizations, Dutch journalists, and media outlets have failed to demonstrate their fairness, neutrality, and freedom of the press. I have continuously remained a victim. Criminals have significantly succeeded in their unlawful motives. I am still waiting, suffering from paralysis in both legs, a medical victim of circumstance, hoping for a miracle from someone who will recognize and understand the need to help before I can no longer share my story. Note: This article was written on August 22, 2020, about Social Media; no, I am republishing it on Medium. I know there will be no response; one cannot expect justice from criminals. Confusion and Dilemma When naturopathy experts and spiritual figures predict with significant certainty that I have no prostate cancer, it confuses, surprises, and creates suspicious feelings in my mind, whereas European doctors have diagnosed metastatic prostate cancer. What should I believe and what not? However, my enemies are still awaiting my death. I breathe, expecting and waiting for the miracle of Allah; it will soon happen, I believe. I neither feel trust in Dutch urologists and oncologists nor do I have the satisfaction of their treatment. I always realize that they do not tell the truth about how serious my disease is, but they never discuss it. Today, the urologist called me, asking how I was feeling. I told him that I was suffering from mucus, shortness of breath, and swallowing difficulty; he didn’t pay notice and said that the endoscopy showed nothing dangerous. I asked him, I have planned to visit my family in Pakistan and will stay longer than I used to stay; therefore, I need medicine for that period. He replied in an unsympathetic way that medicine is costly if you pass away there; it costs insurance money. I requested an MRI scan to make sure that the cancer is not spreading to other parts of the body; he declined, saying PSA stays down, so there is no need for this. It saddened me that they think about the insurance provider but not the patient. On the other side, my insurance provider, VGZ, has refused to pay the costs of a new treatment in Germany, which I would try again. Indeed, such a situation has put me on the track of a dilemma; however, God has given me the enormous power and courage to bear two severe and mysterious incidents since 1980. My experience proves that none of the medicines heal, whether those are homeopathy, allopathy, naturopathy, or even spiritual healing. It seems the rivals continuously attack to harm and damage me: Who are they? The answer is simple: they are in first place, Qadiyyanis, and second place are evil-minded individuals, criminals, and intelligence agency murderers. My fate stands as a barrier in front of me that no one sees or realizes how I have faced, and I am still facing that. God is great, and one day, such criminals will be in court for their criminal deeds to taste transparent justice. Factually, I remain sure that Dutch institutions have provided me with workers through private bureaus; those are trusted or risky ones since intelligence agencies can hire them as well. It is a valid question that requires an authentic answer.

Like going along to his dad’s meetings with the oncologist. Asking intelligent questions, remembering the right details, exact haemoglobin count at the last blood draw, 10.6 off the top of his head. What was it all for, the show of erudition, command of detail. Not as if it made a difference. Insurance against future shame. I was there, I served my hours, punched my time card, don’t forget. I did everything that could be done. Don’t blame me. I was there.

One thing I've heard (and seen) over and over is how much deeper an understanding people have of mental illness once they've gone through it themselves (directly or indirectly via someone they love). Any experience cuts closer when you know it firsthand. It follows that health practitioners care better for depressed and suicidal people if they've been there. But imagine if the only competent oncologists were ones in remission for cancer; if the only decent obstetricians were ones who'd given birth; if only the superannuated could be geriatricians and a neurosurgery prerequisite was having had someone slice into their own brain. Surely the very starting point for trained clinicians in a "caring profession" is basic human empathy—and learning! And putting learning into practice!—to be able to provide adequate, evidence-based mental health care and not be insensitive assholes about it.