Targeted Therapies Quotes

My brain has always been my enemy, and I’ve spent much of the past decade warring against it, with therapy and razor blades and bad behavior, with precision-guided prescriptions that targeted specific regions.

Specificity refers to the ability of any medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host. Killing a cancer cell in a test tube is not a particularly difficult task: the chemical world is packed with malevolent poisons that, even in infinitesimal quantities, can dispatch a cancer cell within minutes. The trouble lies in finding a selective poison—a drug that will kill cancer without annihilating the patient. Systemic therapy without specificity is an indiscriminate bomb. For an anticancer poison to become a useful drug, Meyer knew, it needed to be a fantastically nimble knife: sharp enough to kill cancer yet selective enough to spare the patient.

I may have no emotional skin and come undone at the smallest interpersonal upset, but I’d make a great bullfighter or firefighter—anything that gets my adrenaline going and focuses me on a physical target. The motorcycle is all of that and more. When I’m on the bike, it feels like a door opens in my chest and the world rushes in, pure, fresh, and sparkling with clarity. It forces me to approach fear with total awareness and to pull reason mind into the moment of intense reactions.

Humans do not benefit but are harmed by misleading animal testing, especially when it comes to predicting the efficacy of targeted therapies.

The act of consciously and purposefully paying attention to symptoms and their antecedents and consequences makes the symptoms more an objective target for thoughtful observation than an intolerable source of subjective anxiety, dysphoria, and frustration. In ACT, the act of accepting the symptoms as an expectable feature of a disorder or illness, has been shown to be associated with relief rather than increased distress (Hayes et al., 2006). From a traumatic stress perspective, any symptom can be reframed as an understandable, albeit unpleasant and difficult to cope with, reaction or survival skill (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). In this way, monitoring symptoms and their environmental or experiential/body state "triggers" can enhance client's willingness and ability to reflectively observe them without feeling overwhelmed, terrified, or powerless. This is not only beneficial for personal and life stabilization but is also essential to the successful processing of traumatic events and reactions that occur in the next phase of therapy (Ford & Russo, 2006).

Cancer is not the only brain disease being targeted for treatment with living cells. Cell therapy also has the potential to replace aging or injured tissue. In this hope for regenerative medicine, modified stem cells are being studied as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

Running held a prominent place in my mental health kit, as essential as medication and therapy. Running reduced the number of naps I took, increased my self-esteem, made me more accountable, prevented my psychiatrist from having to increase or change my medication, and likely kept me out of the hospital, but it hadn’t cured me.

The words are ludicrous, but not if it's you they're talking about, not if it's you they're locking up. Not ludicrous at all for the ones who continue to be diagnosed as mentally ill. A mouthy girl in cow boy boots or a boy who drapes a scarf on his head to pretend his hair is long like a princess – well, they are targets for the Dr. Madisons of the world.

change, even a tiny one, in the way we manage our thoughts and perceive and interpret the world can significantly change our existence. Changing the way we experience transitory emotions leads to a change in our moods and to a lasting transformation of our way of being. Such “therapy” targets the sufferings that afflict most of us and seeks to promote the optimal flourishing of the human being.

(IMRT) has an advantage. The newer, high-dose, conformally directed, external-beam techniques for radiation therapy such as IMRT have been in widespread use for less than ten years; IGRT has been around for an even shorter time. However, some reports of long-term success are now emerging. New studies suggest that at ten years, high radiation doses alone can produce PSA control or cure rates in 93 percent of men with low-risk prostate cancer. What about more aggressive prostate cancer? As we discussed in chapter 9, the best treatment regimen for men with intermediate- and high-risk prostate cancer is still a moving target, but it will likely turn out to be a combination of high-dose radiation and short- or long-term hormonal therapy.

When one of my early teachers, for instance, recognized that many ritually abused clients were still being abused while in treatment, she insisted that they could not be treated on an outpatient basis, but should be hospitalized and kept from their families. She was targeted with a series of court cases involving false accusations that she had allegedly abused clients in hospital. The experience was devastating to her. And she was not alone. Many others faced persistent attempts to discredit their professional expertise, or legal assaults that robbed them of time, energy, and even the courage to continue to treat clients, write, or teach. Therapy professionals in both direct services and policy making, members of the criminal and civil justice systems, and the general public were systematically indoctrinated via the media. Many now share the view that people who disclose ritual abuse or mind control content suffer from "false memories” induced by "over-zealous therapists," and that dissociative disorders are iatrogenic (or else they do not exist at all).

For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your team. Picture that person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You’ve got to reach both. And you’ve also got to clear the way for them to succeed. In short, you must do three things: → DIRECT the Rider FOLLOW THE BRIGHT SPOTS. Investigate what’s working and clone it. [Jerry Sternin in Vietnam, solutions-focused therapy] SCRIPT THE CRITICAL MOVES. Don’t think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors. [1% milk, four rules at the Brazilian railroad] POINT TO THE DESTINATION. Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it. [“You’ll be third graders soon,” “No dry holes” at BP] → MOTIVATE the Elephant FIND THE FEELING. Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something. [Piling gloves on the table, the chemotherapy video game, Robyn Waters’s demos at Target] SHRINK THE CHANGE. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant. [The 5-Minute Room Rescue, procurement reform] GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset. [Brasilata’s “inventors,” junior-high math kids’ turnaround] → SHAPE the Path TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation. [Throwing out the phone system at Rackspace, 1-Click ordering, simplifying the online time sheet] BUILD HABITS. When behavior is habitual, it’s “free”—it doesn’t tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits. [Setting “action triggers,” eating two bowls of soup while dieting, using checklists] RALLY THE HERD.

The personal case histories were the most encouraging. A prominent Los Angeles public relations executive has been living with MM for fourteen years, rides horses, and has an altogether active life on drug maintenance. An Arizona man survived MM and with his wife set up a foundation and website for other families bewildered by the diagnosis. I learned, for the first time, that Frank McGee, host of the Today show from 1971 to 1974, suffered from MM and kept it from everyone despite his ever more gaunt appearance. When he died after putting in another full week on the air his producers and friends were stunned. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was another MM casualty, which led many to believe that he had established the high-profile multiple myeloma treatment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is a full-immersion process in which MM is the singular target under the commanding title of Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. There is a Walton auditorium on the institute’s University of Arkansas medical school campus, but the institute itself was founded by Bart Barlogie, a renowned MM specialist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The institute has an impressive record, running well ahead of the national average for survival for those who are dealing with MM. One number is especially notable. The institute has followed 1,070 patients for more than ten years, and 783 have never had a relapse of the disease. Sam Walton was treated by Dr. Barlogie at MD Anderson before the Little Rock institute was founded, but the connection ended there. Walton, who’d had an earlier struggle with leukemia, didn’t survive his encounter with multiple myeloma, dying in April 1992, a time when life expectancy for a man his age with this cancer was short. I was unaware of all of this when I was diagnosed. I took comfort in the repeated reassurances of specialists that great progress in treating MM with a new class of drugs, your own body’s reengineered immunology system, was rapidly improving chances of a longer survival than the published five to ten years. As I began to respond to treatment the favored and welcome line was, “You’re gonna die but from something else.

It's possible to see how much the brand culture rubs off on even the most sceptical employee. Joanne Ciulla sums up the dangers of these management practices: 'First, scientific management sought to capture the body, then human relations sought to capture the heart, now consultants want tap into the soul... what they offer is therapy and spirituality lite... [which] makes you feel good, but does not address problems of power, conflict and autonomy.'¹0 The greatest success of the employer brand' concept has been to mask the declining power of workers, for whom pay inequality has increased, job security evaporated and pensions are increasingly precarious. Yet employees, seduced by a culture of approachable, friendly managers, told me they didn't need a union - they could always go and talk to their boss. At the same time, workers are encouraged to channel more of their lives through work - not just their time and energy during working hours, but their social life and their volunteering and fundraising. Work is taking on the roles once played by other institutions in our lives, and the potential for abuse is clear. A company designs ever more exacting performance targets, with the tantalising carrot of accolades and pay increases to manipulate ever more feverish commitment. The core workforce finds itself hooked into a self-reinforcing cycle of emotional dependency: the increasing demands of their jobs deprive them of the possibility of developing the relationships and interests which would enable them to break their dependency. The greater the dependency, the greater the fear of going cold turkey - through losing the job or even changing the lifestyle. 'Of all the institutions in society, why let one of the more precarious ones supply our social, spiritual and psychological needs? It doesn't make sense to put such a large portion of our lives into the unsteady hands of employers,' concludes Ciulla. Life is work, work is life for the willing slaves who hand over such large chunks of themselves to their employer in return for the paycheque. The price is heavy in the loss of privacy, the loss of autonomy over the innermost workings of one's emotions, and the compromising of authenticity. The logical conclusion, unless challenged, is capitalism at its most inhuman - the commodification of human beings.

Even targeted therapy, then, was a cat-and-mouse game. One could direct endless arrows at the Achilles' heel of cancer, but the disease might simply shift its foot, switching one vulnerability for another. We were locked in a perpetual battle with a volatile combatant. ... the Red Queen tells Alice that the world keeps shifting so quickly under her feet that she has to keep running just to keep her position. This is our predicament with cancer: we are forced to keep running merely to keep still.

Running held a prominent place in my mental health kit, as essential as medication and therapy.

DBT posits that borderline patients possess a genetic/biological vulnerability to emotional overreactivity. This view hypothesizes that the limbic system, the part of the brain most closely associated with emotional responses, is hyperactive in BPD. The second contributing factor, according to DBT practitioners, is an invalidating environment: that is, others dismiss, contradict, or reject the developing individual’s emotions. Confronted with such interactions, the individual is unable to trust others or her own reactions. Emotions are uncontrolled and volatile. To calm these erratic emotions, DBT emphasizes mindfulness, the process of paying attention to what is happening at the moment, without extreme emotional reactivity, judgment, or invalidation. In the initial stages of treatment, DBT focuses on a hierarchical system of targets, confronting first the most serious and then later the easier behaviors to change. The highest priority addressed immediately is the threat of suicide and self-injuring behaviors. The second-highest target is to eliminate behaviors that interfere with therapy, such as missed appointments or not completing homework assignments. The third priority is to address behaviors that interfere with a healthy quality of life, such as disruptive compulsions, promiscuity, or criminal conduct; among these, easier changes are targeted first. The fourth priority is to focus on increasing behavioral skills.

Hacking human biology Quantum mechanics has the ability to provide us with more knowledge about human biology beyond better disease detection and highly targeted, needle-free therapies. Australian scientists have recently discovered a way to investigate a living cell's inner workings using a new method of laser microscopy based on the concepts of quantum mechanics. And we can use quantum computers to sequence DNA quickly then solve other health-care challenges with Big Data. This opens the possibility of specialized treatment, based on the unique genetic structure of people.

Over the next couple of years, Cole and the rest of psychiatry settled on a trial design for testing psychotropic drugs. Psychiatrists and nurses would use “rating scales” to measure numerically the characteristic symptoms of the disease that was to be studied. Did a drug for schizophrenia reduce the patient’s “anxiety”? His or her “grandiosity”? “Hostility”? “Suspiciousness”? “Unusual thought content”? “Uncooperativeness”? The severity of all of those symptoms would be measured on a numerical scale and a total “symptom” score tabulated, and a drug would be deemed effective if it reduced the total score significantly more than a placebo did within a six-week period. At least in theory, psychiatry now had a way to conduct trials of psychiatric drugs that would produce an “objective” result. Yet the adoption of this assessment put psychiatry on a very particular path: The field would now see short-term reduction of symptoms as evidence of a drug’s efficacy. Much as a physician in internal medicine would prescribe an antibiotic for a bacterial infection, a psychiatrist would prescribe a pill that knocked down a “target symptom” of a “discrete disease.” The six-week “clinical trial” would prove that this was the right thing to do. However, this tool wouldn’t provide any insight into how patients were faring over the long term. Were they able to work? Were they enjoying life? Did they have friends? Were they getting married? None of those questions would be answered. This was the moment that magic-bullet medicine shaped psychiatry’s future. The use of the clinical trial would cause psychiatrists to see their therapies through a very particular prism, and even at the 1956 conference, New York State Psychiatric Institute researcher Joseph Zubin warned that when it came to evaluating a therapy for a psychiatric disorder, a six-week study induced a kind of scientific myopia. “It would be foolhardy to claim a definite advantage for a specified therapy without a two- to five-year follow-up,” he said. “A two-year follow-up would seem to be the very minimum for the long-term effects.

Unlock Wellness with Qi Coil PEMF Therapy: The Key to Holistic Healing In a world where stress and modern living take a toll on our well-being, the quest for natural and effective healing methods has led many to explore alternative therapies. One such groundbreaking solution is PEMF therapy, and at the forefront of this holistic revolution is "Qi Coil." Discover the transformative power of Qi Coil PEMF Therapy and unlock the door to a healthier, more balanced life. Qi Coil PEMF Therapy: A Glimpse into Revolutionary Healing At the heart of the Qi Coil experience is the innovative use of Pulsed Electromagnetic Field (PEMF) technology. This non-invasive therapy harnesses the power of electromagnetic fields to stimulate the body's natural healing processes at a cellular level. By optimizing the body's energy flow, Qi Coil PEMF Therapy promotes overall wellness, vitality, and mental clarity. How Does Qi Coil PEMF Therapy Work? Qi Coil devices emit specific frequencies that resonate with the body's cells, enhancing cellular function and promoting balance. This targeted approach can alleviate a range of issues, including chronic pain, inflammation, and stress. The gentle pulsations emitted by Qi Coil devices mimic the Earth's natural magnetic field, helping to restore the body's natural equilibrium. Benefits of Choosing Qi Coil PEMF Therapy Holistic Healing: Qi Coil PEMF Therapy addresses the root causes of various health concerns, promoting holistic healing from within. Non-Invasive: Say goodbye to invasive procedures and embrace a non-invasive solution that supports your body's innate ability to heal. Versatility: Whether you're seeking relief from pain, better sleep, or enhanced mental clarity, Qi Coil PEMF Therapy offers a versatile solution for various health goals. Why Choose Qi Coil? Qi Coil stands out in the world of PEMF therapy with its commitment to quality, innovation, and customer satisfaction. Our devices are meticulously crafted to deliver precise frequencies and optimal results. Join the countless individuals who have already experienced the life-changing benefits of Qi Coil PEMF Therapy. Embark on a journey towards improved well-being and unlock the full potential of your health with Qi Coil PEMF Therapy. Invest in yourself, invest in holistic healing.