Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Cancer therapy, circa 1896
From Tyson’s The Practice of Medicine: the treatment of Hodgkin’s lymphoma,
Treatment . . . may avert the fatal termination for a long time. Extraordinary results in this respect have followed the administration of arsenic, and even recoveries have been reported. Large doses, arrived at by gradual increment, should be attained and kept up until some physiological effects are observed.
Five-year survival for Hodgkin’s lymphoma was 40% in the early 1960s, just under 92% in the early part of this decade. What do you suppose it was in 1896? I’d guess less than 5%, with or without treatment. Oh! Just googled it and I was damned close. Five-year survival of untreated Hodgkin’s disease is 6%, ten-year survival zero. We’ve come a long way.
Sort of. Depending upon your choice of cancer. With regard to pancreatic cancer,
The prognosis is unfavorable, and the treatment only symptomatic.
Nowadays, five-year survival is less than five percent. So there’s the spectrum, folks, from one of our greatest success stories to one of our persistent dismal failures.
But at least there are some success stories.
D.
Did you see this article from the New York Times? I am posting the link – I hope it will let you open it: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/health/research/29cancer.html?pagewanted=all
No, I hadn’t seen it, but it’s hardly surprising. Surprising was the reaction of the elder scientist who dismissed the idea so lightly. I took courses for my PhD (in Cancer Biology, as it happens) 20 years ago, so if I know anything, I know what the state of knowledge was back then. (Not so much NOW, but back then? Yeah, I remember.) And what she was proposing should have made perfect sense to her colleagues.
As for
None of those examples are considered folklore. They’re all solid — wound carcinomas, cancers arising in the midst of chronic infection or inflammation, and immunomodulation of cancer.