Pyro70 wrote:... I will say I’m all for investigation and expirmentation, but it needs to be done in a scientifically rigorous manner.
That's fine for medical ethics and a pharma, university or personal professional positions that profit from delay.
For individual patients, it's all about performance by any productive, reasonably cautious, biologically based means. In the here and now. Also one does not have to be a member of some medical-industrial-financial priesthood to improve on the scientific application of something.
CRC is an extremely heterogenous disease.
That is actually a reason for "fringe" technologies like cytological kill tests with adjunct treatment components and combinations, long before formal testing becomes rigorous enough in 10-30 years, or on the 12th of Never.
Some people progress rapidly, others don’t, with or without medical intervention.
That sounds like some unfortunate blend of medical nilism and fatalism, even if it reflects a historical majority. When the doubling time gets down to ~5 weeks, it behooves some people to work harder, smarter, faster. Also perioperative cimetidine, especially CA199 targeted cimetidine, remains a missed chance for a majority of the true stage 2 and 3 patients that recur to have done better earlier.
This makes it impossible to draw any conclusion about efficacy from any single case or small groups of cases.
We've seen singular, remarkable cases that allowed very real technologies to emerge as strong
possibilities in the here and now. Sleen and Cynthia come to mind.
Perhaps
Kemeny's HAI alums or those that had
laser lung resections done in Germany with massive met loads qualify too. They had less rigorously tested (large, multicentered, placebo controlled, FDA approved trials) treatments that clearly saved the patients' lives here.
We’ve actually signicantly increased overall survival of mCRC since the early 2000s - the improvements have been a result of researchers working tirelessly in a rigorous scientific manner. Do I wish things would go faster? Certainly, most likely research won’t advance fast enough to save me.
What's sad is that there are often identifiable, low risk-high payoff, useful technologies laying around for less vetted uses.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but there is no alternative.
We and others refused to drink that pseudoskeptic purple Kool-Aid.
We found rational, biologically based alternatives, some foreign, some old, some new, some targetable, some testable, and they added together nicely.