Re: Need advice on clinical trials


J W wrote:
What life would that be Steph?The one that has incurable cancer that
nothing will help so what the heck's the use in looking for or trying
anthing life? That's the picture you paint for me Steph. I don't see a
helluva a lot to get on with there do you? I didn't say I didn't have
symptoms, I said There are no tumors showing in scans. I'm in constant
spinal pain, always have abdominal discomfort and can never be far from
a bathroom cause I can't shake the shits. .
But other than that why I
don't see any reason why I shouldn't hop a plane, go mountain biking or
climbing, maybe parasailing, maybe go down south and do some scuba
divng, gee what to do first. I asked if anbody knew anything about the
drugs I listed. If you couldn't answer the freakin question why didja
have to just go and post some nonsense to get me more depressed than I
already was? I got fired fro one onc on mid stream, the new onc I have I
can barely understand when he speaks, he has no time to help me find
anything that may help but he has plenty of time to pump me up with
useless run of the mill drugs he knows won't help and milk my insurance
till I croak, That he has time for. Thanks for the advice.

Steph lacks tact (sorry, Steph!) but it might help you answer your own
question if you clarified what it is that you want or expect. The
symptoms that you describe are not obviously due to the cancer in
someone who has had your kind of surgery and possibly has separate
spinal problems (?). So Steph may yet be right that you may not gain
symptomatically from any additional treatment at present (unless
radiotherapy to a spinal secondary was an option, but that presumably
would have been suggested if that was a possibility).

We can also be fairly certain that most of the trials being performed
on newer agents will produce only marginal gains in lengths of survival
and quality of life for the subjects, if at all.

What you probably desire is something more spectacular than that --
something that has some chance of curing you. Like Steph, I don't
know of anything on the horizon that has shown such promise in
preliminary trials, but keep looking around. You have some time..


If that is what you want/expect, in your shoes I probably would not be
looking at any newer chemotherapeutic agents or combinations thereof,
because they will almost certainly produce only marginal gains. They
are an essential part of medicine's desire to contantly do better, but
the prospects are not great for them producing curative regimes for
your kind of problem.

I would look at more novel treatments, ones based upon newer
immunological or gene therapies or other novel approaches. I have no
evidence that they will produce more spectacular results, merely the
expectation that any major advances are more likely to come from newer
methods. Understand that the chances remain slim and with novel
treatments the risks may be even greater than with the usual
chemotherapy.

Peter Moran

www.cancerwatcher.com

Re: Need advice on clinical trials

Group: sci.med.diseases.cancer Date: Thu, Nov 23, 2006, 4:02pm (EST+5)
From: steph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Steph) wrote:

Do you post here hoping to hear fairy tales or the truth? There is the
world as we wish it was, and the world as it is. I'm not suggesting
anything other than you get on with your life.

Group: sci.med.diseases.cancer Date: Thu, Nov 23, 2006, 5:12am (EST+5)
From: steph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Steph) wrote:
First of all, unfortunately your cancer isn't curable. Second, if your
cancer isn't curable, taking chemotherapy or any other treatment if you
have no symptoms is very unlikely to improve your quality of life.
Third, the reasons trials exist is that we don't now if any of these
drugs are better than others, or better or worse than none at
all............

.