of the one-that-won’t-make-me-nervous-about-dying-prematurely dept
My cancer is back. This is disappointing but not unexpected; of the 2/3rds of people who survive their first bout with ovarian cancer, 80% usually experience a recurrence at some point. For me it was sooner than expected, and disheartening because even if I knock it back this time, it will probably keep coming back at shorter and shorter intervals. On the other hand, it took so long that I was still considered “platinum sensitive” and eligible for treatment with platinum-based medications, which are currently among the most effective for this cancer. Unfortunately, over time the cancer becomes resistant, making it very difficult to treat, let alone cure once and for all, and those treatments themselves are quite corrosive and difficult to tolerate for the rest of the body.
Fortunately, there is exciting science underway, not just for my cancer but for all cancers, to find treatments that, individually or in combination, are more effective, longer lasting, and less toxic in terms of side effects. Some for example medications Developments are being developed that can look for certain characteristics of tumors and then deliver a chemo payload only to cells that have that characteristic, which are likely just the nefarious malignant cells, sparing as many of the rest of the body’s cells as possible from chemotoxicity. Particularly with ovarian cancer, which is particularly stubborn, some drugs are finding ways to do that resets platinum sensitivity so that standard treatments can work effectively again. Others try to beat the mechanisms themselves that make the cancer so deeply rooted.
And then there are therapies that aim to get the immune system on board to help the body get rid of these nefarious cells. Immune systems spend their days attacking things that don’t belong in a healthy body, and yet cancers arise because for some reason they fail to recognize or deal with certain cells, which then run amok. So different modalities are being looked at to help bodies better detect and destroy these cells before they can become entrenched. Sometimes these therapies involve medications direct effects on tumor cells or the tumor cell environment in a way that will inhibit their proliferation. Other times it is a therapy designed to reprogram the body’s own immune system to recognize and destroy the bad cells, for example through T-cell therapy, or by working with the body’s own cells.natural killer”cells, which tend to remember the threat better and remain on guard against it. And then there are some vaccine options, including some uses mRNA technologyall of which are designed to do for an immune system what a vaccine has always been designed to do: teach it what a threat looks like and give it what it needs to fight it, ideally without all that extra poison, and hopefully once and for all.
It is in some ways a very exciting time to be a cancer patient. Cancer isn’t what it used to be, and even for my extremely fatal cancer, I was happy to discover last year that a late-stage diagnosis didn’t automatically mean a death sentence—at least not right away. But it’s also terrifying. Each patient is in a race with science to persevere long enough to reap the benefits of these discoveries. We may all be saved one day, but will our own salvation come in time?
And now, here in 2025, it’s even scarier. Because while on the one hand we are on the precipice of finally being able to tame this monster, we have allowed the US government to make the positive choice of letting cancer win.
The cuts in funding Closing labs could very well close the science that would save the person you know and love. The hysteria-poisoning vaccines also threaten to close off some of the most promising avenues for delivering real cures. Meanwhile, a politicized FDA is poised to delay approval of new studies and treatments. And a CDC that can no longer be trusted to control disease only provides aid and comfort to the pathogens that ultimately want to kill us all.
And especially in women’s cancer, a politicized public health system that views the specific science of our bodies as dirty and criminal is robbing us of all kinds of options for treatment and cure. There is prooffor example, that abortion drugs like mifepristone can defeat the mechanism that makes our ovarian cancer so resistant to treatment, because it may be the same mechanism that protects pregnancies that is now failing to protect our tumor cells. And yet it is so little science at the moment exploring this vector of opportunities, because how is that possible? That science is virtually illegal. As almost all science is now becoming.
Humanity has made tremendous progress in understanding the science of the human body, down to the molecular level. We increasingly understand how to maintain the health of these amazing walking chemistry sets that somehow manage to spark souls. And yet this government would drive us back to the days when all we had were leeches and deity smacks, thanks to a hostility to science that is a hostility to life itself. The gift that civilization has given us, the ability to control our own medical destiny, has been cast aside by this administration. And it means people will die – needlessly, avoidably and heartbreakingly.
No claim to controlling “waste” could ever justify what the Trump administration has done. The real waste is measured not only in lost science and abandoned research, but also in the lives that will be needlessly lost, including the lives of everyone who could use their own life force to improve this world if they did not have to succumb to diseases we can fight. The costs of these policy decisions far outweigh the supposed “savings” these misanthropic policies claim to provide. There is absolutely nothing of value that these idiotic, blithely ignorant anti-science policies could hope to gain, and so much hope is lost if they are not reversed quickly so that we can once again have the world-class public health system we first met the 21st century with.
If not, I fear my own life may soon be doomed. And so will we all be.
Filed Under: cancer, cdc, fda, health and human services, research, therapy, vaccines
#medicine #vaccine #functioning #FDA #CDC #NIH