Is it coming to an end?
Let’s hope so. It’s not as crude as surgery, but it always struck me as a “destroy the village to save it” technique. Medical professionals of the future will marvel at how crude our “modern” medicine was.
8 thoughts on “Chemotherapy”
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I’ve often thought that future generations will look back at 20th century medicine the way we look at blood-letting with leeches and the humour theory…
Edward, they already do. Didn’t you see Star Trek IV?
I was thinking of mentioning that, but I couldn’t find the precise quote :).
‘Sokay, most people only remember “nuclear wessels”.
Remember in ST:TOS, I guess it was in the “City at The Edge of Forever” ep, when Dr. McCoy thinking about what’s going on in early 20th century hospitals, moaning over “cutting people open…” etc. Or the comments he made in, what was it, the ‘save the whales’ movie? More extensively than that, and about early 1980’s medicine. I seem to recall that he also cured one person being wheeled down the hall of the hospital with one quick shot from his air-hypo.
That being said, the humour theory hung on for some 1500 years because of a fundamental lack of data and unwillingness to get it (from anatomies) or inadequate technology to do so. Now we have a lot of data, (though perhaps without enough ‘granularity’ in some cases) and have realized the complexity of the problem for many diseases, and are slogging to try to get somewhere with them. I was just reading something about medical frustration with how many treatments that seem they should affect Alzheimer’s have totally flopped.
*sigh*
In Star Trek IV, where the crew visits San Francisco and Alameda, they end up in a hospital where Kirk and McCoy meet a number of different sick patients. The one patient that Bones “cured” was an elderly lady, but she wasn’t cured with a air-hypo. I believe the exchange went something along the lines of:
“And what’s wrong with you?”
“Kidney… Dialysis…”
“Dialysis?!? Here, take these.” and he hands her two pills.
Later, during the escape from the hospital with Chekov, we see the same old lady, and she’s telling doctors, “doctor gave me a new kidney!”, while doctors query each other, “Fully functional?” “Fully functional!”
Bones comments about how it’s like living “in the dark ages” during one point in the visit (not sure if it’s when they’re in with Chekov or in the elevator with the doctors talking about an upcoming surgery), and also argues that, to cure Chekov’s brain hemorrhage, “drilling holes in his head is not the answer! The artery must be repaired!”
[/pedant]
If we could get something better than chemo by next week, that would be great.
I would say that chemotherapy is, at least potentially, at least as bad as surgery and possibly worse – depending on the details of both treatments, of course. I speak from experience, unfortunately – post-chemo, I’m basically a wreck.