You’d think so, but insulting right-wingers only seems to make Republican politicians even more popular with them.
You do treat cancer to slow it down and give a person a chance to die of something else. My good friends mom was in her 80s, significant dementia, when they found a tumor in her breast. They did the least invasive lumpectomy possible, because untreated cancer is a really, really painful way to die. Far better to keep it away long enough to give something else the chance to take her.
Rush Limbaugh died of lung cancer.
More like lung cancer died of Rush Limbaugh
And my great aunt had metastisized lung cancer, and opted for hospice care, but they still treated the tumor in her hip that prevented her from walking.
There’s a very wide range of choices between, “do everything” and “do nothing”.
Perhaps we could stick with what we do know, instead of the worst case treatments.
Castration, either surgical or pharmacological, is one of the first line treatments for most prostate cancers, and without it, the chance for cure or even significant slowing of the progression go down greatly. These days, surgical castration is rare, but the use of androgen blockers is common. Generally the patient stays on them for 18 months and achieves a testosterone level of close to ‘undetectable’ or more. After going off such blockers, testosterone levels slowly rise again.
Thank you for explaining, rather than just posting, “I sure hope he doesn’t need this”.
Hey, @Qadgop_the_Mercotan , as a real-life, honest-to-goodness actual licensed physician, would you like to weigh in on the overall validity of this statement, please?
FWIW, my mother was on an immunotherapy cocktail for her colon cancer, and it didn’t seem to cause any brain fog. So anecdotally, there are treatments to some cancers that don’t cause a “___ brain” effect for some people.
That’s not in the Hippocratic oath (which I took), which is generally summarized as “acting with beneficence (in the patient’s best interest), non-maleficence (avoiding harm), justice, and respect for patient autonomy and confidentiality.” There are many possible things that can be done, but if it’s non-beneficial or futile or if the patient rejects it, I don’t do it.
That doesn’t really contradict what I said, but my statement probably wasn’t sufficiently clear. I’m a strong believer in DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) rights for a patient, and indeed in access to euthanasia in the appropriate circumstances (enshrined in law in Canada as MAID – Medical Assistance In Dying). I’m also a strong believer in medical treatment decisions being a doctor-patient collaboration, not unilaterally imposed, which is one reason that I despise health insurers so much – their whole business revolves around meddling in that relationship.
Nowhere did I mean to suggest that doctors have a duty or moral obligation to pull every stop to save a life even if the patient doesn’t want it and/or if the situation is hopeless. My wording was sloppy. All I meant to say is that physicians have a moral responsibility to attend to the sick regardless of the patient’s age, which as I said earlier, I’m proud to say is what I’ve observed in the health care system in Canada.
Chemo brain is very real for the people who experience it.
Weren’t you on that for a while yourself?
I was thinking of SURGICAL castration, which is rarely done nowadays.
I was on chemical castration myself after my breast cancer diagnosis; just because I have ovaries instead of testes doesn’t make it any less potentially drastic. Since I was in menopause, it wasn’t as drastic as it might otherwise have been.
But that’s very much not the same thing as
In fact, for patients with less to gain (either because they have other problems or because even if they “beat the cancer” the cost to their future well-being will be high) doctors often do less than “everything possible”, with the blessing of the patient.
Biden is old. It’s possible he has dementia. He may have other conditions we don’t know about. He and his family may decide it’s not worth aggressive treatment. Or, they may choose to “do everything”. Unlike many Americans, I’m sure Biden has the resources for that choice to be his (or his family’s, if he really is does have serious dementia, which none of us is in a position to know.)
I suppose we’ll learn more in the coming days and weeks. I’m not worried that Biden will be undertreated. I hope he isn’t over treated, either.
Heck, my Mum was having radiotherapy for a cancerous tumour on her lung when she was 92! (God bless the NHS). The cancer didn’t get her, heart failure did when she was 96.
I’m not a doctor, but my layman’s understanding is that prostate cancer is easy to detect because there’s a blood test for it. The blood test alone doesn’t definitively prove that you have prostate cancer, but if the test shows high levels of prostate-specific antigen (PSA - a protein produced by the prostate) then that’s suggestive of prostate cancer and warrants further investigation. As President, I assume Biden was getting regular check-ups, and as an old man, I assume this blood test would’ve formed part of them. How was his illness allowed to progress so far? It feels negligent.
Is the blood test specifically for prostrate cancer, or would any regular blood test reveal it? Because if the former, they’re not going to test him for every possible disease every time he has a health check.
Or … they have known for a while and they’re only telling us now.
My layman’s understanding is that the blood test is primarily for prostate cancer (would welcome correction on this if I’m wrong). However, Biden, purely by virtue of being an elderly man, is at risk for prostate cancer, so I’m not sure why they wouldn’t test him for it. The test might not form part of a typical check-up for a regular person (again, could be wrong on that), but he was the President, so I figured they’d want to be extra cautious.
The PSA test is a specific thing, but it’s a standard thing to check in men, at least in the US. I don’t know if they stop looking after awhile, although I don’t know why they would, given that risk of prostate cancer increases with age.
I had two uncles diagnosed with prostate cancer in their fifties. One “treated” it with woo, and lived about a decade before it spread everywhere and killed him.
The other treated it aggressively and seemed to have beaten it, but it eventually returned and spread. He was getting checked, but when it returned, it returned with a vengeance. We lost him last summer. He lived about 20 years from first diagnosis.
I don’t know if this is Biden’s situation at all, but it’s possible to do all the checks and for it to still be too late.