Oncologist describes a career dealing with cancer
Dr. Azra Raza wrote a full length essay on cancer that you can find in the link for source reference. Here is brief summary of her essay. This oncologist focuses on acute myeloid leukemia, a bone-marrow malignancy. AML represents a third of all leukemia cases. At the moment, the typical age of diagnosis is 68; approximately 11,000 individuals pass away from the disease each year. About 24% of these adults reach five-years of survival after diaganosis. Indeed, a bone-marrow transplant can rise the probability of survival to 50% at the most. These numbers have barely changed since the 1970’s.
Cancer mortality in the U.S. has dropped 25% following a high point in 1991. Hence the number of lives saved is roughly 2.4 million lives saved. Better medical treatments is not the reason for this drop. Instead, smoking cessation and better screening have resulted in 36% fewer deaths for frequent cancers—lung, colorectal, breast and prostate.
Meanwhile, the cost of cancer drugs has skyrocketed, estimated to pass $150 billion by 2020. The price of the newest immunotherapies is millions, thus the practices of cancer treatment are unsustainable.
A paradigm shift would be necessary for better outcomes. Currently, most research and expense concentrate on treating the worst cases.
It would be far better to commit to anticipating, locating and eliminating the first cancer cells.
Prevention is without a doubt the best alternative to the painful, difficult mix of slash, poison and burn. It’s the most global method to save lives, besides the estimated cost-savings from early diagnosis add up to over $26 billion a year.