A new thought

Here's a new thought:

'What it means to win the war on cancer is not to eradicate cancer from our lives, but rather to imagine extending what I call this cat-and-mouse game with cancer as far as possible while retaining as much dignity of patients as possible.'

If you think about this for a minute, we have been fighting the so called war on cancer for over 40 years and haven't gotten there yet. So maybe instead of just focusing on the cure, but what about extending lifespan and retaining patient dignity as well. The author phrases it as though it should be done instead of research for a cure. I don't completely agree with him but I like the thought.

Researchers should be empowered on two sides here: one group work on finding a cure for cancer and the other group work on extending lifespan of cancer people and retain patient dignity. Perhaps both sides are equally important.

These thoughts come from a new book which I think I will read by Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, called "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer". Any new thoughts on the cancer interest me. In this book he writes a biography so that we can understand and dissect it better.

He states 'We write biographies in order to understand, to decipher the psyche, to enter the personality. In a sense, we’ve been trying to do this with cancer for nearly 4,000 years.' Perhaps this will help make sense of this disease. I can't completely agree with him but I think he has a good thought.