Practical challenges -- part 3 -- and some partial successes

Some practical challenges, or maybe I should say frustrations ....

1) You begin to treat someone who has incurable cancer. Over a few weeks the condition begins to improve, at which point the doctor pricks up his ears and decides that the patient now has a fighting chance and should go for last ditch experimental chemotherapy. You can't say to the patient "don't go for experimental chemotherapy", but once the person starts getting chemo, you are pretty much done. You can't continue treatment during chemotherapy, and your effectiveness is limited afterwards by the damage that the chemo has caused. Altogether I'm not sure whether the patient will be better off.

2) We are now looking at three cases where the MRI shows soft, new tissue around or under the tumour. The doctors can't figure out what this tissue is. We think it has something to do with our treatment, but we don't know. It seems consistent with how Bill describes the treatment working, but there is no experimental evidence of any sort to back it up.

3) Someone is looking at cancer surgery a few months down the road. They know about what we do. They wait until the 11th hour and then ask us to treat it. Why wait that long? Because they don't believe that what we do will work, and they don't want to make a long-term commitment and then have the disappointment of failure. But just on the off-chance that it might work magically, they'll try it at the last minute. Failure is almost guaranteed ....

4) We ran out of time with two cases of breast cancer. The good news is that in both cases the original option was a mastectomy, and the actual surgery that happened was a lumpectomy. But once a diagnosis has been confirmed, doctors are highly reluctant to re-test. MRIs are expensive and biopsies are invasive, and cancer is not expected to diminish or to go away on its own. So it is entirely possible to encounter a hypothetical scenario in which a tissue biopsy after the mastectomy turns up no cancer. This would be very much a good news/bad news scenario. No cancer is good news, but .... We have a to find a way to work in concert with the medical establishment. (PS: In both cases we found out that we did affect the cancer. In one case the affected tissue was less extensive than what was shown in the original MRI; in the other the cancer was found to be a lot less aggressive than the biopsy indicated.)