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Jeff asked if I could clarify my statements about "no cure" and mets vs. primary.
Maybe you know something I don't?
I know of no cure for cancers that overexpress Her-2/neu. They can be controlled and a person can even be NED as I am. But - I still have a disease that needs treatment as it is almost certain to come back without something to combat it. If there was something I could take that would insure my cancer never to return i might consider myself "cured."
Other cancers also overexpress Her-2/neu and they also have a high rate of mets/recurrance.
Here is a quote from Dr. Lerner at Swedish Tumor Institute here in Seattle:
Healing Vs Curing Cancer
Author: Michael Lerner, PhD
Source: CancerSource
Publish Date: 10/18/2002
Review Date: 10/23/2003
(Page 1 of 2) Next Page
Reviewed by:
John Durant, MD, Medical Advisory Board
Barbara Given, PhD, RN, Medical Advisory Board
David Heber, MD, PhD, UCLA School of Public Health
Daniel Nixon, MD, American Health Foundation
Helene Brown, Medical Advisory Board
Michael Lerner, PhD
The words cure and heal are often used interchangeably. The fact is, however, that curing your cancer and healing your cancer are two very different things. References to this distinction are found throughout the best of medical literature. Put simply, healing is fundamentally your responsibility and choice, while curing is the domain of the physician or health professional. The physician may support or diminish the healing process, but ultimately, healing comes from within yourself.
The Meaning of ‘Cure’
Let’s examine the word cure. Where cancer is concerned, this word is used in three ways. The first involves statistics. Some people believe you are cured if you live five years without signs of cancer recurring. In my view, that is not a real cure. That is five-year survival.
The second use of the word cure is the one that really matters for you. By definition, you are cured of a disease if you have been treated and the disease disappears, and you live just as long as if you had never had the disease. That is a cure. A cure of this kind can be achieved with any type of treatment -- or even with no treatment -- as long as the disease disappears and you live out a normal lifespan as if the disease were never present.
The third use of the word cure goes beyond the individual, and it is also very important to you. A specific treatment for a type of cancer is considered a cure if the cancer never returns in a substantial percentage of treatment cases. If a conventional cancer treatment exists that is curative for any form of cancer, I always strongly encourage patients to use it, and use it promptly, because, as we will see later, there are no known systematically curative treatments for cancer among the complementary therapies.
Because life is so deeply precious, and because conventional therapies are the only known current treatments that have a scientific track record of systematically curing some cancers, the search for a curative treatment should always start with conventional cancer therapies.
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