It appears to me that there is too much black/white thinking going on, that many lock into one reality of thinking. The danger of this is that we base research and medical treatment on a false premise. It becomes a powerful collective consciousness that becomes nearly impossible to change.
Of course, I've been mischievously chipping away at some less than helpful belief systems. The corsets are not too tight! Yes, this is an actual conclusion of an early study with nuns - they did not contract venereal disease because their corsets were too tight. No one connected it with . . . shhhhh! . . . sex!
And on a breast cancer note:
In 1842, the Italian physician Domenico Antonio Rigoni-Stern noticed that nuns in Verona were more susceptible to breast cancer than other women. Ruminating on what aspect of convent living might explain the phenomenon, he concluded that the nuns' corsets were too tight. This explanation was wide of the mark but the initial observation was sound; we now know that having children makes a woman less likely to develop breast cancer.
Another fascinating belief is that Herceptin is not protecting our Central Nervous System because it is too small to cross the blood brain barrier. And this is why, supposedly, that Her2 ladies have such an increase in CNS metastasis. Of course I don't hear any discussion about the recent acceptance of Taxotere and Platinum Salts as treatment and increased CNS mets (TCH).
I do hear plenty of conversations about the severe diarrhea with the TCH combo. I've previously posted about the Gut-Brain connections. Now add the affects of the treatment on the blood brain barrier. Its enough to make a cancer survivor go hmmmmmm . . .
Now, if we were really smart (which some of us are darn near Mensa, myself not included) we would consider treating brain metastasis by a 3 step process:
1) Introduce a chemical to degrade the blood-brain barrier
2) Administer a targeted treatment into the CNS
3) Administer another treatment to restore the blood-brain barrier
Or we can just mechanically bypass this - which someone has already thought of, and we read about the patients using it on our board:
http://her2support.org/vbulletin/sho...erceptin+brain
Or even better yet, we can enroll in clinical trials that offer better treatments, combined targeted therapies or antibody drug conjugates such as Kadcyla!
Of course, most of this is my own personal opinion, and of course I'm no doctor. Just a wanna be scientist!