[chrisy]

Alice,

I agree, and personally I do a pretty good job of remembering, and saying, that the TREATMENT failed, not the patient. When a treatment fails, it's really traumatic and not helpful to have it put in the wrong context.

That said, I think many doctors are trying really hard to change this but they do slip up. Heck, even I occasionally slip up! Last year at San Antonio, the doctor presenting the TDM1 results slipped and said it wrong and was taken to task by an advocate during the Q&A.

I had a conversation with that doctor later in the day (we met by chance) and I told her I was in that study and doing well, and thanked her for her dedication and work. She was still beating herself up about having misspoken in the meeting! I agreed, the language we use is powerful but for me the most important thing was to keep making progress on the REAL goal of defeating cancer!

That will make semantics of "treatment failure" irrelevant