[Lani]

There was an editorial by MD Anderson oncologist musing whether the dire prediction of survival held equally for those who were oligometastatic ie, having only one or few mets and particularly if only one or a few in certain organs ie, bone vs liver vs lungs.
The only way to tell whether close follow-up with scans to catch things early will make a difference is NOT TO TREAT EVERYONE EQUALLY and not scan anyone waiting for symptoms or fractures or the like, is to try to divide breast cancer patients into subgroups and see if finding things early and treating them in various ways (like this NOVALIS treatment) will make a difference.

I have posted papers regarding surgery and radiofrequency ablation seeming to make a difference in survival, but most of these studies are by their nature done with only a few patients.

Let's hope studies like these get taken up internationally--funding may be difficult to find...but the payoff in giving just the right patients just the right treatment and no more and no less will save lives, quality of lives, and costs
of treating patients with so many metastases which are so resistant to so many treatments that the treatments are so much less likely to make a difference and the complications so much worse.

Off my soapbox!