[Lani]

The point this all seems to make is that cancer treatment is definitely a "work -in-progress" Most people ASSUME that short and long term effects are known, whether for chemo, radiation, etc. All cancer treatment has basically been a trial. Something seems to work, they try to find out why. It is hard when something SEEMS to work to try to use less and see if it is equally good, hence the trials of more. Money for trials overwhelmingly comes from Drug companies.

I went to a lecture yesterday at Stanford, where the instigator of a clinical trial of high dose (not available outside the clinical trial and not equivalent to that which you get without a prescription) Vitamin D and Naprosyn for advanced prostate cancer. He bemoaned the fact that there is not enough money to continue the trial past one year of treatment, or even to follow those who might or might not continue on just naprosyn after the trial ended. Similarly, there is little money for the trials of accelerated partial breast irradiation.

Let's make less assumptions (so many of my posts here have to do with previous "dogmas" being questioned), support those doing research to answer these questions, and be as informed as we can. That does not mean not to trust one's doctors, just to be aware that there aren't necessarily "right answers" out there and therefore "one-size-fits-all" thinking regarding methods of treatment needs to be seriously reconsidered

If everyone gets the same treatment ie, radiation therapy, the same drugs and doses it makes it extremely hard to figure out which parts of the treatment might be unneccessarily toxic and which other treatments might be less so.

Food for thought