Breast Cancer Patients to Get Less Chemo - thought provoking

http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/...ap2382891.html

RB

ABSTRACT

".....For years, doctors have known exactly what to do with breast cancer patients like Eva Ossorio: Poison them. Blasting women with toxic chemicals was considered the best way to save their lives. The bigger the cancer or the more it had spread, the more vile liquid doctors pumped into their veins to try to kill it.

But there's been a sea change in the last year.

Guidelines recently adopted in Europe and similar ones unveiled this weekend at a conference in Texas will result in far fewer women getting chemotherapy in the future.

The new advice calls for choosing a treatment based on each woman's particular type of tumor.

"In the past, we made all decisions based on how big the tumor was and whether the lymph nodes were involved. If you had a lot of cancer, you got treated one way, and if you had a little cancer, you got treated another way," said Dr. Eric Winer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston. ....." MORE