[v-ness]

alaska angel wrote: "HER2+ bc, as Becky said, is notorious, and although some would probably never recur even if all they had was surgery, the chance of recurrence is greater. .. It continues to be more dangerous because the medical profession continues to avoid finding out whether early stage HER2+ bc can be successfully treated less aggressively without chemotherapy but with drugs like trastuzumab and lapatinib and an intact immune system to boost that treatment."

i fail to grasp how less aggressive treatment can make a cancer *more dangerous*. you say they should try to treat early stagers (like me) with just herceptin and let our *intact immune system* do its work. i would argue that if we have cancer in the first place something is not at all intact in our immune system anyway. besides that, several months ago i started a thread asking what percentage of us Herceptin actually works on, and the number wasn't enough to convince me that it would ever be sufficient to contact a ferocious cancer like ours. i guess you'd have to be a gambler and, in that case, remember the House usually wins. i went through TCH for my node negative triple positive cancer, and i personally would opt for chemo again if i had to rather than die trying the 'less is more' treatment.

valerie