Cancer treatment: sorting the good news from the hype

The newspapers love a cancer research story, but many are misleading or won ’t affect patients for many years. But there is plenty of progress worth reportingEvery news story about cancer research should come with a health warning: believe the hope, but not the hype. Good headlines are quick and catchy, good science is steady steps taken on a complicated issue over a long time. If a new treatment is still being researched, it could be metaphorical miles and actual years away from getting into the hands or bodies of patients. Asblogger Kay Curtin, who has advanced melanoma, puts it: “The media tend to pick one line on a report and run with it, but they do not draw attention or highlight that it’s just a potential benefit, or the fact that many of these are just proven in a petri dish or a mouse and very often do not prove effective when tested on humans. It is cruel to exis ting patients to make claims with misleading headlines.”One of the best ways to deal with cancer is to divide and conquer, based on as much knowledge as we can get of how individual tumours work. Treating all cancers from the same part of the body equally isn ’t good enough – you must match the right patient with the right treatment.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Cancer research Health & wellbeing Life and style Society Medical research Science Source Type: news