Cancer

I just finished reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A biography of cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I have a quibble with the title -- it should be history, not biography. By personifying cancer, he plays into just the mythologizing he is trying to dispel. But that aside, I found the book very informative. I knew the general outline of the story, but not a lot of the details. What I want to comment on here, which I believe is the key takeaway, is that medical practice is subject to ideological capture, even in the modern era of " scientific " medicine. In the center of the book is the horror story of radical mastectomy. Before the true nature of cancer was understood, surgeons responded to breast cancer by what I can only describe as savage  butchery. They not only removed the breasts and surrounding lymph nodes, but underlying muscle and bone, creating ghastly disfigurement and disability. Leading surgeons competed with each other to commit the most ghastly assaults on their patients, boasted loudly of the extremism of the damage they inflicted, and reacted to criticism with sneering disdain. All this was based on the assumption, entirely false as it turns out, that cancer spreads concentrically. In other words, they removed all of these body parts because they presumed that metastasis was confined within a radius of the original tumor and they were removing all of the places it could lurk. They were wrong.Cancer cells can break off an travel through the bloo...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs