Completely agree, I think she was the smartest and most insightful person on the NewsHour. She had a knack for asking penetrating questions that neither the viewer nor the interviewee saw coming. Just the sort of person we need more, not less of, in the Trump era. Very saddened by this unexpected news.
tangential question, may be there is some doctor here who can explain - i'm not a doctor and just from pure technical/mechanical point of view i don't understand why for example we can't just insert 2 thin, needle thin like, probes (similar to laparoscopy only much thinner and more flexible), one with video camera and LED and one with IR laser, ultrasound guide it to the tumor and burn the tumor small piece by small piece. Wouldn't it be better than radiation for example?
The issue with cancer is that it has the ability to metastasize - that is to travel to other parts of the body and grow there. Thus even if we completely remove that tumor that we see initially, but there could still be millions or billions of cancer cells that are now in other parts of the body but have not grown into tumors that are big enough to see yet. Also, in your scenario, depending on the type of cancer - you can actually spread cancer cells along the path of the needles when you remove them.
In addition, some areas of the body make such surgery tricky because the cancer cells are very close and intertwined with critical structures. This can be especially true in brain cancers.
Thanks for taking the time to make a suggestion. Like many areas, one of the ways breakthroughs in medicine occur is that someone with a fresh perspective suggests something that the experts are too close to see. I hope that this will someday happen with cancer.
I'm not a doctor but have been dealing with cancer in the family. I think we will soon see much more use of fine-needle techniques in cancer treatment in novel ways.
Perhaps the next big thing will be an oil-and-gas engineer adapting drilling, guiding and visualisation technologies to the very small scale.
Directly killing the cancer cells is often futile because you can't kill them all, but we could also use this tech to:
* take samples of the the tumour and its microenvironment to analyse and guide treatment
* inject biological agents into tumours (e.g. T-Vec)
* inject "broad-spectrum" immunotherapies (ipilimumab, various cytokines) which may be too dangerous to use systemically
* insert radioactive grains or auger targets as an adjunct to enhance immunotherapy
* apply local electroporation to enhance the uptake of chemotherapy and breakdown of tumour cells, again to enhance the immune response (e.g. ImmunoPulse)
* take samples in order to grow personalised treatments in the lab for later injection (e.g. dendritic cell therapy)
* provide safer options for dealing with complications like pericardial effusions.
Yup. Plants get cancer too - it's called burls. But they don't have a circulatory system and therefore it doesn't spread to the rest of the body. So it's more of an annoyance.
Not a doctor either, but early stage cancers are characterized by local tumors, and are often treatable. Late stage cancers involve the cancer cells spreading throughout the body and many tumor in multiple organs.
I'm not a doctor but just had a loved one die of cancer, and what the parent has said is correct from what I learned. Here is a breast cancer survival breakdown by stage:
Stage 1 they do pretty much exactly what you propose: lumpectomy (take out the tumor), radiation (zap tumor cells in a localized way) and chemo (poison yourself, but with a poison that especially likes to kill tumor cells). The survival rate after 5 years is 99%.
By contrast you have Stage 4 with a survival rate of 15% after 5 years. This is when the cancer has metastasized. This basically means the cancer isn't just in that body part (in my link, the breast), it's all over the body. For my loved one there were many many tumors on the lungs, kidney, liver, and tailbone. Even worse, it's in the blood, which means even if you could remove all these tumors (and put your body through horrible trauma to do so), they would still come back. At this point you don't cure the disease, you treat it and hope for the best. There are many many different types of treatment. Some won't work for a specific person, some will, but only for awhile, and if you're very lucky some may cure the person, but there are no guarantees and doctors play a bit of a guessing game.
Although there are many different types of cancer, in these later stages there are very few ways a person dies. The cancer breeds in places with high cell turnover in mission critical organs (lungs, kindneys, liver) and you die.
unfortunately most of our knowledge of the subject usually doesn't come as a result of sheer curiosity :( I already had members of my extended family lost to the disease, and my father had piece of a lung removed and tumor in the second irradiated during the last year. My original comment in no way was intended as "cure all", more just about feasibility of another [may be easier on the body] technical implementation of early stages surgery and radiation procedures as well as for palliative surgeries at the late stages.
There are methods where the drug is delivered directly to the tumor via a similar idea, except of course they use tiny tubing.
This allows the use of drugs which if given orally or by injection, would have to be at such a high concentration that e.g. the liver would be damaged. By delivering the drug to the site the cancer alone gets hit with it.
while it may seem similar in principle, it is very different at the detail level - radiation even while it is done from several directions still seriously hits a lot of healthy tissue (even proton "knife"). And i think the radiation burn (at the level of several Sv per session deposited at the tumor site) while is definitely deadly for the cells isn't exactly the thermal burn, with cells dying differently and thus different by-products, etc. With the local IR burning by the probe you can also suck the "ash" out right away saving the body from the burden of dealing with the massively dying cells' by-products.
Do we even have the technology? I know there are angioplasty lasers capable of vaporizing plague, but what you are referring to are tumors.
Even if we did, I imagine that there might be some health repercussion when burning such a large tissue mass, which is why we opt to surgically remove them.
I first became familiar with her work in the early 90's when she was writing for the New York Times. I loved her writing style and always read her articles. She was just as good on TV - sharp, intelligent dialog without the yelling you get on other shows. She'll be missed!
She was a real talent in both print journalism as well as television on both Washington Week and The News Hour. Her and Judy Woodruff made such a wonderful team as co-anchors. This is very sad news. She will be missed.
I'm not sure which shocked me more: Trump's victory, or this. Another bright light in the firmament has been extinguished. RIP, Gwen. You will be sorely missed, now more than ever.
Gwen was one of the best journalists to ever live. One of the best compliments is after all these years I still can't be 100% sure I know what Gwen thinks about various issues.
It's an amazing achievement that she could be so objective for so many years. All others should learn from her example. What a tragedy, the world lost one of its best. RIP.
