Bad News About Chemotherapy
You know all those immunohistochemical stains for different types of cancer; the ones that say what a patient has and what chemo works for her? Well, because we live in a time of discovery, and thus of great uncertainty, standards and scoring vary greatly from laboratory to laboratory. We know this from the leukemia, lung cancer and mesothelioma litigation. Now Gina Kolata has written about it in the breast cancer context in the NYTimes in: "Cancer Fight: Unclear Tests for New Drug"
Years from now, we hope, when it's all clear and obvious, historians will look back on this era and marvel at our tolerance for untested treatments, primitive diagnostics and a swing-for-the-fences approach to our health. For now though it's the best we can do.
