Cancer Therapy Quotes

You don't want to inhibit cell division. You want to inhibit cell division in the cancer cells, and even that is not really where you want to do it. You actually want to destroy the cancer cells, which is a different matter altogether. Just stopping them isn't enough - you really want to kill them.

Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission.

Everything on my body turned real dark. My toes, under my feet, inside my mouth, under my tongue - I just turned really dark. I'm still here, but it's gonna take a while to get back to normal. Chemo kills all the good cells along with the bad.

I think one possibility [in the future] might be chemotherapy. And I'm always hesitant to say that because it makes it sound like I'm against chemotherapy. Right now, chemotherapy is the best cancer treatment therapy we have. But let's say we find some way where we can almost genetically engineer the DNA of our being and fight cancer that way. Then, the idea that we used to pump poison into people to fight off cancer will almost seem like the use of leeches or something.

Bringing together the unique expertise of researchers from both NYU and the Technion will hopefully enable us to overcome some of the most difficult challenges in treating cancer patients.

If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.

I tried chemo, but chemo and I didn't agree, so we didn't persist.

In Sept of 2013 I was diagnosed as having an aggressive form of stage 2 endometrial cancer. I underwent a rigorous treatment program that included a radical hysterectomy followed with chemo and radiation therapy.

Such a strange thing. What was terrible for a healthy fetus has been wonderful at defeating the cancer cells.

The principle of treating cancer is to kill the abnormally dividing cells. Many drugs achieve this in a relatively unselective way, killing any cell that is dividing.

The question was, which would the chemo kill first: the cancer or me?

For so long, the mainstays of cancer treatment have been chemotherapy and radiation. They're toxic and primitive. We need to look at it in a rational way and say, how can we help the body heal itself?

Essiac is a therapeutic tea that all cancer patients can benefit from.

It's unconscionable that cancer patients get the wrong diagnosis 30 percent of the time and that it takes so long to treat them with appropriate drugs for their cancer.

....chemotherapy's success record is dismal. It can achieve remissions in about 7% of all human cancers; for an additional 15% of cases, survival can be "prolonged" beyond the point at which death would be expected without treatment. This type of survival is not the same as a cure or even restored quality of life.

There's about 100 different cancers in a cancer cell. And so what we're finding out is, they're finding out ways to deal with one or two of the cancers there, with certain medicines. But they don't know why, if you have that cancer and I have that cancer, and I get the therapy and you get it, I don't live and you live. That - they don't know why.

Chemotherapy is brutal. The goal is pretty much to kill everything in your body without killing you.

Chemo is properly punishing, and it's hard to do things at the usual level.

It is becoming clear that many diseases - especially cancer - are highly complex and may respond better to a multi-drug approach which targets many different aspects of a disease process.

It's possible, although far-fetched, that in the future we could think of cancer being used as a therapy.

Cancer is like a cockroach. It just comes back stronger. I'm tearing apart the immune system of the cockroach and seeing how it ticks. I've opened up my own pathology center.

In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'

Chemotherapy tests your sanity.

Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And we're trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs.

I was terrified of getting the chemo. It's not pleasant. And the radiation is not pleasant.