The Future of Cancer Care

I will never forget the first child I saw die of cancer. I was a medical student tagging along with my dad, who was attending the general pediatric medicine service at Arkansas Children's Hospital. She was three years old, sleeping peacefully in a crib. She was thin and bald from chemotherapy. I thought how peaceful and almost angelic she looked. I might have been in the room for 30 seconds because she was in comfort care, and there was nothing left to do.

She had failed all therapies, and the medical staff was resigned to her death. The next day, we returned to her room, and the room was empty. The floor nurse reported she had died the night before. I decided for a short while I wanted to be a pediatric oncologist. As my experience with oncology grew, I observed hundreds if not thousands of people endure chemotherapy, including a couple of my own family members. In this Advanced Respiratory and Sleep Medicine blog article, I discuss a revolutionary method of treating cancer introduced by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

An alternative to cytotoxic drugs and chemotherapy.

At that point, cytotoxic drugs were the treatment. I often wondered if chemotherapy did more harm than good. Nausea, vomiting, hair loss, weight loss, and lethargy seemed to be expected side effects. My encounters were mostly with hospitalized patients, so I saw the sickest subset. Cytotoxic drugs kill all rapidly reproducing cells which is why they cause so many problems. It was a non-specific killing. With a novice understanding of immunology and oncology, it seemed there should be a way to direct someone's immune system to knock out only the bad cancer cells.

For the first time, I read about this type of approach in an article on nature.com. Researchers at NIH took lymphocytes out of a cancer patient, identified which cells were successfully attacking cancer, mass-produced these cells, and reintroduced them into the patient. Metastatic cancer disappeared. It is only one patient. It could be a coincidence. I really hope this is the beginning of a new age in cancer care.

Treat the underlying cause.

If you need help with your sleep, instead of looking to the pill bottle, approach your insomnia or poor quality sleep like any other problem. Identify the underlying cause and treat it. I can't promise the process will be simple, but it will be more effective than taking pills.