The most difficult reality about an incurable disease is that an uncountable number of patients will need to suffer through doomed treatments before the winning formula is confirmed. I think we’ve all had the experience of learning about how doctors once used leeches to ‘suck the bad blood’ out of a patient – it is easy enough to shake our heads now and wonder what madness had taken hold of the medical profession in those days. What isn’t so easy to wonder about is what our grandkids will say when they read about chemotherapy (1).
The one thing the patients of yesteryear will share with those many generations in the future is what seems like an ingrained human instinct for self-sacrifice. Historically speaking, people have always seemed ready to sacrifice themselves for a larger idea. This has played out in large-scale examples such as war and in small moments like an adult risking death to save a stranded child. In medicine, this plays out every day when sick patients opt for an experimental treatment or a last-ditch surgery that, although the odds of success are slim, will at least help the profession learn more about the illness and maybe prove invaluable in helping treat the next sick person.
Footnotes / actually, it ain’t that hard…
1. Scene: some medical school, decades from now….
Wait… the cancer treatment they used to do... could cause more cancer???
