Radiation therapy safe, effective and lifesaving
Monday, February 1, 2010 at 20:24 There is a good article in The New York Times that will, no doubt be misinterpreted by many cancer patients considering whether or not to have lifesaving radiation therapy.
The article is about several horrible, and completely avoidable, ‘accidents’ where cancer patients in New York state hospitals received overdoses of radiation.
The bottom line, from me anyway - and I had seven weeks of radiation therapy for my Stage IIIa breast cancer - is this:
This is what you get from a for-profit, often ad hoc, based system of medicine.
This is why medical consumers must understand why it is so important to do their homework, get second opinions, and go to the best facility possible. That isn’t easy for a sick person. I know. But I can attest that my treatment at the best cancer center in the world - M. D. Anderson - was no more expensive than had I gotten it in Reno, Nevada.
At centers of excellence - like M. D. Anderson or Sloan-Kettering, for example - they are not doing radiation therapy as a sideline, value added service. It’s an integral part of the institution’s mission. There are more hours, more patients, successfully treated there than at the average hospital - therefore the technicians and providers have exponentially more experience. The safety protocols are rigorous to say the least.
Please, don’t base your decision to get radiation therapy or not on these horrible examples. Base your decision on sound, critical thinking and evidence of efficacy. And go where they do a very lot of it.
Here is a good article by one of my team members at The University of Texas, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas in the newest edition of Cancerwise: