Chemotherapy; A post devoid of all humor

I have never really made a secret of how I feel about chemo. I have seen it used on several people and the results are appalling. I am somehow unsurprised. The idea of injecting poison into the body to kill unwanted guests has never seemed all that smart to me. I have oft predicted that in a hundred years...and probably less...people will look upon our backwardness and stupidity in using chemo in much the same way we mock the use of leeches that so famously sped the death of George Washington along.

Logically speaking there is one certain, unchangeable, unquestionable truth; chemo is harmful and devastatingly so.

I will leave room here for all the anecdotal evidence of people who have been helped by it.

I will even start it by telling about Jack Evans who had his Hodgkins disease sent into remission, the credit going to chemo per the doctors.

Great. But what that tells me is not that chemo works but rather that there are medical solutions to many health problems. And I will never be convinced that deliberately injecting potent poisons into the system is the correct way to go.

At the same time, I am not thinking the change will come as a result of things like this. Certainly her death was a tragedy. And errors are going to happen. One reason medical costs are so high are because in medicine mistakes equal malpractice. I think people have not really thought that one out very well.

In the business you work in are mistakes ever made? Making fun of goofed up news headlines and stories is a solid career choice for many people. Check out any magazine or newspaper in the country. Every issue, every day, they print corrections. These things pass through several stages and still mistakes happen. In my business we write credits every day for mistakes. New trials are ordered in the justice system because of legal mistakes. The bottom line is...perfection does not exist and mistakes are going to happen. Some mistakes are minor...putting the wrong name under a photograph or mis-spelling a name or writing down an incorrect product. Some are more serious...jail time for someone perhaps or yes...even someone dying as a result of making a mistake on a complicated mathematical formula when putting a dangerous substance into someone's body.

It is good to see them working on solutions such as revising procedures...now, lets move most of the medical research money away from how to perform plastic surgery or how to heal misbehaviorally related sicknesses (yes, lung cancer, that is in no small part directed at you) and into how to do what chemo does without the devastating side effects. Maybe then a normal human error won't be lethal.