Originally published: . Volume 8, No. 8. Source pages: 2.
The poignant loss of our colleague Conni Patterson, reminds us that medicine sometimes has little to offer a person who comes down with a dangerous form of cancer.
Not much real progress has been made in curing the serious cancers, even though we’ve been at it since Nixon signed the National Cancer Act and threw down the “War on Cancer” gauntlet in 1971. I wonder if Nixon saw Kennedy put a man on the moon and thought, “How hard can it be?”
You can’t blame him––Not finding something you are looking for after 46 years requires some talent, just applied in the wrong directions.
Since I can’t image that the failure is at the individual level, that leaves the group level and the large system as the culprit for this poor job performance. One process variable at fault is probably––information flow.
The medical/pharma industrial complex has a bad rep when it comes to information flow. It took 25 years for them to stop x-raying pregnant women after we knew it hurt the unborn; the news of folic acid and neural tube deficits seemed to take that long; and the link between Vitamin D3 and cancer, preached by outsiders for years, is only lately common knowledge.
I had my own first-hand experience when my sister died of a serious cancer in the 90s. Like Conni, she had a nasty, glandular cancer. Suzie first went through the surgery, but then it spread and then she did the chemo and then MD Anderson sent her home to get her things in order.
I frantically scrambled around for an experimental treatment, which Suzie now qualified for, since she’d run through the rest. We decided on a “biological response modifier” designed by a Presbyterian minister of all things, Mr. Hill, where he attempted to use a tricky combination of insulin and potassium to force the person’s internal biochemistry to go into infection-fighting mode, and rev up the immune defenses by 10, 100 or 1,000 fold. He had studied spontaneous remissions and found that this was what happened with them, and he’d shown success in animals. It was non-toxic and she could stay at home.
The effort took constant micromanaging on my part, getting the physician, nurses, pharmacy and lab on the same page, daily if not hourly to keep her in the effective biochemical “zone.”
We obtained a “mild response” but not enough to save her life. Mr. Hill judged that her immune system was too weak by that time and the growth of the cancer too fast.
That was 1996. I followed Mr. Hill’s efforts for a number of years and he reported to me that trying to get a study done properly through the official channels was extremely frustrating. He found that the precision needed was almost impossible for the medical staff and it became clear to him that the motivation was just not there to truly test his method. The patients were always already very sick and their immune systems weakened by chemotherapy. The last I heard, he was going to look for some avenue to test the method in healthy, newly diagnosed people, but that was not allowed in the US and so he’d have to find something international. He was not a young man then and I don’t know what happened to him and his work.
If there were a cure for cancer, could it make it to the light of day, or to the tipping point, so that people would have the information when they needed it?
Psychologists should see our roles as not only producing scientific and psychological truth, but to somehow cause this information to get to the level of our society so that it makes a difference.
This year the Times did not sweep the Best Investigative Reporting in our Division 7, which is the Louisiana Press Association division for some of us little guys. At first I was disappointed, since we’d won for three years in a row.
But when I found out that another little guy, the Lafayette Independent had not only grabbed the first place in Division 7 but had gone on to win the whole shooting match, beating out the heavy-weights like the Advocate and Times-Pic, for the Freedom of Information honor, the most prestigious award of the Press Association, I just felt happy for them. I felt happy for all of us.
They had the courage to force the issue, to kick in the door, so that a town official gave over the information that the public deserved. A judge even put the guy in jail for failing his duty as a records custodian.
Hooray for the little guy. And hooray for freedom of information.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.