Bad reporting!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6194168.stm
If one is suffering from a terminal condition, one does NOT recover under any circumstances (except for one case nearly 2000 years ago).Mr Castro is suffering from terminal cancer and may never recover.
There is far too much loose language in news reporting.
Brian (the devil incarnate)
Think again.
Many, many "terminal" patients survive just in the US fdue to spontaneous remissions & regressions. That they recovered most often has little to do with mis-classification either, so don't even go there
The actual number is hard to pin down because of insufficient reporting, but any pathologist experienced in malignancies on this side of the pond will tell you they're much more common than the "out of thin air" 1 in 60,000 often quoted.
BTW: that characterization isn't mine; it came from a U of M oncologist in a conversation on this topic
An interesting factoid is that often these patients experienced an acute infection just prior to the regression of their tumor.
ex:
http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v9.../6602386a.html
CONCLUSION
A large fraction of spontaneous regressions and remissions described in the literature was preceded by a hefty feverish infection. The hypothesis that fever can have therapeutic value can be brought in line both with successful historical attempts to apply fever using bacterial extracts and with immunological evidence. Putative beneficial effects of fever should as well act preventive, and indeed epidemiological studies show that a personal history of feverish infections reduces the likelihood to develop cancer later.
Immunological strategies to break cancer cell tolerance should be individualised rather than generic. Fever induction will necessarily induce an individual response, which even addresses the problem of antigenic drift in time. Today we should be able to induce and control fever much better than 100 years ago. The discussion should be re-opened if and how to best scrutinise fever therapy in the future.
Last edited by Dr Mordrid; 29th November 2006 at 01:58.
Linguistically speaking, if someone has terminal cancer and "recovers," it wasn't terminal in the first place.
LOL, exactly what I was thinking
Thankfully linguists don't moonlight as oncologists or pathologists.
Well, if they did, maybe they'd be more careful before telling someone that they were definitely gonna die.
Everybody is definitely going to die!
Brian (the devil incarnate)
"He died unexpectedly"
"What? You expected him to live forever??"
lolOriginally Posted by Umfriend
Titanium is the new bling!
(you heard from me first!)
No, they didn't expect him to last this much!
"For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism."
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