Two Radically Different Medical Tales

A Life Worth Living by Robert Martensen is a troubling account of aggressive treatment of serious and fatal illnesses.  He confronts the uncomfortable facts: treatment is often horrifically miserable; in many cases life is only extended a few years (if at all) beyond a no-treatment scenario; those extra years are often taken up with relapses; and with many rare illnesses doctors don't actually know what to do, and are essentially experimenting on their patients without informed consent.

The Patient From Hell is Stephen Schneider's account of his battle with a rare cancer, during which he aggressively pushed his medical team to do more and to try new things.  After a few years of treatment and slow recovery, his story ends with what appears to be complete remission.  It would be very uplifting, if I hadn't read Martensen's book first.

And googled Schneider.  Schneider died nine years after his diagnosis.  His death was not from the cancer but from heart failure, almost certainly brought on by damage from the cancer treatment.

Further, Schneider's account of physical torture involved in his treatment is harrowing.  If you want a blow-by-blow of what cancer treatment is really like, here it is.  Each intervention is not only devastating to the body in and of itself, but also tends to throw multiple other systems out of whack, each of which then needs its own intervention.  It's a wonder the whole thing doesn't go into a state of massive collapse.  (In fact, it often does.  A similar situation arises with attempts to save "micro-preemies."  But that's a whole other post.)

Don't get me wrong, an extra nine years of life is nothing to dismiss.  But also bear in mind that Schneider's survival even for that long was unusual.  Even with recent advances in treatment, the average patient with his type of cancer lives just six years.  And most of those patients spend those six years having multiple relapses.  (See above paragraph about torture.)

Oddly, for all his scientific savvy, Schneider comes across as quite naive about medicine and illness.  He seems to believe that, with enough effort, doctors can flip the switch from "not normal" to "normal."  He was a climate scientist, who was watching a huge intricate system go into unpredictable and possibly disastrous wobbles when perturbed, but he couldn't see the analogy to the individual body.