Cancer Survivors: A Physician’s Perspective

Abstract

During the past three decades since the declaration of a war on cancer with the National Cancer Act of 1971, we have been exposed to a very public display of both the challenges and triumphs in this war. As a young medical oncologist, I anxiously awaited each annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), expecting to hear the latest small advances in the treatment of leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease, and then breast cancer (the first solid tumor that seemed to respond to multiagent chemotherapy), gradually seeing plateaus in the survival curves suggesting cure. With the phase II trials of cisplatinum, there were rumors of young men with advanced testicular cancer rising from their deathbeds after a single course of treatment. Soon thereafter, the Einhorn regimen1 of vinblastine, bleomycin and cisplatin, brought about high cure rates in this rare but devastating cancer of young men. And of course, three decades later we all know the story of Lance Armstrong, one of the world’s most famous testicular cancer survivors. However, as the breast cancer activists reminded us in the early 1990s, there were still more American women dying each year from breast cancer than U.S. deaths during the entire Vietnam War.2*

Forty-four thousand women were dying each year from breast cancer. While subsequent estimates of death in Vietnam were 759,000, breast cancer activists often used this for a point (Patricia A. Ganz, personal recollection).