Hope is a Good Breakfast

There's been a lot in the news over the last few weeks about a woman who had her breast cancer eradicated by a new type of Immunotherapy. You may have seen it -- if you're like me, the word "cancer" in a headline catches your eye.

My wife saw an article about it before I did, and read it to me. A few other people have pointed it out to me.

It's excellent news, for the woman and for the rest of us.

But whenever I see something related to cancer that's getting so much attention, I have the same reaction -- first a rush of hope, then a jolt of skepticism. Anything that's getting that much hype needs to be examined a little more carefully.

Here's the line in one of the news reports that stopped me: "Six other patients in the trial (out of 45 total, with various types of cancer) also saw their diseases go into remission after participating in the trial."

7 out of 45? That's a rate of 15%. Not exactly a number that should get anyone excited.

The original article in the journal Nature Medicine actually focuses on just this one patient. The authors are certainly not trying to hide that. They present the patient as one example of how this approach to Immunotherapy might work.

(And it's a very cool approach. This type of Immunotherapy tries to take advantage of immune cells hat are inside the tumor, but aren't attacking the tumor. The immune cells are removed, as are some of the tumor cells. The tumor cells are screened for mutations, and then the immune cells are checked to see if they will recognize those specific mutations. So, like all Immunotherapy, the immune system is being trained to recognize cancer cells that it wasn't able to recognize before.)

The problem I have with all of this isn't the article, or the research, but the way it all gets reported and consumed. Too much attention paid to splashy headlines and not enough to the details -- for both the sites that present the articles and the people who read them.

That's kind of inevitable in the Internet Age, I guess. Sites want to be read, and people want to read happy things.

And as a cancer patient myself, I certainly don't blame anyone for grabbing onto a headline that gives them Hope. You don't have to read this blog for very long before you see me use the word "Hope." It's important to me.

But Hope is about possibility, not reality. Hope is about what we want to happen, not what is happening.

That sounds way more negative than I usually sound about things, but I need to remind myself every now and then to slow down. I am prone to being hopeful. When I write about new treatments being tested, I almost always focus on the good. I have to remind myself to write about bad side effects and reasons why things might not work the way we would like them to.

"Hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper." (I think Francis Bacon said that, and if anyone knows about good breakfasts, it's someone named Bacon.)

That doesn't mean we shouldn't be hopeful. Hope keeps me going. And I'm not going to stop feeling that way.

Ian Fleming did Francis Bacon one better: "Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it."