But For Grace Of God, Cancerland A Test Away For All?

Having noted the abuse of prescription drugs that led to an opioid crisis, WSJ now asks “Will We All Soon Live in Cancerland?” Warns the author: “New technologies promise to help us discover more cancers in time to treat them; but they also risk ushering even the well into an all-encompassing kingdom of the ill.”

Author Siddhartha Mukherjee relates as an example a breast cancer patient who caught & clearly beat the beast, yet became obsessed with the very unlikely possibility of a relapse … or, with her young daughter’s future bout with the cancer … to the point it not only influenced but dominated her life & even physical health. “Laura M’s experience,” Mukherjee wrote, “presages a strange new world of constant diagnostic surveillance; of dealing with the anxiety of relapse & maintenance; of that peculiar desolation of the shuttle from clinical trial to clinical trial & from hospital to hospital, as she tries to keep one step ahead in the chess game against cancer; and of watching doctors pit their will, wit & imagination against a formidable enemy that keeps changing its shape.” From a public policy standpoint, she observed, the legal ramifications of who is responsible for the if as well as what, where & when of treatment is daunting.

That’s not all. In this new era of high tech progress & heightened expectations (note President Biden’s unrealistic promise to “stamp out” COVID pronto), Mukherjee also wonders whether “we unwittingly, but insidiously, [are] intensify[ing] the totality of the ‘cancer institution’” for not just patients, but for those who “might” one day be patients, like Laura M's healthy daughter; that is to say, ALL OF US. If so, are we headed for “But for the Grace Of God, there go I” medicine?

Davd Soul