A research study assistant slid the informed consent document for the clinical trial across the desk to us.
My wife, Ruth, sitting next to me, signed it. She was in treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where I am also a doctor and cancer researcher.Ruth had flipped through page after page of the informed consent forms. They were peppered with frightening words like “death” and “cancer recurrence,” and caveats discussing horrifying reactions to the experimental treatment. I winced each time I saw a scary term go by.
The clinical trial she was joining would test a new treatment for her breast cancer. Some women in the study would get it, while others would get the old standard. But during the trial, none of us, not even the doctors conducting the research, would know who was getting which drug.
It was, essentially, a coin toss.
The trial, which wasn’t designed to help her or to harm her, haunted both of us. The truth was that the new treatment could turn out to be worse than the standard approach, and we would not know in time to stop it.
This hard reality of cancer research is often tucked away out of view, but we both sensed it every time her nurse hung the mystery bag in the chemo suite. It might be the study treatment, or maybe it’s just saltwater. And then it would start dripping in.
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