Word: frei
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...clinical research has been most successful recently with a program for the treatment of bone cancer, osteogenic sarcoma, by chemotherapy, or the administration of chemicals. The field that Frei extols--medical oncology--is the study of tumors, and it is neither clinical nor pure research by his definition. Rather, Frei explains, it is a field only now "coming to fruition," involving scientist from almost all disciplines, and concerned especially with the effects of radiation therapy and chemotherapy on malignancies. In the Farber Center, Frei boasts, "No man can be an island; optimal evaluation and treatment for cancer involves the multiple...
...While Frei brims with oliched pronouncements on the history of cancer treatment over the last ten years, he also recognizes the intense controversy in the medical community surrounding the glorification of the medical oncologist amid the wash of federal spending. "Progress and controversy," Frei wrote recently, "are handmaidens...
Problems arise, first of all, over the techniques of treatment. Both radiation therapy and chemotherapy are methods for the destruction of malignant growths in a live human being, and both can have extremely toxic side effects on the patients. Frei says that he feels limited by the federal laws that required detailed informed consent of the patients he would treat by these methods, and that it is hard to innovate with new drugs when the Food and Drug Administrations is very conservative about authorizing their administration to human beings...
...patients tested with new drugs," Frei says, "are patients with incurable cancer and have received all known acceptable treatment." Testing new and unknown drugs on these individuals, he says, may be worthwhile if only for the hope it gives the patient. "Hope," he says, "is an extremely important factor." What's more, Frei explains, failure to innovate in the National Cancer Institute hospitals may only lead desperate patients to seek new and glorious treatments from quacks. Laetrile, Frei points out, only becomes more attractive in the absence of innovative drug programs...
...Frei says that academic boards of authorities should be allowed to decide what chemicals can be administered to terminal cancer cases. As he said on the telephone to a colleague two weeks ago, "Many (cancer) centers have much more sophisticated people sitting around a table than the FDA has." Frei's image of a self-contained cancer center where researchers determine the limits on experimentation suggests the type of facility where heady and expert investigators can experiment on human beings with impunity, but he emphasizes the ethical obligation to serve the patient first, above any commitment to research. But Frei...