Chemo-Poison
One of the drugs used as a therapy for chronic lymphocytic leukemia was previously sold as a rat poison.
Cancer patients who undergo the indignities of chemotherapy are often in a desperate life-and-death battle. They are hardly in a good position to accurate weigh the benefits and side effect of going ahead with various therapies. One expects your doctor(s) to do this, ethically and kindly. Some cancer patients are not properly informed by the medical profession. The patient assumes that by undergoing these terribly painful infusions of poisons he has a good chance that his cancer might be cured. Or at least that his productive, useful, and happy life expectancy will be increased by several years minimum.
Chemotherapy often makes you vomit, it can make you bald, eliminates your ability to taste, takes outrageous amounts of your (family's) money, and may even give you what patients call “chemo brain.” I take this phrase to mean that your brain function apparently is substantially reduced; or in street language you become just plain stupid. The medical profession frowns on using this phrase.
Many times the physician who is recommending or administering the chemotherapy is fully aware, and does not admit to the patient, that the expensive “therapy” he is performing will only work in a small subset of patients. Or that even when it is effective, overall life expectancy may be only be increased by two or three months.
I was diagnosed with leukemia eight years ago, and the negative effects of this CLL are now completely dominating my life. One can imagine that when I see desperate cancer patients and their families being conned and taken advantage of, I get rather angry and upset. I can think of few things more cruel and viscous than taking advantage of the dying or their families.
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