Showing 9 posts from August 2009
Many who love a dog with bone cancer need information to make sure pain is managed. Bone cancers are often very painful. Since life quality is so essential for us when making medical choices, we need to always control pain.
Bone cancer is often first noticed as a limp. Many times I have had a dog [...]
The problem with chemotherapy, at least traditional drugs, is that it is indiscriminate. What I mean by that is the chemo drug may not care if it shuts down a dividing body cell or a dividing cancer cell.
Chemotherapy drugs tend, with some exceptions, to go after cells that divide. True, cancer cells, by their nature, [...]
Chemotherapy does have side effects that need to be considered. About 5% of these will require your pet to be hospitalized, on the average, and there is a 1% chance of fatal reactions overall with chemotherapy.
Although I have not seen any published data, unpublished estimates on overall risks of any side effect are roughly 25-40%. [...]
After all this work, dog cancer is still often incurable.
Why?
In this second post on the topic, I would like to look at the flow of information. We need to look at where data is generated. And, as usual, recall the flow of the dollar.
Generally, cancer research is the source of the information we have about [...]
Those who have experienced the frustration and sadness in caring for a dog with cancer may have wondered, “Why is cancer still winning after all this time?”
In the last forty years, successes in cancer treatment relative to effort have been pretty meager. Even if one were to spend the average total price tag of $5000-8000 [...]
