Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [67]
Nothing we tried was able to halt the inexorable march of the cancer that migrated into the middle of Mom’s brain, where it could not be resected or radiated. The MRI diagnostic report was sterile but bone chilling: “Again identified is an approximately 2.5 × 4.0 cm mass in the right frontal lobe involving the corpus collosum. A similarly sized irregular mass is again identified in the left frontal lobe.” My mom was dying. There was nothing to lose in trying some alternative cancer treatments, right?
The world of alternative and complementary medicine is a complex and murky one, particularly in the cancer community, involving countless unsubstantiated claims alongside glowing testimonials from cancer survivors (dead men tell no tales here either). As a former professional bicycle racer I could not be prouder of the fact that Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France six times after coming back from death’s door with testicular cancer that had trekked to his lungs and brain. It shall always reside in the annals of human achievement as akin to a miracle (although Lance attributes it entirely to good science, medicine, and training, as do I). But what about all those other cancer patients who never rode a bike again? We don’t hear about them. This is an inherent problem in many fields of study: we remember the hits and forget the misses, celebrate the triumphs and bury the defeats, publish the successes and file-drawer the failures. (In scientific research, in fact, this is called the file-drawer problem, in which journals are inclined to publish only positive results. Negative results—the discovery, for example, that something does not cause cancer—usually get filed away as failed experiments.)
When faced with a grim prognosis we are typically offered a choice between scientific medicine that doesn’t work and alternative medicine that might work. In fact, as I discovered in the very agonizing process of trying to save my mother’s life, there is only scientific medicine that has been tested and everything else that has not been tested. Alternative medicine is not a matter of everything to gain and nothing to lose. There is much to lose, in fact, as I came to realize at a deep emotional level. Schlepping my dying mother around the country grew less appealing as I realized that the treatments might kill her before the cancer did. (Not to mention what a boatload of medications does to one’s stamina and energy. Mom was downing a dozen different drugs every day, all of which played havoc with her biochemistry.) Given the ultimate fate of all flesh, what really would be accomplished in running down such chimera? My dad and I decided that it would be best if we spent as much quality time with Mom as we could.
The end came sooner than we thought. The tumors (or possibly the temozolomide) upset Mom’s balance and she began falling—a risky thing when one is missing half a skullcap. We watched her as closely as was practical, but in the middle of the night she stumbled and fell headfirst into the corner of a television set, knocking herself unconscious. At four in the morning, waiting in an emergency room as a medical team tried to resuscitate her, it struck me as almost absurd after all of this to have the staff psychologist inquire if I would like to talk about my feelings. At least she didn’t suggest an antidepressant.
Mom’s body recovered, but her brain did not. She never regained full consciousness, although she could seemingly answer questions through hand squeezes. Someone was in there, so we kept her alive with a feeding tube. But after many agonizing weeks we arrived at the