One answer that immediately struck me was generally in medicine if something is on a decline, waiting for it to get worse is not a wise choice. On the other hand at research time, administering something that might simply kill someone or confuse them into not taking a known existing "good" treatment path because they're experimenting has some ethical issues (unless you're into patent medicine, fads, faith healing, homeopathy, crystal healing, that type of thing).
So in the long run, rather than sitting around waiting for the tumors to weigh 7 pounds because every other current treatment failed as per the article examples, this might be an early treatment option. Certainly "processing" 7 pounds of dead tumor is going to be hard on your biochemistry. But years or months earlier in the progress of the disease, a couple grams of dead tissue, maybe even less, eh, no big deal.
Gangrene of a leg, today, well that's gonna be a tough one. Minor infection of a toenail six months earlier, eh, no problemo.
The interesting part of the human interest puff piece is they ran several trials and of course only the successes get any commentary. Curious what happened with the failures, ranging from no effect to maybe the treatment killed them. Although the journalist thinks what happened to the most successful patient will define the future of this treatment, in the real world, what happened to those folks where it didn't work is likely to define the future. Compared to the amount of ink spilled about baseball, not much was mentioned, which sounds like good news...
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One answer that immediately struck me was generally in medicine if something is on a decline, waiting for it to get worse is not a wise choice. On the other hand at research time, administering something that might simply kill someone or confuse them into not taking a known existing "good" treatment path because they're experimenting has some ethical issues (unless you're into patent medicine, fads, faith healing, homeopathy, crystal healing, that type of thing).
So in the long run, rather than sitting around waiting for the tumors to weigh 7 pounds because every other current treatment failed as per the article examples, this might be an early treatment option. Certainly "processing" 7 pounds of dead tumor is going to be hard on your biochemistry. But years or months earlier in the progress of the disease, a couple grams of dead tissue, maybe even less, eh, no big deal.
Gangrene of a leg, today, well that's gonna be a tough one. Minor infection of a toenail six months earlier, eh, no problemo.
The interesting part of the human interest puff piece is they ran several trials and of course only the successes get any commentary. Curious what happened with the failures, ranging from no effect to maybe the treatment killed them. Although the journalist thinks what happened to the most successful patient will define the future of this treatment, in the real world, what happened to those folks where it didn't work is likely to define the future. Compared to the amount of ink spilled about baseball, not much was mentioned, which sounds like good news...