I fear becoming my patient.
Positron emissions where they shouldn’t be,
x-ray deflections that aren’t quite right.

On the outside he smiles,
with only the faintest hint
of the terrible, tragic, and
deathly wrong.

I give the radioactivity
- yes I’m helping! -
then, bad news comes,
the disease progresses,
and pain happens.

The wife, the child at home,
the things left undone.
The great beyond of forever.
An unstoppable tsunami,
not far off.

So I smile warmly.
We share a laugh.
We still have this moment.
We still have this joy.

Our burst of light can’t be seen,
yet it shines brighter
than the photon flux,
that hits the crystal,
inside my camera.

The scan is real,
but what does it reveal,
about what’s inside?

Cancer is an insideous disease. But it can be prevented in many cases, and also cured. Here are some “secret” cancer treatments that your doctor probably doesn’t tell you about.

1. The best cure? prevention. Exercise is probably the #1 prevention measure, yet unbelievably, this is not widely discussed in the doctor’s office or in medical policymakers.

2. Radioactivity. Not external beam radioactivity or internal seeds, but rather radioimmunotherapy. For cancer patients, an antibody targeted to the tumor is used to deliver a lethal dose of radiation directly to the tumor cells.

In emergency medicine, I was taught that “a person isn’t dead unless they are warm and dead.” This saying basically means that hypothermic patients can appear lifeless, but when warmed up you can revive them. You should never pronounce a person as dead unless they are warmed up first.

For cancer patients, perhaps there is a similar sentiment. We shouldn’t give up on certain lymphoma patients unless we have tried radioimmunotherapy. We shouldn’t declare patients with advanced lymphoma as “dead” unless we have tried radioimmunotherapy.

This thought was expressed recently at Hopkins during a noon conference. One of the world’s leading experts in radioimmunotherapy said to all of us, in effect, that although radioimmunotherapy has not been perfected yet, it can be life-saving. In particular, certain subtypes of lymphoma respond to radioimmunotherapy. We should not tell patients that “we have tried everything” until we have tried radioimmunotherapy.

It doesn’t work for everyone, but many of us who practice nuclear medicine believe that radioimmunotherapy is really underutilized. Ask your doctor about it.