Rumi Nations

We often fail to appreciate the marvels of modern medicine. What would have been considered "miracles" once upon a time are now merely   routine . That magic combination of Ethambutol, isoniazid, pyrazinamide, and rifampicin worked for me just fine as it does for   millions . No need to go for Second Line or Third Line therapies. Ordinary housewives are living ordinary lives taking care of their kids while having been a patient with CML for over a decade. And they have no obvious external physical indicators of their being cancer patients. The miracle medicine is of course Glivec. Patients are routinely cured from acute leukemia through the use of bone marrow transplants. Former U.S. Congresswoman from Aizona Gabby Giffords was shot point blank and had a bullet pass through her brain but modern trauma care including   craniotomy   saved her life. Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with   ALS   in his early 20s and doctors told him that he would ...

Tasigna has got fast-track approval from the FDA to be used to treat Ph+ chronic phase CML (chronic myeloid leukemia). To use the technical phrase, the FDA has approved a new indication for Tasigna (nilotinib) for the treatment of CML. This new indication expands the use of Tasigna to to adult patients in earlier stages of the disease. The new indication for Tasigna was approved under the FDA's accelerated approval program, which allows FDA to approve a drug to treat serious diseases with an unmet medical need based on an endpoint thought to reasonably predict clinical benefit. The interesting thing is that while the FDA has approved the drug, in the meanwhile, the company is required to collect additional long term efficacy and safety data confirming the drug's benefit. Thus, with this accelerated approval program, patients get to lay their hands on promising new drugs while the confirmatory clinical trials are being conducted. One can hope that these confirmatory trials will ...

Recent days have seen some known personalities succumb to various types of cancer. Patrick Swayze Farrah Fawcett Sen. Ted Kennedy Lisa Ray has recently revealed that she has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma . I wonder what effect these sort of news have on the general population. People in India, in particular tend to have strange attitudes towards diseases in general ... huge numbers of Indians still believe in quaint stuff like astrology. Indians probably still believe that if somebody gets cancer or some such dreadful disease, it might have something to do with their past misdeeds and the disease might be a manifestation of God's anger writ large. When faced with personal disasters such as these, Indians tend to react in weird ways. They tend to start visiting temples and stuff and do more than the usual quota of beseeching God(s). I find this silly, hilarious, and even irritatingly stupid. Let me explain. I can say from personal experience how medical science has been a re...