Miracle cure - what do the papers have to say

I read with interest, as I'm sure many people did, the news articles about the apparent cure of the man in Seattle with advanced melanoma skin cancer. His doctors tried a very new and experimental approach in cancer treatment, which looks as if it has worked for this man. The doctors removed some of his blood and identified a particular white blood cell that was specifically primed to attack the melanoma cells. They then cloned the white blood cell and gave them back to the man. The large number of this white blood cell then attacked the cancers and the tumours disappeared.

It's great news for this man and his family. And potentially encouraging for lots of others. But this treatment is so experimental at this stage that it will be many years before a treatment like this is available to others, if indeed it ever is. The treatment is also very individual and perhaps unlikely to be widely available.

The trouble with media reports of research like this is that they can often give false expectations. It's right that news about new developments is shared, but newspapers should perhaps give a more balanced view. All the reports I read about this latest breakthrough in cancer treatment did mention that more trials are needed and that it may be years before the treatment is available, but these details were kept to a minimum and possibly lost in the whole excitment of the news about a 'wonderful new cure'.

As a cancer nurse I tend to read nearly everything in the press about cancer, in fact at Cancerbackup we're lucky to have someone scan all the press for stories for us. I'm not sure what I'd do if I were a cancer patient. I guess it would depend on how things were going for me, but I suspect that I would continue to read the papers and search on the internet.

It has its dangers though, as this latest news highlights. I think if I had advanced melanoma it would be difficult not to get excited by this latest treatment, only to become disappointed that it isn't going to be available. It's a difficult one and I feel for anyone who may find themselves in that situation.