Saturday, November 12, 2011

Cancer treatment shows promise for rapid weight loss | StrongerThanCancer

Cancer treatment shows promise for rapid weight loss | StrongerThanCancer

This is more than a little scary. Drugs are drugs. Drugs are powerful. Whenever they manipulate what your body naturally wants to do - I get nervous.

Perhaps it will work, but a therapy like this ignores the causes of obesity, and patients will not develop the self control needed to keep themselves in a healthy state. That is the best case scenario. The unknown is whether the drug will have other side effects. If it is restricting blood supply, what else is it restricting, or what vital organs may be affected?

In my opinion, there is only one way to lose weight: burn more calories than you take in.

Of course, there are clinical cases where a patient needs intervention. But cancer drug therapy doesn't seem like the best choice. It may be more appealing than getting your stomach stapled, or having a rubber-band put in (I've heard these work), but we simply don't know.

I often think my cancer is a result of having childhood allergies. Year after year of taking antihistamines - a drug made to suppress the immune system - must have taken a toll. Then when I needed my immune system to kick into gear, but it was weak and inactive.

It will be interesting to see how this develops.

For the sake of the patients, I hope it is well targeted to specific cases, but I can't help but worry.

Drug companies want to sell drugs. And with the epidemic of obesity in this country, that population is an desirable target for any marketable drug therapy...

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