While I would never pass judgment on anyone who does not want to seek excruciatingly painful treatment, I am grateful for all those who do and add to the data that allows medicine to progress and increase quality of life for those in the future.

It is only by giving people too much and too little chemotherapy that humans figured out the dosages and regimens that optimize survival and minimize relapse rates.

I think about it a lot when I see kids in the pediatric cancer ward, and what decision I would make for myself, versus the decision to subject a child to very painful treatments to kill the cancer. And how mine only has a good prognosis because so many others went through hell, and didn’t survive.