Better Cancer Treatment or Just Puffing up?

I’m sorry but someone has to say it: There are ambulance chasers and, then again, there are ambulance chasers.

I’m watching Maury this morning — not much work these days — and this commercial comes on. Seems this woman was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and her doctor — you won’t believe this! — her doctor, the insensitive, son of a bitch, actually … told her!  No wait, there’s more!  He not only told her she had cancer but told her that pancreatic cancer was a particularly aggressive cancer and she may indeed not survive. No lie! What a bastard.

Well, he doesn’t know who he’s dealing with!  She’s a fighter! So she got up and took her pancreas and fighting spirit down the road to a hospital where they treat you right. You know, where they don’t treat you like some sick person, telling you things you don’t want to hear. Nope, here they tell you anything to get you in the door, like “You’re a fighter!”  Where they play on your wounded sense of fairness in the world: I mean, this can’t be right. You’re a good person. You don’t deserve this. Time to run down to City Hall and get this straightened out once and for all. After you plead your case they’ll surely see that this is some sort of hiccup in the cosmic order. Where they pick one lucky patient out of the hundreds who weren’t so lucky and film her, telling you, that “they,” down at the other hospital, told her she only had a few months to live.

Of course they run that little disclaimer along the bottom while she’s playing with her grandkids or driving a golf ball to the cup or bungee jumping off the Ben Franklin Bridge: “Your results may differ,” or “You will probably have just as much luck as this lady if you sacrifice a virgin to Ixchel, the Mayan god of healing.”

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think there is anything greater or more powerful in this cruel world than hope. But there is nothing lower or more despicable in this cruel world than false hope, unless, of course, it is buying and selling it to people who have no where to turn but a desperate and hopeless black market of hope.

Honestly, has it come to this? Pitting the men and women in the front trenches of cancer treatment against each other in some kind of Papa John’s and Dominoes pizza war? The Supreme Court calls this “Puffing up.” “We make a better pie because we put more love into our marinara! Those other guys just slop on the sauce and cheese and toss it into the oven like it’s …just another pizza! We, on the other hand, serve up a more holistic and compassionate tomato pie!”

If you’ve already signed up at the C.T.C.A. you’ll probably do just fine. I have no doubt that the doctors and nurses and technicians and counselors there are talented and compassionate health care professionals.  Why?  Because all doctors and nurses and technicians and counselors who work with cancer patients everywhere are talented and compassionate health care professionals. My beef is with a health care center that would hire the advertising agency of Festering, Boils and Puss to make their TV commercials.

I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but when I went on to its website I couldn’t make heads or tails of the organization’s puffing or its survival charts.  One chart has the center with a 13 percent greater rate of survival for breast cancer patients after three and a half years compared to the National Cancer Intitute's survey. If this is true, I would stuff that little gold nugget into a jingle and hire a Sheryl Crow sound alike to sing it in my commercials instead of resorting to snake oil testimonials.

If the judgment at the top of a company is so suspect, how can you trust anything they say – or do to get pigeons – I mean patients  – in the door?

There are ambulance chasers and, then again, there are ambulance chasers.

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