Here’s my short list, culled from newsworthy developments that might improve health, reduce costs of care and better patients’ lives between now and 2020, starting this year:
1. “Real” Alternative Medicine. By this I don’t mean infinitely-diluted homeopathic solutions sold in fancy bottles at high prices, but real remedies extracted from nature and sometimes ancient practices.
A good example is curcumin, a curry ingredient from the root of the turmeric plant. We’re just starting to uncover this compound’s anti-cancer effects in humans. Another natural antidote that’s gaining ground is green tea; scientists are sifting through its components to see how it reduces cell growth in some forms of leukemia and other tumors.
2. Chemotherapy Pills. Why get treatment through an intravenous catheter if you can pop some pills instead? To be clear, some of the best and most effective cancer therapies require infusion. And just because a medication can be taken by mouth doesn’t mean the side effects are trivial.
But quite a few targeted therapies, like Gleevec or Tarceva, besides some old-fashioned drugs like Leukeran and new forms of old agents, like Xeloda, work just fine in pill or capsule form. Many patients, especially those with limited life expectancies, would gladly choose an oral combination therapy, the sort of medication cocktail taken by AIDS patients only for cancer, instead.
A gradual shift from intravenous to oral therapies for cancer would transform the practice, and economics, of oncology as it’s practiced in North America.
3. Environmental Hazards. Where we live, what we carry and ingest surely affect our bodies and our cells. We’ve learned about Bisphenol A (BPA), an estrogen-like molecule that leaches from plastic food containers into the foods we eat.
Now, we should expect and demand more information on what’s really in the water, so to speak. And in our sunscreens, and in so many chemicals we use routinely and without hesitation.
4. Health Informatics. The Pew Research Center reports that two thirds of American adults are going on-line for health information.
But that’s only part of the story. Sure, the internet makes it easier for people to learn about medical conditions, but the same applies to physicians. In principle, the internet should help doctors stay current, make sound decisions and provide better care.
Electronic health records (EHRs) will, in the long run, reduce costs from duplicate testing, faxing and re-faxing of reports and, more importantly, lessen errors from illegible or incomplete medical files that are too-often inaccessible. Over the next decade, we’ll see how patients find value in their own records (or don’t), how privacy issues play out, and if electronic documentation of millions of health reports provides, in itself, new information on disease trends and treatment effects.
5. Better Cancer Monitoring. The costs and risks of repeated CT scans are very real.
For a cancer patient undergoing therapy, the current standard involves multiple scans at intervals of months or even weeks, to see how a tumor is responding, or not, to a particular treatment regimen. Once in remission, some people undergo additional periodic studies just to be sure there’s no evidence for the tumor’s recurrence.
The news is that easier, more accurate and less dangerous methods for monitoring tumors are forthcoming. Using microchip-based detectors doctors can, using just a few drops of blood, measure the extent of a colon or lung cancer and examine how tumor cell genetics change during treatment. Over time, this and similar technologies will improve and, with standardization in manufacturing, come down in price.
6. Palliative Care. Not everyone wants to spend the last days of his or her life in an ICU hooked up to a ventilator with tubes and intravenous lines. But few people prepare for the end of life when it happens in a hospital, and doctors don’t generally talk about it in advance.
Palliative care, the kind of medicine aimed at treating symptoms, rather than achieving cure, is underused in the United States. Over the next decade, we should see better education of doctors in this essential field in cancer medicine, and of the public, too.
7. Cancer Vaccines. These work by immunizing a person against a tumor just as one might, instead, inoculate a person with a modified virus or bacterium to stave off infection.
Cancer vaccines would stimulate and harness the body’s normal immune cells to confront and eradicate cancer cells. This year, the FDA will take another look at Provenge, a vaccine that’s designed to treat men with prostate cancer. Similar biological agents are in the works for most other tumor types.
We’ll be hearing more on these innovative drugs that, so far in clinical trials, appear to have few side effects. Whether the vaccines are effective — if they can shrink tumors — we’ll have to wait and see.
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