OUT OF THE STONE AGE
Even if she hadn’t lost her husband to cancer, oncologist Azra Raza would have been the kind of doctor who feels strongly about her patients. She sees them on diagnosis, knowing how changed they are going to be by the treatments they will have, and it is always difficult, especially because those treatments are harsh and often not effective enough.
Slash-poison-burn: that is how she refers to the combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation that over a 43-year career, with minor variations, has remained her most useful weapon against cancer. In a new book, The First Cell, Raza calls this “an embarrassment”, arguing that we should be doing better.
“We are living in a sophisticated era of technology and yet we are still using Paleolithic treatments,” she points out. “When I started, in 1977, as a fresh graduate of medical school, I had two drugs to offer, what we call the 7 + 3 [seven days of a drug called Cytarabine and three of Daunorubicin]. Today, in 2020, I am still using the same approach. And we still don’t know how those drugs work; we are just killing all kinds of cells. Why do some people respond while others don’t? We can’t tell you.
“I feel fraudulent, embarrassed and extremely depressed that I can’t offer anything different, that