User talk:Geargeek01

Welcome!

Hello Geargeek01, welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Our intro page contains a lot of helpful material for new users—please check it out! If you need help, visit Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on this page, followed by your question, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:57, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Chemotherapy

Hi Geargeek, and welcome to Wikipedia. I've removed your changes to Chemotherapy, because they removed accurate information. The fact is that chemotherapy doesn't work at all in some cancers, and that it's completely unnecessary in others.

Think about it: you'd never send someone with a small spot of simple skin cancer in for chemo, would you? That person can be 100% permanently cured by cutting off the cancerous spot. Why would anyone make them take some of the most dangerous drugs on the market for months just because the spot had a "cancer" label? If that happened to you, you'd be calling a lawyer or the medical board about malpractice.

We take an approach at Wikipedia that we call WP:NOTCENSORED. By this, we mean that we tell the facts (as supported by the best expert sources we can find) as best we can, without worrying about whether our readers are emotionally strong enough to hear the fact that chemotherapy doesn't always work or that it is sometimes futile medical care pushed by what today's newspaper accurately called "death-denying doctors". Telling a possibly dying patient that there's no point in doing chemotherapy is extremely difficult for doctors—harder, they say, for the doctor to say it, than for the patients to hear it (and that must be very hard, even when they half-suspect it).

The sources say that chemo works well for some cancers, poorly for others, and provides zero benefit in others. We therefore say what the experts say, even if the facts are less pleasant than other options. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:11, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Geargeek01. You have new messages at WhatamIdoing's talk page.
Message added 19:26, 8 June 2011 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 8 June 2011 (UTC)