Medical News: Body Weight Makes No Difference in Ovarian Cancer Survival - in Hematology/Oncology, Other Cancers from MedPage Today

i am so angry about this that i almost can't talk about it.

Medical News: Body Weight Makes No Difference in Ovarian Cancer Survival - in Hematology/Oncology, Other Cancers from MedPage Today

All patients received chemotherapy administered according to their actual body weight. Often, chemotherapy is administered based on ideal weight, which may lead to insufficient doses for obese patients, according to the researchers.

in plain english, when they gave the patients doses of medicine calculated as to what they actually *did* weigh, rather than what the medical profession thought they *ought* to weigh, fat women with ovarian cancer live just as long as skinny women with ovarian cancer.

chemotherapy is nearly always systemically administered rather than directly administered to the tumor. this means you take pills or they inject the medicine into you.

that means that in order to be effective, you have to adjust the size of the dose to reflect the size of the system aka patient.

that means that when they weigh you when you go in to see your oncologist? they may or may not be using that information for anything useful, like, making sure your treatment is effective.

goddamnit.