janelane wrote:

The good news is that almost 80 percent of children and teenagers who get diagnoses of cancer today become long-term survivors.

Holy cow!

-janelane

Hm, that is an interesting statistic, but i want a definition of "long-term survivor". If I recall, the metric that the medical profession and government settled on for "survival" was that the patient was still alive 5 years following diagnosis. I'm curious what they consider "long term survival". Semantics are sometimes misleading.

That being said, it does sound like people are staying alive more often, albeit, perhaps, with some pretty ugly side effects. That's good, I suppose, and I certainly support efforts to ensure ongoing medical care for such patients.

RE: Cancer Care Seeks to Take Patients Beyond Survival - New York Times