these technologies especially in testing ways to use them together, rather than separately, to improve results and give the investment in basic research time to bear fruit. It was not considered appropriate to allow a generation of cancer patients to suffer unnecessarily if their lot could be improved by tinkering with current tools. This investment has also paid off, first in cancers in the young and now in common cancers such as breast cancer and colon cancer. Like recent laboratory advances, the most dramatic advances in breast and colon cancer treatment are still too recent for their effects to be measured until about the year 2000.
When that Cancer Act was passed, U.S. national survival rates were 38 percent for all cancers combined (again excluding skin cancers). The improvement in the use of technology is responsible for the increase up to 50 percent in the last figures reported in 1989, and the substantial decline in national mortality from cancer in all people all the way up to age 65.
The more effective use of technology has led to another dramatic change in cancer treatment that is often overlooked. Treatment has become far less difficult to take. To be sure, it is still not considered easy but, compared with 20 years ago— when patients regularly bled to death or became infected and died, even when their cancers were responding to treatment, for the want of good supportive care—the availability of ways to prevent bone marrow toxicity has much improved. Even nausea and vomiting, never a lethal side effect, but the bane of existence for cancer patients receiving radiotherapy or chemotherapy , has, in only the past few years, become almost totally under control.
