Cancer care is one of the top priorities for the College of Medicine’s Science Council. That is not surprising with Professor Mustafa Djamgoz, professor of cancer biology at Imperial College, London, at the helm.
Professor Djamgoz is a leading international authority who has discovered how cancer cells communicate through electrical signals both with each other and with their environment within the body. He is now developing a novel, non-toxic treatment to stop cancer spreading.
Speaking at the House of Commons, where a special event was held to celebrate the launch of the new College of Medicine, Professor Djamgoz explained that cancer is a complex disease that has an enormous economic impact on society, on NHS budgets and on individual patients and their families. He said:
We need to find better ways of treating the disease and of managing it. Cancer is not something that is cured by five days in hospital and a couple of weeks’ recuperation. Patients live with it for months and years.
It is our ambition to make it a chronic disease, that people can live with but not die of.
That means they need more than just the surgery and the chemotherapy. They need therapies that help reduce their stress, control their pain, adjust their nutrition, enable them to relax - plus psychological, emotional and spiritual support too.
It includes the best of western, orthodox medicine but also learning from countries like China and Japan where the incidence of many cancers is low and life expectancy is long. After all, we live in a global village now. And we have to learn how to integrate the science, the medicine and the care.
The Science Council is making a start with a special one-day seminar, to be hosted by Imperial College 7th December. Expert scientists and clinicians from the UK and Europe will look at the latest clinical advances, a neuroscience approach to cancer, individualised integrated care, environmental factors and prevention.
Good medical science doesn’t have to mean treating patients like lab rats, Professor Djamgoz said. It has to be thorough. It has to be objective. And it has to remember that people are not machines on a production line.
(Ed: Gosh. We are not alone!)