Lung cancer treatment is most reliable when privately tailored

  Lung cancer is highly malignant and has poor prognosis. Clinically, because some lung cancer patients do not have timely diagnosis and treatment, when diagnosed, the disease has already developed to the middle and late stages, and many patients have metastasized and spread to many parts of the body, and about 80% of them die within one year after diagnosis, and the median survival period is about 6-8 months, including 4-9 months for adenocarcinoma, 5 months for small cell carcinoma, and 7-8 months for squamous carcinoma. Therefore, some patients think that since the disease has developed to the middle and late stage, the time of survival is similar whether treated or not, so they simply do not treat it. In fact, statistics show that patients with advanced lung cancer can only survive for 3-4 months without treatment, but with surgery, single chemotherapy drugs, targeted drugs combined with immunotherapy, cell therapy and other techniques, patients’ quality of survival is significantly improved, and some patients can even survive for 3-5 years. It can be seen that the outcome of treatment or no treatment is very different. Especially those patients with non-small cell lung cancer, if there is no distant lymphatic metastasis and no spread to organs such as liver, brain, bones and adrenal glands, they can undergo surgery according to the guidance of international guidelines for lung cancer treatment, which can maximize life extension and improve the quality of survival.  ”What if I am at an advanced stage and the tumor is too big for surgery?” Some other patients have such a doubt, which actually involves the issue of indications for lung cancer surgery. Some patients either have tumors that are too large for immediate surgery, or tumors that are not large but have distant metastases. For these patients, chemotherapy can be used to shrink the tumor to reduce the stage, and then seize the opportunity to perform radical resection. Combined with various techniques such as chemotherapy drugs, targeted drugs, immunotherapy, cell therapy and even Chinese medicine adjuvant therapy, it is possible for patients to achieve long-term survival, otherwise everything is free of discussion.  Drugs are one of the pillars of lung cancer treatment and one of the most effective treatments to save and prolong patients’ lives. How to select drugs that predict relative sensitivity and avoid drugs that predict relative resistance becomes the key to improve the efficacy. With the development of pharmacogenomics and pharmacogenetics that target drug sensitivity-related markers for detection, individualized drug therapy has become possible. Individualized therapy, also known as “personal tailoring”, is the use of the best chemotherapeutic agent or targeted drug for the patient based on his or her tumor pathology and genetic characteristics to improve drug sensitivity and prolong median survival time while minimizing toxic side effects. However, we should not believe in such tests, not to mention that these tests are used more for research, and more importantly, the “cost effectiveness” of the tests is not high, and patients may not get satisfactory results after spending a lot of money, “Some institutions exaggerate the importance of genetic tests, but in fact, these tests are not that miraculous. Clinically, the selection of targeted drugs or chemotherapy drugs is based on individual patient’s condition and genetic test results, combined with lung cancer treatment guidelines and the experience of different disciplines, and a reasonable treatment plan is given through the collaboration of multiple disciplines, which is believed to be more reliable in this “personalized” way. “