To the editor: As talked about within the op-ed, a failure by medical doctors to speak, navigate and promote fairness might additionally imply an absence of up-to-date medical data (“Being insured in America is not the same as having access to care,” March 19). Sure, California ranks excessive within the quickly rising subject of most cancers remedy, however typically, whether or not in our state or throughout the nation, physicians won’t pay attention to the newest expertise. I do know this firsthand, as I used to be recognized with terminal most cancers in November 2022.
My daughter was 4 months pregnant and anticipating our first grandchild. Medical doctors didn’t anticipate me to see him based mostly on my prognosis.
However my hospital, Cedars-Sinai, practiced state-of-the-art drugs and ran a biomarker evaluation on the most cancers, revealing a mutation. Additional remedy utilizing focused remedy after it unfold has put me within the class of “no proof of illness,” and now I’ve lived to satisfy not just one grandchild, however two.
In immediately’s world, you need to go to a “heart of excellence” the place prime medical doctors apply, even when they’re out of state. It might save your life.
Robin Clough, Santa Clarita
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To the editor: Visitor contributor David Robles’ piece jogged my memory of my good friend, Jessica, who at age 50 developed a thymoma — a tumor on her thymus gland. Making an attempt to diagnose a cough, her physician took an X-ray of her lungs, which confirmed a faint shadow above her lungs and coronary heart. By the point an additional scan recognized it as a tumor, it was Stage 4.
Insurance coverage paid for an oncologist who handled the tumor historically, with radiation and, I assume, chemotherapy. At her second-to-last assembly with the oncologist, he declared he had cured her.
Jessica had been researching and located that experimental surgical procedure eradicating all of the necrotic tissue across the tumor website was the one assure of the tumor not coming again. Her insurance coverage wouldn’t cowl the surgical procedure. When she requested, “Properly, now what do I do?,” the response was, “Palliative care?”
Positive sufficient, the tumor got here raging again inside a month or two. To today, I want she had merely paid out of pocket and fought with the insurance coverage firm afterward. She is perhaps alive immediately.
Betsy Rothstein, Lengthy Seashore
