Reply #4: Melanoma Patients

[LeighAnn]

One puzzling finding: The shortest treatment time was for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, at 17.8 hours the first year. Early-stage melanoma can be surgically removed with good survival, but it's often discovered late. The study didn't address if the shorter treatment time was because melanoma patients had fewer treatments to try, or some other reason.

Too often I hear of stage IV melanoma patients that started out as stage one patients, then lo and behold two years after the initial surgery that was supposed to have cured them, they've got it all throughout their bodies. I wonder if it's woefully undertreated in its early stages, and then shamefully undertreated by doctors who look at the odds and don't try very hard in later stages. That's what this study suggests to me. There are plenty of stage IV survivors at http://www.mpip.org