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Bridge to Nowhere

Taking a closer look at the opening act of a glioblastoma diagnosis.

What awaits patients going through the trauma of diagnosis and the decision to proceed with surgery are a broken standard of care and a hodgepodge of treatments that may work well enough to stave off death for a time, but which are far too ineffective to cure. There's a reason medical professionals beat the clinical trial drum so hard when glioblastoma patients are in earshot: they know that resection is a bridge to nowhere but can't bring themselves to speak so frankly. The thousands of unfortunate souls each year who will go on to be diagnosed with glioblastoma deserve far better treatment in the first few days of the ordeal than my experience suggests they currently get.

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