魏则西之死背后的中国医疗黑幕

choi

VOA Chinese, May 2, 2016.
www.voachinese.com/content/article/3312134.html

Note:
(a) I have read blogs of Chinese patients or their families, mostly at Mitbbs.com which I last visited years ago.  My observation may be summarized as: I was in shock. Chinese patients knew little; even the best hospitals in China made absurd diagnosis and/or treatment; patients had received treatments (from best hospitals in China) for as long as years that made no sense.
(b) Fundamentally I doubt the diagnosis: 滑膜肉瘤 synovial sarcoma. By definition, it arises from synovial membrane, which lines joints 关节 and whose function is to secrete (clear, viscous) synovial fluid that functions as lubricant. It is impossible that the sarcoma first appears in an abdominal MUSCLE (as Mr Wei himself described; see (c)(ii) ) -- simply because there is no synovial membrane there to begin with.

(c) I assume it is done at the request of his parents. In any event, almost all of Mr Wei's original postings were wiped out. What can be located is other people's postings that have Mr Wei's postings attached. The last posting of Mr Wei's is listed first.
(i) 魏则西, 你认为人性最大的「恶」是什么？ 知乎, Feb 26, 2016
https://www.zhihu.com/question/26792975/answer/88170767
("百度，当时根本不知道有多么邪恶 * * * 可当时不知道啊，在上面第一条就是某武警医院的生物免疫疗法，DC，CIK，就是这些，说的特别好")
(A) DC = dendritic cells

Karolina Palucka & Jacques Banchereau, Cancer Immunotherapy via Dendritic Cells. Nature Reviews Cancer 12, 265-277 (2012).
www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v12/n4/full/nrc3258.html

There is no need to read the review. I can summarize facts: First and foremost, whether immunotherapy works in cancer treatment is questionable. It is true that FDA has approved some best-selling monoclonable antibodies to treat a couple of (not many) cancers. But I can not think of a way how it may work in the cellular and molecular levels. Dendritic cells is more or less like macrophages, except that the former are stationary but the latter move around inside the body (besides the fact they looks differently under microscope). Both dendritic cells and macrophages have the same functions: killing cells, engulf some remnants, which they digest and presents pieces to T lymphocyte, to activate the latter against the pieces (which may, through luck, on the surface of cancer cells). The problems are dendritic cells and macrophages think cancers are normal cells, both of which share the same surface proteins (neither dendritic cells nor macrophages can see though the inside of cells, which are almost the same anyway).
(B) CIK = cytokine-induced killer cells  
(T cells that are specific toward cancer cells -- but there is no scientific proof such T cells exists, again because cancer cells and normal cells share the same proteins -- are withdrawn from patients' own blood and activated ex vivo (Latin: outside the body) to increase the number of T cells, and infused back into the patients.)
(C) "我现在住院，找到了真正靠谱的技术" which is Keytruda (as displayed in the top photo).

Come on. Keytruda is approved (by FDA) to treat a subset of lung cancer, not ANY cancer. The opening statement of the official website states "KEYTRUDA is a prescription medicine used to treat a kind of lung cancer called non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). KEYTRUDA may be used when your lung cancer has spread and tests positive for "PD-L1"* and you have tried chemotherapy that contains platinum, and it did not work or is no longer working and if your tumor has an abnormal "EGFR" or "ALK" gene,* and you have also tried an EGFR or ALK inhibitor medicine.

* PD-L1 = programmed death ligand 1; EGFR = epidermal growth factor receptor; ALK = anaplastic lymphoma kinase."
https://www.keytruda.com/

The molecular target is  PD-L1. But there are few papers that says molecularly how PD-L1 works or do not work -- and what a monoclonal antibody against PD-L1 do to cancer treatment. I just do not see great improvement in outcomes from treatment with these monoclonal antibodies.
(ii) 枚橙(蜉蝣), 二十一岁癌症晚期，自杀是否是更好的选择？ 豆瓣, Aug 15, 2015.
https://www.douban.com/group/topic/78638078/