Cancer Treatments: One size does not fit all

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Dr. Robert Nagourney

For people with life threatening diseases, getting the right treatment at the right time could be the difference between life and death. No one knows this better than Dr. Robert Nagourney.

Dr. Nagourney is board-certified in Internal Medicine, Medical Oncology and Hematology as well as an instructor of Pharmacology at the University of California, Irvine’s School of Medicine. He founded Rational Therapeutics and has pioneered personalized cancer therapy using “functional profiling”, which gives each patient a unique treatment road map.

“Everyone basically carries the same genes but one person gets cancer, one person is a basketball player,” Dr. Nagourney said. “Everyone uses their genetic information differently. Just like your son and daughter are different people, everybody’s cancer is unique. And if we try to use their informatics, their genetic profile, their blueprint very often we don’t get answers that specifically describe them. “

Dr. Nagourney authored the much talked about Outliving Cancer: The Better, Smarter Way to Treat Your Cancer where he describes his reasoning for this rogue approach to cancer medicine.

Cancer Treatments: One size does not fit all

For people with life threatening diseases, getting the right treatment at the right time could be the difference between life and death. No one knows this better than Dr. Robert Nagourney.

Dr. Nagourney says that diagnosis and treatment of cancer are not always accurate and can cause more harm than good if not implemented properly.

“That really comes from the error fundamental to the way we look at cancer,” Nagourney said. “We just to think that cancer grew too much, so we studied its growth. And to find drugs and combinations to treat it we would then see what drugs stopped it from growing. Well as a result we never really got any answers, I mean people didn’t get better when we selected it so one laboratory said well if a cancer cell exposed to drugs can grow happily than it’s probably very resistant.”

The failure rate of conventional treatments motivated him to innovate better solutions.
Dr. Robert Nagourney joined Mike Walters in the studio to discuss individual treatment for cancer patients and why he encourages everyone to always question conventional wisdom.

Follow Dr. Nagourney on Twitter: @RobertNagourney