Yuri E. Nikiforov
If there's one lesson that I like to emphasize while laying down my near-daily dose of Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful, it's that practicing medicine and surgery is complicated. Part of the reason that it's complicated is that for many diseases our understanding is incomplete, meaning that physicians have to apply existing science to their treatment as well as they can in the context of incomplete information and understanding. The biology of cancer, in particular, can be vexing. Some cancers appear to progress relentlessly, meaning that it's obvious that all of them must be…