• Question: Is it sometimes better not to have pills due to the secondary effects?

    Asked by Marc Álvarez to Richard on 10 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Richard Friend

      Richard Friend answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      It can be, yes. This is part of why being a doctor is such a difficult job! Sometimes the only reason that you’d want to take a medicine is because all of the others that you’ve tried didn’t work, even though the side effects would be terrible. Chemotherapy can be a lot like this, where the treatment seems to be worse than the disease. New treatments are being discovered all the time though, so hopefully in the future we’ll have fixed this.

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