SignifyMD

There is an especially outlandish conspiracy theory that oncologists are hiding the cure for cancer Its proponents must think us particularly noble, then, when we sacrifice our lives to keep the secret: forgoing a panacea and succumbing to the very disease we treat Dr. Shroff is not the only “wounded healer” I’ve known, but her legacy is far more than the wretched illness that claimed her own life too soon She did her very best to push oncology forward, especially for patients with notoriously difficult-to-treat biliary tract cancers (a close relative, anatomically and sometimes pathophysiologically, to pancreatic adenocarcinoma) I remember her incredible humility to stand at the podium at one of our largest scientific conferences and admit that a triplet therapy had not produced the benefits she had hoped for, allowing biological plausibility to cede to data yielded from the clinical trial she conceived & ran Our field is full of such examples of good ideas failing to reach fruition, but we can only get better by admitting what’s not working as well as promoting true advances When the history books are written, most, if not all chemo will look like grand folly, akin to our modern view of, say, blood-letting But it is because of visionary physician-scientists like Rachna that we are making any progress at all: doing the best we can today while realizing there must be a better way and testing rigorously our ideas of how we might get there May she be remembered in part for her tireless work, born out of irrepressible hope and true caring for her own patients as well as ones she never met (she never failed to kindly & helpfully answer a question I posed to her when I faced a management conundrum in her niche of cholangiocarcinoma) RIP to a dear colleague (link in post below to a fund for young investigators named & bestowed in her honor)