I used to think that disease and pain was just a simple matter, because illness can be easily treated with pills or injections, right? Treating diseases includes more than just taking medicine. A patient’s emotions and mindset about the illness also have to be considered.
As I listened to a lecture about pain at the Stanford EXPLORE Lecture series, I realized that medicine and disease are extremely complicated, because disease and psychology are linked. When Dr. Sean Mackey told the story about a patient whose back pain was aggravated by emotional stress, I recognized that an individual’s emotions can impact how they perceive their illness, which in turn, affects treatment success. In some cases, patients don’t actually need pills or injections, but instead need someone to listen and empathize with their situations.
Additionally, illnesses are complicated because many evolve rapidly in response to the medicine designed to combat them. Therefore, new research and drugs must constantly be developed to properly address these diseases. Learning about the devastating symptoms and mortality rates of diseases like tuberculosis and anthrax at the UC Davis COSMOS program made me understand that we have not conquered diseases yet. Even illnesses that currently have cures are running out of available medicine that can treat them because pathogens evolve in response to medication. When I learned about super antibiotic resistant bacteria, I realized that there is still a lot to be discovered about diseases in order to provide better cures. Specific research must be devoted to each of the many infectious diseases to combat them.
To me, one of the most interesting aspects about medicine is that each person needs personalized treatment because every individual has different emotions and situations. I was reminded of this at a UC Irvine neuroscience camp this past summer when my partner and I role-played physician-patient interactions. As I acted as a physician trying to understand the patient’s story, I replayed my experience with my grandfather years ago when he suffered from a stroke.
After my grandfather suffered from a stroke, he often forgot to take his medicine. Therefore, I devised a system to help him remember. I bought two automatic dog feeders from Amazon, and in each slot, I put all of the medicine he was supposed to take that day. I also had my mother install security cameras to monitor the medicine. Every morning, before I went to school, I called him while watching the security camera footage, and reminded him to take his medication repeatedly until I saw that he had taken it. My experience with my grandfather and the system I devised to help him with his problem continues to serve as a source of inspiration that reminds me of the need to find specialized treatment for patients.
Creating personalized treatments includes considering every individual’s immune response capacity. Through my internship at FLX Bio, a pharmaceutical company dedicated to developing immunotherapies against cancer, I learned about the importance and complexity of the immune system. Chemotherapy and radiation are sometimes unsuccessful because the cancer cells attract regulatory T-cells, which render tumors undetectable to the body’s own defenses. During my internship, I learned about regulatory T-cells and conducted assays to test the efficacy of potential cancer drugs. By testing the efficacy of a regulatory T-cell depleting antibody, I learned that immunotherapies that target specific pathways are better cures than antibodies because they produce less severe side effects. As I continued to carry out this experiment and learn more about immunotherapy, I realized that the most successful treatments are those that are more specific.
As my interest in medicine grew, I realized that treatment and medicine needed to be tailored to provide the most effective cures against debilitating diseases, because every individual is unique. This realization sparked a desire to make a difference and contribute to creating personalized treatments, so that every person with disease can be more effectively cured.