Academic

Chemo Brain--Stuntz

By David Skeel and Bill Stuntz

Thanks to some of my cancer survivor friends, I recently discovered that Wikipedia has an entry for ?Chemo brain.? (The link is here.) They call it ?Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment,? but I think the simpler label works better.) So far as I can tell, it?s totally true: these drugs seem to have roughly the same effect on mental acuity as repeated viewings of ?Legally Blonde.? I can feel the I.Q. points departing, perhaps never to return. And I didn?t have that many to spare.

I know that a lot of interesting work is being done these days on links between mind and body. I?d love to understand those links better. One thing is clear: when your body takes hard shots, your mind suffers. A pain researcher once told me that chronic pain patients? minds age much faster than the population at large; fighting off the pain uses up mental energy, and not all of that energy gets replaced. So too with fighting off cancer cells, I suspect. Thankfully, I?m not a mathematician?I?d already be far too dumb to do the job. Legal academics is a more forgiving line of work, and these days, forgiving lines of work sound pretty good to me.

Full post as published by Less than the Least on April 18, 2008 (boomark / email).