The wild card in breast cancer prognosis

The other wild card is that you can't know in advance how well you or the person you're caring for will respond to a particular treatment. One of the things that makes cancer so mysterious and frustrating is that doctors can't predict how effective a particular treatment will be because patient response is so individual. For each diagnosis and treatment option, the patient population responds along a bell curve, with the larger group of patients in the middle of the curve responding "typically" and a small group on either end who respond either much more positively or less well. Many breast cancer patients like to set a goal for themselves of "beating the bell curve," because no matter what the general prognosis for the majority of patients with a particular diagnosis, some are going to fall on the side that beats the odds.