OCF is one of the funders of this clinical trial with Dr. Gillison at the James Cancer Center and 100 participating clinical institutions co funded by the NCI. You are asking a question that there is no real answer for - hence the clinical trial. The HOPE is that eliminating cisplatin will eliminate some of the long term QOL issues for people, but if Erbitux will work as well is an unknown. As a side note, OCF's part of this trial is to collect patient data on 100 iPads at the different institutions, (data filled out directly by the patient at various stages during treatment) about QOL issues during the treatment process, so that by itself can be improved regardless of which arm of the trial you are in.

Cisplatin is the known. Everything else is a crap shoot. All I can say is that at this stage of clinical trial, there has to be high expectation from previous data/experience that the alternate to the long term known, would work at least as well, or the trial would not have been approved. No individual's experience alone (there have been good and bad experiences on the same drugs) is an indicator of what will happen to the overwhelming majority of individuals on a particular protocol.