Don

I'm feeling a little snippy waiting out my MRI results so I wanted to address your frustration shown in changing the subject line.
In my opinion, since your introduction thread asked the same questions about induction chemo and there were 4 pages of back and forth with several detailed posts about induction chemo, it's not surprising that the posters who have already shared their experience with induction chemo did not cut and paste their reply again. So really there has been more than one substantive reply to your question. I'm pretty defensive about OCF's compassion and response rate, so I'm setting the record straight here.

I understand your frustration that apparently the majority of doctors who treated the OCF community did not share your team's view of induction chemo as being the way to go. It's good that you started a new thread focused just on this dilemma. Most all of the posts I've seen on OCF about induction chemo were about how hard it was on them. Without rereading the four pages on your other thread dealing with induction, I don't remember if anyone linked to this clinical trial on induction.
In reading the summary below, it does emphasize that its so toxic that if it doesn't work right off the bat the first time, they are going to stop it and proceed to regular TX.
[quote] Therefore new therapy concepts are needed. The advantage of the induction chemotherapy is the possibility of tumor response assessment during chemotherapy and may present a selection criterion for organ preservation.
In order to minimize the time between chemotherapy and surgery it is important to have an early answer for the tumor response. In this study response will be assessed after the first cycle of chemotherapy. Patients showing no tumor response will be operated at once. The other patients will receive further cycles of chemotherapy.
Toxicity of the induction chemotherapy have to be moderate because surgery should not be delayed.

To improve the tolerance of induction therapy the medication dose isn't given on day 1 every 3 weeks, but is dispersed on day 1 and day 8, q3weeks.
[/quote] Induction chemo clinical trial
The excerpt above gives the hope and the fear of induction. It could very well be that there are no more answers coming to you from OCF than you have already received. It's a tough call and sounds like a perfect reason for a quick second opinion.
This whole treatment area is so darn frustrating with very few definitive answers.
Charm