Having gone through similar exhaustive research myself in the past, and undoubtably in the future as well ....
... one thing that such an exercise does do is to give you some reassurance that you're not letting anything slip by. That you did what you could, and that you found all available best current information.
Sometimes all that provides is a negative result, or a neutral result, e.g., "there's nothing more that we can do".
But at least you know that having done so, which may bring its own comfort.
I still periodically do scans on literature of a decades-old experience I'd been proximate to. Then, in the moment, there was always the hope for some incipient breakthrough. What I've learned is that years and years and years later there really hasn't been, and the principal chemotherapies actually date to WWI chemical warfare agents. (Medical history is ... weird.)
Another viewpoint is that it might be possible to marshal effort into research on some condition or another. I've also seen some of those attempts, often with great fame and fortune behind them (Reeves on spinal injuries, Fox on Parkinsons, amongst the better known). These have made some progress, but often only marginal and slowly over time. Other instances, notably of infectious disease, have been more profound (polio, smallpox, HIV/AIDS, cervical cancer, ...).
Predicting where and when breakthroughs might occur is desperately hard.
Thanks for that perspective, I now realize in my mind I completely glossed over the fact that my dad ultimately got proton therapy instead of traditional radiation because of my research. I found a paper comparing proton vs gamma radiation for soft tissue sarcomas and went down a rabbit hole. His oncologist at OHSU was very supportive of the idea and it all seemed to perfectly fall in line with my coping strategy believing technology had to have advanced somehow somewhere and we just needed to find it.
No way to know for sure whether that actually improved his quality of life vs gamma or was more effective but I believe it had to have helped and gave him and us more confidence he was getting the most cutting edge treatment modern medicine had to offer.
My dad was an early adopter of basically every technology trend going back to the first handheld sized cell phones and I could tell it gave both him and I some comfort being able to endlessly read about this brand new promising tech. And gave him some new optimism he might not inevitably lose his entire quality of life like his mother’s last few years of miserable chemo before her cancer ultimately killed her. The combination of Keytruda and proton radiation took a toll on him but he was still able to keep up with his routine of jogging and swimming a couple times a week which meant a lot to him.
Looking for proton centers then led my parents to the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle [1] who both had a proton therapy center and were conducting research on soft tissue sarcomas which led to enrolling him in the Keytruda trial that was desperate for eligible patients almost overnight.
My parents felt so much more trust and confidence there vs his original OHSU oncologist who made of point of emphasizing that my dad’s subtype of cancer wasn’t something they really had experience with or a specific treatment plan beyond the generic cancer treatment checklist.
I guess I ultimately did find something tangible and my medical techno optimism wasn’t purely escapism. So maybe it wasn’t as futile as it felt by the end, re-reading the same research over and over for months on end and still unable to form a mental model of the severity and most likely outcomes/survival odds for my dad.
... one thing that such an exercise does do is to give you some reassurance that you're not letting anything slip by. That you did what you could, and that you found all available best current information.
Sometimes all that provides is a negative result, or a neutral result, e.g., "there's nothing more that we can do".
But at least you know that having done so, which may bring its own comfort.
I still periodically do scans on literature of a decades-old experience I'd been proximate to. Then, in the moment, there was always the hope for some incipient breakthrough. What I've learned is that years and years and years later there really hasn't been, and the principal chemotherapies actually date to WWI chemical warfare agents. (Medical history is ... weird.)
Another viewpoint is that it might be possible to marshal effort into research on some condition or another. I've also seen some of those attempts, often with great fame and fortune behind them (Reeves on spinal injuries, Fox on Parkinsons, amongst the better known). These have made some progress, but often only marginal and slowly over time. Other instances, notably of infectious disease, have been more profound (polio, smallpox, HIV/AIDS, cervical cancer, ...).
Predicting where and when breakthroughs might occur is desperately hard.