Hodgkin's Lymphoma — The Great Teacher

Over the past half century, the field of oncology has drawn valuable insights from the management of Hodgkin's lymphoma. One early lesson was that the primary treatment should be optimized to cure the largest proportion of patients, because salvage therapies are often substantially less effective. The observation that high-dose chemotherapy and autologous hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation could cure Hodgkin's lymphoma that is resistant to primary chemotherapy, offering a second chance at a cure to otherwise doomed patients, provided another paradigm-shifting insight. Underappreciated until recently, however, has been the full impact of reliably curative secondary treatment on the best choice of primary . . .