Beyond the Breakthrough: What Families Teach Us About the Future of Medicine

Breakthrough therapies dominate conversations about cancer medicine. Progress is often measured in trials, innovation, and outcomes. For families living inside illness, however, the story looks much different. Treatment unfolds across hospital hallways, kitchen tables, and long stretches of uncertainty that no protocol prepares you for.
Betsy Larrabee draws on seven years of writing about her family’s experience with pediatric leukemia, relapse, and clinical trial medicine. Speaking from the intersection of grief and gratitude, her work explores how a person’s relationship to medicine is shaped long before a diagnosis or a clinical trial. Family histories, moments of loss, encounters with medical language, and experiences of care all accumulate to form the lens through which patients and families understand health, safety, and participation in medicine.
At a moment when cell and gene therapies promise unprecedented breakthroughs, the future of medicine will depend not only on scientific progress, but on recognizing the lived experiences that shape how patients and families encounter medical innovation in the first place.