Progress is and has been made, but mortality rates from cancers remain high. One main line of treatment remains the use of cytotoxic drugs targeting cell division, the point being that cancer cells divide more rapidly than the rest of the body cells. The side effects that people experience is a manifestation of the fact that other body cells do divide, and are thus vulnerable to the drug.
You may not like the way I characterised this process, but I stand by my comment.
Sylvia.
Early diagnosis has the added "benefit" of increasing the survival statistics. And that's true even if you die at the same instant you would have died without any diagnosis!
Did you get that paranoid nonsense from you favourite trustworthy source, Russia Today?
Even a dimwit should realise that cancer is not "a thing"; it is many many varied things.
Early detection and a succesful treatment is the best way of course.
Luckily the 3 different cancers I had between 2001 and 2010 were that way. Too many family members and friends hadn't had that luxury.
boB
Sometimes it is. When you see that the survival rate for childhood leukemia is now 90%, it's not hard to remember when it was an absolute death sentence. That's an extreme case but there are many others. Breast cancer is another one. Don't forget quality of life, either.
+1
Well, the cancer didn't kill them anyway.
Too many people have to be involved for any such conspiracy. The chances of a secret being kept go down exponentially with the number of people who know the secret.
And this would be kept secret how, exactly?
Sylvia.
Cancer is not a single disease, so there's no single magic bullet.
Cisplatin is close to a magic bullet for testicular cancer, and a useful treatment for a few others. It takes Cursitor Doom's level of ignorance to be unaware of this.
Cursitor Doom rolls out yet one more idiot conspiracy theory.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Most cancer treatment is radiation, surgery, or chemotherapy. All fairly barbaric. None of those are based on understanding of genome biology. Real immunotherapy based cancer treatment is just beginning to happen.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Heard a Dr. call it "chemo, beamo, or reamo".
py
Most of medicine is pretty barbaric. We've had medicine a lot longer than w e've had science, and there's a lot of really primitive stuff in there that happens to work.
Because they were all developed before we knew we had a genome, and long be fore anybody had sequenced the human genome. That doesn't stop them from wo rking.
And that doesn't owe much to genome sequencing either - we've been manipula ting the immune system since we started innoculating against small-pox, tho ugh getting an imunotherapy that works against some cancers takes rather mo re subtlety than that.
It's great to have a more detailed understand of what's actually going on, but it doesn't seem to have offered the medical profession much in the way of obvious magic bullets so far, and further progress looks as it will be i ncremental, rather than revolutionary. We seem unlikely to be part of the g eneratio0n that might live forever.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
as
erally used. The violet ray on skin cancer, and the more extreme approach o f [accidental] direct lightning strike has cleared people of cancer before.
e information from the world, therefore the odds of it happening are close to zero. What has been done many times is to demonise & misinform about met hods that threaten profit margins - the violet ray is a classic example of this.
It's not a conspiracy and there is no secret. Go back and understand what I wrote first.
NT
I'm not arguing with you, Mr. Paranoid Asshole. I thought you killfiled me.
has
ut
senerally used. The violet ray on skin cancer, and the more extreme approach of [accidental] direct lightning strike has cleared people of cancer befor e.
ove information from the world, therefore the odds of it happening are clos e to zero. What has been done many times is to demonise & misinform about m ethods that threaten profit margins - the violet ray is a classic example o f this.
I wrote first.
It's Cursitor Doom's lunatic conspiracy that's being derided, not yours. Ma ybe it's you who needs a better understanding of what you are reading.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
I've just finished "The case against sugar". The writing was somewhat ponderous, so not a good read. But he makes a very strong case against sugar being responsible for many 'so called' Western diseases. Mostly obesity and diabetes, but also hyper-tension and in the last chapter he includes various cancers. The case for cancer is much less strong, but the prevalence (of cancer) does seem to follow a 'western' diet.
George H.
Sugar is a major food group. It's perfectly natural and your body is evolved to metabolize it.
The lifespan of "Western" people keeps increasing. Without cigarettes and heroin and fentanyl and car crashes and high-fructose corn syrup spiked with caffein, it would be even better.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
It would be hard to suppress basically murdering a few hundred million people.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
erapy
ht.
e
besity and diabetes, but also hyper-tension and in the last chapter he
the
Sugars - saccharides
are a wide range of compounds. Glucose, galactose, fructose, xylose are mo nosaccharides. Sucrose and lactose are disaccharides, and starch is a polys acchardide.
We can certainly metabolise all of them - lactose does seem to be an except ion for a lot of adults of non-European descent - but exposing your system to a lot of sugar at frequent intervals isn't a great idea, and seems to be an excellent way of bringing on type 2 diabetes.
Saying that something is "perfectly natural" exhibits sloppy thinking, and thinking that that implies that you can consume any amount of it without ha rm is even sillier.
American life expectancy is a bit short, by advanced industrial country sta ndards. Bad health care may have more to do with than drinking Coke, but it 's an open question.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Indeed, it's hard to imagine that people saved by this treatment would be willing to stand by while their somewhat less elite friends and family died. The ultimate outcome of that is obvious.
Sylvia.
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