Comment by huijzer
2 days ago
We have over the years raised billions (maybe trillions) for cancer treatments and we seem to have made negligible progress in actually curing cancer. Will it ever succeed? So maybe there is a root cause for your root cause?
That doesn't seem at all right, even misleading, cancer survivability has significantly improved
Unfortunately "cancer" is a very broad brush that covers a multitude of diseases.
Plus the phrase "cure" does a lot of heavy lifting. People seem to see a win here as being "here's a tablet, all cancer is gone."
So yes, we have spent an insane amount of money that can be ascribed to "cancer". (We've Also spent a lot on heart disease, diabetes and so on.)
But yes, we have got an extraordinary return on money spent. Treatments and survivability of common cancers (breast, prostate etc) have gone through the roof. Better screening, better education and much better Treatments lead to much (much) better outcomes.
Not all cancers are the same though. Some are harder to treat. Some rare ones are hard to investigate (simply because the pool is too small) but even rare cancers get spill-over benefits from common ones.
In terms of "cure" - that's not a word medicals use a lot anyway. Generally speaking we "manage" medical conditions, not cure them. "Remission" is a preferred word to an absence of the disease, not "cure".
In truth, we all die of something. Cancer is usually (not always) correlated with age, and living longer gives more opportunities to get cancer in the first place. So it's not like we can eradicate it like polio.
Progress in cancer treatment has been incredible
Just one example, prostate cancer today has a 90+% 10 year survival rate, in 1970 that was 25%
There are more than 200 known types of cancer, and most are very fundamental and serious. It's not something which can be easily prevented or even fixed by just taking some pill or eating different. Yet, progress has been very phenomenal over the decades. Cancer can be cured to some degree, people can survive, but progress goes type by type.
Untold trillions have been spent fighting wars and yet the cause of war hasn't been solved.
Imagine if those trillions would be spent on research and healthcare
Demonstrably false. There are immunotherapies today that can completely cure cancer.
According to this US government site, 5-year survival rates across all cancer sites have improved from 50% to 75% between 1974 and 2017. (For men it started at more like 40%).
That’s not utterly transformative but I wouldn’t call it negligible either.
https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival
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That's on the same level as terraforming Mars to escape climate problems on Earth.
Removing cancer from a body is tremendously simpler than making a new body.
The brain cannot function outside the body. The brain needs your bone marrow to make red and white blood cells. The kidneys and the liver to filter and break down metabolic waste. Various other hormonal systems that affect how the brain works (c.f. the HN favorite "gut-brain axis"). A brain separated from the body could survive for a few weeks, but long term it would certainly die from neuron loss (i.e. dementia).