And to be a little pedantic, a tumor that you suppress before it developed certain aggressive features is not a cancer.
But yeah, i know a lot of people who have successfully fought off cancer with medical aid. Some of the advances are straightforward, like being able to examine the margins of an excised tumor for cancerous cells in real time, during the operation, so the surgeon knows exactly how much to remove. Others seem out of science fiction, like immunotherapy that can train the immune system to attack the tumor more effectively. There’s been a huge amount of improvement in the treatment of many cancers in the past 10 years.
Those things, if true, aren’t due to lack of scientific progress.
All of those things can have an external cause completely unrelated to scientific or medical advances. For example, increased toxins in the environment causing more cancers shows bad policies and regulations, not lack of progress in medicine.
As said by others, increase in the prevalence of some diseases can be caused by decrease in other diseases. For a radical example, childhood vaccine development mean that those kids will grow up to die of something else.
A huge amount of medical and pharmaceutical research is done at universities and government labs. This research is then commercialized by pharmaceutical companies to make new drugs and treatments. This can lead into debates about drug patents, drug safety regulations, time to market, and such, but that is all policy and political, not scientific.
@Jackson99, don’t you think there’s enough evidence in this thread that biology and medicine really have changed in the last 30 years? Can you at least thank everyone for proving “some one”, whoever you were referencing in the title, completely wrong?
Rather than acknowledging all the evidence that medicine has made a ton of progress, you shifted to just talking about cancer. When it was shown that there has been a ton of progress in cancer treatment and prevention, rather than acknowledging that, you’ve now shifted to ER wait times.
When I come here asking a question, or starting with a position I’m not that sure about, and all the posters here show me where I was wrong, I thank them for all their patience with me.
I think the problem here is they are only modifying one or two genes but for it to be what you saying they would have to be modifying many genes. And the that may cause other health problems in people.
I’m sorry this thread is getting a bit off topic now talking mostly about cancer and healthcare system crashing, but I got scared when I read that article that 40% people in the US will get cancer.
I think the problem is if you don’t read up on the scientific articles you don’t know if biology or medicine is advancing because it does not make the news.
Disclaimer: these views are my own and in no way represent the official position of any organization I might be associated with.
The way it generally works is that the universities do the basic research that identifies targets and mechanisms of therapy. Then the pharmaceutical companies step in and use that research to make a drug that they think might work. Then under guidance of the FDA, the company spends big bucks to fund a trial where they recruit patients for various hospitals to try to prove that the drug works.
This is a big gamble that could make them gobs of money if it works or could cost them tens of millions of dollars with nothing to show for it if it fails. Unfortunately, this means that they are only going to run trials for those drugs that they think are going to make them gobs of money. So if you have a rare cancer, or if the drug in question only works on a particular subset of a given cancer (say those with a particular mutation) then they often decide its not worth their while.
That doesn’t change how you should interact with people you’re asking for help. Lots of posters in this thread painstakingly laid out the ways that medicine has advanced, and then specifically how cancer treatment and prevention has advanced. Rather than acknowledge their points (I see! Thanks for clearing that up! It’s good to see how things really have advanced. How about cancer specifically…, etc.), you just change the subject and pretend this thread was about something else.
It’s pretty frustrating to read. I don’t know, it just seems like it would be polite to acknowledge how helpful and patient everyone has been.
Also some treatments may work to kill off 99.99% of the cancer cells, but by chance 0.01% of the cells got a mutation that happened to make them resistant to the treatment. So you get an initial response that makes it look like the cancer might be cured, but then a few months down the road those remaining cells start repopulating, and you get the cancer back but it is now totally unresponsive to the initial treatment.
Cancer in a text book case of Darwinian evolution on a cell level scale in real time.
Reading this thread is like reading the latest 9/11 CT thread.
You want to know how medicine and lifestyle has affected us all? Go watch some old TV shows from the 50s and 60. Notice how old the old people look? Then look up their birth dates in imdb and do the math. Those old people were in their 40s! Maybe 50s. I saw a contestant on What’s My Line that looked like an 85 year old grandma, and she was 63!
Getting people to quit smoking has had such an affect, and it gets lost in the “70 is the new 50” talk. People see that but they never get why - because people aren’t killing themselves slowly with 3 packs a day. Aside from lung capacity and lack of cancer, their hair and skin look better, their teeth look better. They just look younger!
When I was a kid, adults getting a chest x-ray was a routine part of a yearly physical. It hasn’t been for decades.
There’s much that is wrong with this. First of all. medical progress, like all scientific progress, is not linear. You can’t extrapolate when a problem will be solved based on how long it’s taken to get to this point.
Second, doctors have been trying to figure out how to cure cancer for a lot longer than 30 years. It was a disease known even in ancient times. Of course progress was very slow most of that time, but there was nothing that happened 30 years ago to make that the start date.
My wife had a brutal cancer battle 13 years ago that she fortunately won. Apparently, however, had she had the same thing 10 or 20 years earlier she would have lost that battle. So I would agree that that’s wrong as well.
The Washington Post had a recent article on a therapy for a childhood disease MLD (gift link below - hope it works). Children typically develop muscular problems, with death often by the age of five. There have been infusion therapies, but this new treatment is a one-time injection of the patient’s genes that were sent to a lab to be modified. The jaw-dropping price of $4.25 million dollars raises several questions, such as availability and fairness.
But … it’s a one-time infusion, and they calculated $4 million dollars as the worth of a full life. There will be many more such therapies.
