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Why a Cure For Cancer Is So Elusive
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "George Johnson writes in the NYT that cancer is on the verge of overtaking heart disease as the No. 1 cause of death and although cancer mortality has actually been decreasing bit by bit in recent decades, the decline has been modest compared with other threats. The diseases that once killed earlier in life — bubonic plague, smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis — were easier obstacles. For each there was a single infectious agent, a precise cause that could be confronted. But there are reasons to believe that cancer will remain much more resistant because it is not so much a disease as a phenomenon, the result of a basic evolutionary compromise. As a body lives and grows, its cells are constantly dividing, copying their DNA — this vast genetic library — and bequeathing it to the daughter cells. They in turn pass it to their own progeny: copies of copies of copies. Along the way, errors inevitably occur. Some are caused by carcinogens but most are random misprints. Mutations are the engine of evolution. Without them we never would have evolved. The trade-off is that every so often a certain combination will give an individual cell too much power. It begins to evolve independently of the rest of the body and like a new species thriving in an ecosystem, it grows into a cancerous tumor. 'Given a long enough life, cancer will eventually kill you — unless you die first of something else (PDF). That would be true even in a world free from carcinogens and equipped with the most powerful medical technology,' concludes Johnson. 'Maybe someday some of us will live to be 200. But barring an elixir for immortality, a body will come to a point where it has outwitted every peril life has thrown at it. And for each added year, more mutations will have accumulated. If the heart holds out, then waiting at the end will be cancer.'"
Cancer is a whole spectrum of diseases with different causes, effects, mortality rates, etc. This question is only a little less silly than asking why we haven't cured all disease yet.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
But barring an elixir for immortality, a body will come to a point where it has outwitted every peril life has thrown at it. And for each added year, more mutations will have accumulated. If the heart holds out, then waiting at the end will be cancer.'"
Pffft, I plan on being 100% robot by then. I'd like to see cancer bite my shiny metal ass.
This hypothesis (that cancer is inevitable, just masked by other diseases that get you first) is wrong.
There are populations where recorded cancer rates are essentially 0. Some pacific islanders, African populations before westernization of their diets (I.E. eating grain) etc. This simple fact undermines the above hypothesis.
There is also evidence that people get cancer all the time and the body deals with it.
The medical research on cancer is primarily focused on identifying the mutations and chemical pathways that cause cancer to occur and then developing chemicals to block those pathways.
So a productive approach may be to find what it is that is causing people's bodies to fail to continue to detect and correct cancers in the body. Unfortunately, that has more to do with diet than drugs and so there isn't a strong profit motive to take that vector seriously.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
Cancer is contagious right there.
Also, note that Gardasil, the vaccine which prevents HPV, is being legislated ostensibly to prevent cervical cancer.
So yes, there are contagious causes of cancer, but there are other non-contagious causes as well. And the trouble is that once it occurs, it is difficult to selectively remove those particular cells when they look mostly like any other cell.
I guess Heather did, but why did she never disclose what the Kergan did?
And I guess maybe Freddie Mercury did, but he was doing it wrong.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
"It's more lucrative to treat a disease than it is to cure it."
While true at face value, the implication here is that a "cancer cabal" profits as a whole when cures are withheld and it collectively decides to release only incrementally improved treatments. But there is no such cabal, quite the opposite, there is intense competition among researchers and pharma companies and no collective decision, only individuals more than willing to "break the ranks".
Heck, curing a single type of cancer say prostate or leukemia will guarantee you a Nobel prize and a life time of doing whatever you want whenever you want both from a professional and personal point of view - regardless if the cure is monetizable (patentable) or not. And you expect us to believe researchers are actively hiding cures for the sake of the pharma industry ? Please, not even the Mafia can command such allegiance.
In this world most pharmas would sell you each base pair at a time. If you would be able to quell the mechanism that mutates DNA then we could live in perpetuity at the point you stopped mutating DNA. Then we would have to buy time in units and have our remaining show up on a tattoo.... umm well never mind.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Seriously, how many articles per day is Slashdot going to feature from this guy? Recently it feels at least 3 per day.
A strong immune system keeps cancer at bay - this is a duh.
But our lifestyles are increasingly focused on pathogen and stressor avoidance instead of encountering and overcoming them. Most people look at me as if I'm crazy when I say I like going out in the cold because it's good for me, and as many think I'm a kook when I ask them if they have ever drank water from a stream. Activities in the outside world boost our immunity, and we perform them less and less, and de-germ our environments more and more. I, for one, think there is a correlation.
Sent from my ENIAC
As someone who has had cancer, I have learned a lot. Most importantly, all the various cancer charities are complete frauds. Despite taking in untold Billions of dollars, the number of people dying from cancer has increased, not decreased over the last 20 years. And nobody has ever had their cancer cured because someone wore a pink ribbon or yellow wristband or walked 10 kilometers.
If you had bothered to actually read even the slashdot article (you don't even need the links), you would understand why the number of people dying of cancer increases. Everyone who has died so far has died of something. Many of the causes people were dying of, we have minimalized or fully eliminated in the last 150 years, Nearly no one dies of the bubonic plague anymore for instance, and most of the other infections are in retreat. With every cause we eliminate, all the remaining causes get a bigger share. And in the end, there are two main causes remaining: coronary diseases and cancer. Everyone of us, given that he dies not of anything else before, will in the end die of either coronary diseases or cancer, which means that they will increase their share, if we further eliminate the other causes for an premature death.
What is actually increasing is the average age humans die because of coronary diseases or cancer. That means, we are able to push the time further away, when cancer or coronary diseases will get us.
Is the cure elusive because they're digging in the wrong place?
This article seems wedded to the somatic (gene) theory of cancer.
What if it's a metabolic disease (Warburg, Seyfried)?
Seyfried has a 2012 textbook, but here's a concise summary:
http://ajp.amjpathol.org/article/S0002-9440%2813%2900653-6/fulltext
If so, the top treatment, calorie-restricted ketogenic diet, is something that sufferers can try at home. I suspect many are, and I would expect anecdotes to become data in a few years.
Of course, many people are on keto (and just low carb) diets for unrelated reasons. It will take a little longer to learn if this confers improved immunity to the big C.
As someone who has had cancer, I have learned a lot. Most importantly, all the various cancer charities are complete frauds. Despite taking in untold Billions of dollars, the number of people dying from cancer has increased, not decreased over the last 20 years.
That is a statistical fallacy, if we're getting better at treating cancer but even better at treating non-cancer diseases and injuries the relative share of cancer deaths may go up. Most of the people diagnosed with cancer are quite old and while we're getting better at emulating the body's "functions" with artificial hearts, artificial lungs, dialysis machines and so on we're not making the same kind of progress on cancer. I've had several ill and frail relatives but modern medicine kept them alive until the cancer got them, I consider it more of a success than a failure of the medical system. Eventually everybody dies from something.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In some sense, increasing cancer mortality likely results from people in industrialized nations being killed less often by other stuff (cars, emphysema, smallpox, contaminated water). And walking 10 km (on a regular basis) probably has significantly decreased cancer mortality, probably by changes in hormone balance and metabolism. Cancer research may not always be flashy, but they do seem to dig up useful stuff over time.
So how do the conspiracy theories explain the dramatic improvement in survival rates in those cancers where research-guided improvements in treatment have been very successful?:
https://www.stjude.org/stjude/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=5b25e64c5b470110VgnVCM1000001e0215acRCRD
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15726810
Clearly there's a great deal to be done, and finding 'cures' is a very complex and difficult task. But we finally have the tools to do this in a systematic and rational way, and targeted therapies are already emerging.
And in the end, there are two main causes remaining: coronary diseases and cancer.
Kindda like Wal-Mart and Amazon. Anyway, it's nice that a cure for KMart has already been approved, and a cure for Best Buy is currently in medical trials.
for an example. So if you broke your leg because you fell off a ladder I'd expect the over all treatment to be a bit different than if you broke your leg because you have Osteoporosis. Come to think of it you could also break your leg because you have a tumor in the leg, that would be a VERY different treatment.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
"runs counter to reproductive fitness"
Wrong. There is a huge reproductive fitness bonus for getting old useless people out of the way as quickly as possible, and more specifically a huge natural selection bonus for death after some maximum amount of years. Death is one of the major pillars of natural selection, and cancer, in many species plays a big part to ensure that we do not too many people living to 80-100+ or comparable.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
We all get cancer many times in our lives, but our immune system normally eliminates it without our awareness of the close call. The problem with most cancers is that they are not cause by something present, a mutagenic virus, for example. Instead they result from something absent, a healthy, raring-to-go immune system. Therefore the focus should be on boosting the immune system.
Yes, but at the same time they would be putting most of their friends and peers out of a job.
And saving themselves and their families from a painful death. Which do you think researchers think is more important?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have a couple of counter arguments. 1) Shareholders and the markets put strong pressure on corporations to take short term profits at the expense of long term profits. 2) The larger a conspiracy the harder it is to maintain. I don't believe for a moment it is possible to maintain a conspiracy large enough to prevent cures from being developed. 3) Cures are being developed, but they are very expensive. The drug sofosbuvir, a recently developed cure for Hepatitis C will cost $1,000 per pill. A typical course of treatment will last 12 weeks and run $84,000, plus the cost of necessary companion drugs. Some patients may need treatment for twice as long. That doesn't even put it in the top 10 most expensive drugs.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Nanomachines, son. Every baby gets a dose and they supervise the internals, nip cancerous cells etc the moment they appear. The only thing is the nanomachines are self replicating so we could just end up replacing cancer with robo-cancer but then at least we might get cool glowy eyes and stuff out of it.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
There is no suppression of already-discovered cures, that's pretty obvious. But could it be that possible cures receive less R&D investment than they "deserve" based on their projected future value to patients? That seems more reasonable.