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If We Can't Kill Cancer, Can We Control It?
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The New Yorker:
In April, [Dr. Eytan Stein] presented his findings to a packed auditorium at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, in San Diego. It was the first public airing of the results of AG-221; patients with progressive [acute myelogenous leukemia] had never improved so quickly and definitively. ... The breakthrough is notable in part for the unconventional manner in which the drug attacks its target. There are many kinds of cancer, but treatments have typically combated them in one way only: by attempting to destroy the cancerous cells. Surgery aims to remove the entire growth from the body; chemotherapy drugs are toxic to the cancer cells; radiation generates toxic molecules that break up the cancer cells' DNA and proteins, causing their demise. A more recent approach, immunotherapy, co-opts the body's immune system into attacking and eradicating the tumor. The Agios drug, instead of killing the leukemic cells — immature blood cells gone haywire — coaxes them into maturing into functioning blood cells. Cancerous cells traditionally have been viewed as a lost cause, fit only for destruction. The emerging research on A.M.L. suggests that at least some cancer cells might be redeemable: they still carry their original programming and can be pressed back onto a pathway to health.
I made contact, they gave me a peace offering, the cure for cancer is ozone. Needs to be developed, not sure how though.
My wife just died of breast cancer this week -- she did not live to be 40 -- so articles and research like this give me hope that, when our child grows up, cancer will not be something that takes people's lives away from them so quickly and so young. This is a site for geeks, so I am sure a lot of people know about the brilliant nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, and how his wife Arline Greenbaum died of tuberculosis in the 1940s.
Today of course, tuberculosis is no longer a death sentence the way it was in the mid-20th century, and I think, well before end of this century, cancer will no longer become a death sentence either.
Anti-CD47 is just entering the first human trials at Stanford, and shows a lot of promise. We really should start seeing declining deaths rates and better quality of life.
I feel medical publishing needs to move away from the current paradigm even more than the open-access journals that have been discussed so widely. The company that made this advance, Agios doesn't seem to be a typical "big pharma" company: They are running lean on market cap (350 million in outstanding shares) and big dreams. Imagine a world with a hundred more companies like this could be creating equally innovative solutions. Then realize that the biggest drug company has a market cap that could be funding over 500 Agios's.
Given advertising costs that number is a little deceptive. Nevertheless we are talking about human trials in the US, an enormously expensive process. It's popular to be conservative about medicine, especially in the US and there's a good reason for that but there's a line between looking for more likely results and wasting money on almost exclusive focus on incremental improvements. We've crossed that line.
Medicine is science and science is moving faster all the time. As a society we need to keep up by focusing capital on smaller, more agile companies, not only to prevent the tragedy of unaddressed new problems but to move the state of the art forward as fast as possible. There are lives to be saved.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
There's always one ...
The Republicans have blocked every good treatment so far so why should we expect their kind to allow this? No. They want us to die.
I have two objections on the "big pharma fighting the truth about cancer" point of view... maybe you can give this some thought and comment on them:
1) how can the pharma have a PERFECT bureaucracy that wins EVERY time a new alternative cure comes along? A lot of people say that big pharma has a big cover up operation in place and no cure will ever be publicised or made viable unless it suits big pharma. However, when articles about alternative cures come along, they are always revolutionary and obviously simple. If that's the case, why don't we see something as simple as gathering 100 or 1000 cancer patients, treat them, document the success and only then release the findings on Youtube/P2P/whatever?
2) Consider the annual sales and profits of Big Pharma. Then the same for Big Food. IF there's a simple cure using natural food and basic ingredients that big pharma cannot patent, what's Coca Cola, Pepsico and other similarly large companies waiting for to steal big pharma's lunch?
you are full of shit. As a cancer victim I can say that it is down to risk, if the numbers are against you, age, over weight, lack of exercise, genetics, environment exposure, then you'll be more likely to get some form of cancer. These may go undetected for years, at which point it is too well established to be totally eradicated. Early detection is very important, survival is dependant on early detection and the effectiveness of treatment, sadly the cost of drugs is high and people are not always able to afford them, even in 1st world countries. As for the conspiracy theory, improvements are there, but the thoughts that there are magic bullets out there, being suppressed, is crap. If you want to survive, do the right things, loose weight, build fitness, eat better, look out for body changes, get regular check ups. You can't live forever.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
When you have lost loved ones to cancer - and watched them suffer horrendously and miserably after receiving chemotherapy "treatments" - only to have their last days on earth be an agonzing, living hell for them - you start to question the validity of these treatments and begin open yourself up to the possibility that others who have had a very measurable success with unorthodox treatments may very well be onto something very real and special.
Of course, naysayers will always naysay.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
GP here. My mother contracted colorectal cancer, had chemo and radiotherapy and has been clear for the last couple of years. Sure, it's not perfect, more research is needed.
Bu yeah, baking soda. Do the research, conduct some trials.
I think this is the key thing to understand.
If we stopped aging, and everyone was age 21 forever, we would find that accidents and illness, especially cancers, would be the bane of humanity.
We are all going to die, one day. If not from old age, then it'll be ness or accident. It's important to realise that, as time goes on, the likelihood of a fatal accident would tend toward 1.
Each of us is going to die.
Also, fuck you Slashdot:
This resource is no longer valid. Please return to the beginning and try again.
This is a link in case anyone on /. is feeling generous and wants to help someone try to survive their fight against cancer... https://www.givealittle.co.nz/cause/savesally/
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
This would require modifying the environment within the human body. Your entire body chemistry.
Your body isn't the way it is just because it can be, your body is the end product of millions of years of evolution. Changing the internal structure of it that dramatically will just ensure death.
We are all going to die, one day. If not from old age, then it'll be ness or accident.
I'm going to die from Ness?
Ok, i'll play....
1. Fear.
Many people are afraid to try anything new.
Especially if their doctor tells them "the accepted treatment is chemotherapy.. blah blah blah.." and "...that baking soda stuff - don't believe everything you read on the internet. It's not an accepted medical practice". Doctors can be sued for not following "accepted" practices.
As for documenting successes, I have provided some links. As this is a relatively new discovery I don't know if there are 1000 people who have tried it yet. I think that we will hear more and more success stories with baking soda treatments in the coming years.
However, even if baking soda treatments had only ever cured one single person's cancer (and there have been more than one) then it is still a very important treatment to dedicate serious research to.
Big Pharma does not have a "perfect bureaucracy". If they did we would NEVER hear anything about effective new alternative treatments such as baking soda, marihuana or laetrile.
Instead, the few people who dare to venture into uncharted territories and report their findings to the world are often labelled nutters or conspiracy theorists.
2. There is nothing natural about Coke and Pepsi. They are artificial "slop" drinks and they most likely contribute to cancer. And baking soda cannot be patented.
It may sound silly, but I really don't think that "Pepsi NaHCO3" would be a big money maker anyway.
Personally, if I had cancer I would try everything else before I would accept barbaric chemotherapy treatments. As the saying goes, "if the cancer doesn't kill you, the chemo will".
Enough said.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Bullshit. I've seen lots of friends die of AIDS in the early 90s. Now HIV/AIDS is under control. It's now a chronical disease that people can live long productive lives with, as long as they take their drugs. When treated early, most infected people will be asymptomatic except for the (relatively mild) side effects of the drugs. I wish we could say that for most cancers.
Of course unlike cancer, HIV is communicable. And unlike Ebola, it killed many rich white men. These factors might have contributed to the success story of its treatment.
Acidity levels in your body are largely affected by your diet.
Eating more alkaline foods - vegetables, generally speaking, and eating less acidic food - such as meats, will also cause acidity levels in the body to change - often dramatically.
This also explains why vegetarians have much lower cancer rates (and health problems in general) than non-vegetarians.
> Changing the internal structure of it that dramatically will just ensure death.
Yes, if it gets too acidic one might be riddled with cancer.
The same principle applies here - the more alkaline the body is the less likely you are to get cancer. If you already have cancer, you have a much better chance of surviving it by adopting an alkaline diet.
Baking soda and most vegetables reduce acidity levels, which helps the body fight cancer.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Please don't diffuse complete nonsense. The pH of the body is regulated within very strict limits, generally 7.35-7.45, and a therapeutic window ie a dose of drug X, in occurrence any alkaline agent, that does not kill the patient while killing the disease does not exist. You either don't kill any cancer cells or die with them by taking too much soda.
It would be extremely easy for any individual researcher to publish this research and become instantly famous. Hell, I could do it tomorrow since I am an oncologist and treat patients with cancer for a living. The problem is that it doesn't work.
Two weeks ago I saw a poor lady who was "treated" with soda infusions. Of course the disease spread and, in addition, she suffered a stroke because of the way the treatment was delivered (via intra-arterial catheter!). It's such a pity that patients, in their considerable emotional distress, actually believe that kind of stuff.
PS: Posting anonymously because the incident with the intra-arterial soda infusions got some legal attention.
Why not work on prevention? Cancer rates have quadrupled in the last century, thanks to our increasing use of synthetic chemicals in food and environment. Why not try to get rid of the causes instead of finding out what other sort of drugs and chemicals we can add to reverse it?
And some of us have had relatives and friends saved from cancer using the same treatments.
NB that treatment aren't the same all over the world, in the US the therapy will in many cases continue until death occurs while in many other countries the treatment will shift to make the patients remaining time and death as comfortable as possible once it's obvious that the cancer will be lethal.
Let me give you a brief summary of TFA:
- Some cancers have IDH1, IDH2 mutations that change cellular metabolism
- This drug is the first targeting the IDH2 enzyme that has been tested in humans
- 6 out of 7 patients whose disease (leucemia) had the specific IDH2 mutations had "objective response" to the drug, ie the disease burden was reduced. Note, this does not mean cure.
Now, this is obviously good news, in the same spirit as previous targeted agents like vemurafenib, erlotinib, trastuzumab, crizotinib, especially since it concerns a new aspect of cellular functioning (metabolism). It's too early to say whether the drug will have long lasting impact, but we'll know more after phase II/III trials. It does seem promising.
For patients with AML or MDS and documented IDH2 mutation, the study (NCT01915498) is still recruiting in several centers around the US and in Paris/France (Institut Gustave-Russy). More information can be found in clinicaltrials.gov (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=NCT01915498&Search=Search).
... did they use the romanized version of the greek word for "saint"?
2) Consider the annual sales and profits of Big Pharma. Then the same for Big Food. IF there's a simple cure using natural food and basic ingredients that big pharma cannot patent, what's Coca Cola, Pepsico and other similarly large companies waiting for to steal big pharma's lunch?
Actually, if a cure was "known" Big Pharma "A" would want to produce it first and charge $$$$$, before Big Pharma "B" does it. It's not like Big Pharma works as a single organism. Multiple companies, competition and all that. Furthermore, don't forget "little pharma". The drug mentioned in the article comes from a little drug company, Agios, not some multi-billion behemoth.Several new drugs have been created by start-ups and were later sold. In fact, Big Pharma mostly does the last part of the pipeline (human trials, FDA accreditations and marketing) but the first part of the drug-discovery process often comes from little inventors who are not afraid to take risks.
I happen to know two people who are in the drug "startup" business and would be quite happy to make $$$$$ selling a cure for cancer to Big Pharma. These are the people that actually do in vitro/in vivo experiments and, trust me, if compound ZZZ were very effective they would be very happy to test it immediately, even if it meant loss of billions for other companies.
>The problem is that it doesn't work.
Perhaps it didn't work for you, but it has worked for others. And it has been documented. (Chemotherapy usually kills people; but sometimes it helps them too. Nothing is 100% effective.)
>she suffered a stroke because of the way the treatment was delivered
If treatment wasn't administered properly and therefore didn't work, that is not surprising.
> got some legal attention.
Not surprising at all.
> It's such a pity that patients, in their considerable emotional distress, actually believe that kind of stuff.
What's worse is people's blind faith in modern medicine. With the exception of emergency services and a few others, modern medicine is little more than glorified barbarianism. If they aren't shoving your body full of pills, they're cutting pieces out of you.
Prevention is the key here. A healthy diet, regular exercise and a positive attitude goes a long way. As does open-mindedness and not being afraid to try something new.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
This also explains why vegetarians have much lower cancer rates (and health problems in general) than non-vegetarians.
I have a problem with this misleading comment, non-vegetarians is a rather large group. How about we define if further.
Do vegetarians have a lower chance of cancer than those that are obese, eat a lot of processed food not recommended by a dietitian? Sure! These are non-vegetarians
Do those that eat healthy, portion controlled chicken, red meat, pork, fish along with vegetables, fruit, nuts, wholegrains and other natural nutritious foods have a higher incidence of cancer than vegetarians? DO THEY????
Fuck cancer and fuck big pharma fucking patients over over money, so fuck money too.
If 50% of the world's religious people pray for a cure, certainly God would provide one.
Get to work. Stop being lazy. Stop praying for selfish things and do some good for the entire world. Pray 2 hrs a day for a cure to all forms of cancer.
Think about it: If a company finds a cure for all cancers (emphasis on the plural form, cancer is not just one disease) they could demand any price at all and people would pay it. "Let's discuss payment plans." The inventors would receive hero status and could retire rich as kings of old. You don't think this would sound appealing to the people allegedly sitting on this cure-all?
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The main proponent of sodium bicarbonate as an alternative cancer treatment is Tullio Simoncini, MD. ..
According to the Cancer Treatment Watch Web site, "[Dr. Simoncini] has been using unsubstantiated cancer treatments for 15 years in 2003, his [Italian] license to practice medicine was withdrawn, and in 2006 he was convicted by an Italian judge for wrongful death and swindling"
"Acidity levels in your body are largely affected by your diet. "
Nope, there's a control system to keep your pH within narrow limits.
We are far from general cure for cancer.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... We can't kill cancer?
I have to say after seeing whats going on on the research end of things, it is extremely unlikely clinicians are getting good advice. Just look up NHST hybrid, in the vast majority of cases, the way they decide what counts as evidence or not was invented on accident by a guy writing an introductory textbook.
Oh and thats not to say these alternative treatment strategies have anything more going for them. In most cases the situation there is much worse, at least they have the excuse of low funding though.
"I've seen lots of friends die of AIDS in the early 90s"
How do you distinguish between dying of AIDS and dying of AZT-treatment?
"Of course unlike cancer, HIV is communicable. "
How many times would one need to have unprotected sex in order to have a 50% change of getting hiv from an infected partner?
I've seen one analysis that estimates that if all medical causes of death were eliminated, we would enjoy an average lifespan of about 650 before some accident would kill us. With a lifetime like that, imagine the tall tales you could tell your descendants. And if, in such a society, the most cautious individuals made it to age 1000, would they get birthday cards from Skynet?
My response to those "they're sitting on a cure" conspiracy theorists is that though pharma may be the most powerful lobby in the US, there's a whole world out there. A number of other countries would love the sheer prestige attached to announcing a cure. And even if they gave that treatment away through nationalized health care systems, they would reap huge income from American medical tourists.
If it were anything so simple as ozone or baking soda, we would have known it years ago.
Please don't diffuse complete nonsense. The pH of the body is regulated within very strict limits, generally 7.35-7.45, and a therapeutic window ie a dose of drug X, in occurrence any alkaline agent, that does not kill the patient while killing the disease does not exist. You either don't kill any cancer cells or die with them by taking too much soda.
I'm going to take you at your word that you're an expert, but as a listener you suck. He never said anything about anything 'killing' anything.
He said (to paraphrase): "It seems to make it harder to grow", and, "I'm not a researcher", and "I've seen more than one person go into remission, ostensibly as a result".
It would be extremely easy for any individual researcher to publish this research and become instantly famous. Hell, I could do it tomorrow since I am an oncologist and treat patients with cancer for a living. The problem is that it doesn't work.
Two weeks ago I saw a poor lady who was "treated" with soda infusions. Of course the disease spread and, in addition, she suffered a stroke because of the way the treatment was delivered (via intra-arterial catheter!). It's such a pity that patients, in their considerable emotional distress, actually believe that kind of stuff.
PS: Posting anonymously because the incident with the intra-arterial soda infusions got some legal attention.
Now see I don't think he said that either. Intravenous 'Soda Infusions' sounds like crazy nutter shit to me; I believe his people were eating the baking soda.
He said another thing: If it appeared to cure one person, then it's worth looking into. That's the one thing he said that I am sure is true; there's no such thing as magic, *something* cured them. Of course they are flying blind without scientific training, and only doing it because they feel they have nothing to lose.
What I don't like, is not so much the out-of-hand dismissal, you're entitled to that if you're an expert in the field; but the idea that to even talk about it, is somehow doing a disservice to cancer victims and is a bad thing. Right here in the comments on an article about thinking outside the box in cancer treatment.
Yeah, no. Human DNA can undergo a limited number of divisions, and that limit appears to be hit around 120 years.
OK, you cite four links.
One is about Vernon Johnston. The second is a Natural News (Mike Adams, arch conspiracy theorist) story about the same guy. Now let's be charitable and take this 100% at face value - real guy, real diagnisis, real remission. Sometimes it does go away, but this is one case. The plural of anecdote is not data.
The we have a clipping from "Weekly World News" - I'm not from the USA but I know this paper's MO - it is not a credible source. Country doctor, maple syrup, yadda, yadda, I'm sure he believes what he's doing, but is just more annecdote with no data to back it up.
And then a story about treatment from a Doctor that got struck off and done for manslaughter and fraud.
If this is the best evidence that you can provide then you fail it.
Maybe it is helpful, who knows, but do the goddamn research, conduct credible trials and prove it's effective. There's not a legitimate researcher on earth who wouldn't be all over this if there was any good evidence that it was effective.
But Big Pharma Consipiracy, yeah, so scientists die of cancer now so that they protect a worldwide cartel who are supressing the "truth". Right,
Excuse me if you aren't the only one to have gone through that.
Or not. Different people react differently to differente chemotherapy treatments.
Sorry for that to be your case. Fortunately, chemotherapy actually avoids that fate in many cases.
Until you notice that they have had no measurable success, that they are based on quack science (cancer grows on acidity? How does that explain leukemia?), and that, actually, some of them have narrowly escaped being sentenced to prison for manslaughter.
Technically once? If the chance is 50% that's the odds of a coin flip landing favorably.
Which would be a medical cause of death....
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
We can take this as a rough estimate:
"Pooled female-to-male (0.04% per act [95% CI 0.01-0.14]) and male-to-female (0.08% per act [95% CI 0.06-0.11]) transmission estimates in high-income countries indicated a low risk of infection in the absence of antiretrovirals."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19179227
Imatinib Sulfate puts CML and HES into remission in 95% of the patients that can take it (without lethal side effects).
It was approved for use back in 2003 for CML, 2004 for certain types of stomach cancers, and 2006 for HES.
It took doctors almost 4 years to diagnose my HES (Hypereosinophilic Syndrome, a cousin to CML) which was diagnosed in 2009. I have been in remission with the use of Gleevec since 2 weeks after starting it and remain in remission to this day.
As another doctor and Internist (not the same as the AC), it absolutely hurts to keep talking about the same quackery that has been discussed and dismissed decades ago. It brings false hope to desperate people. It keeps people away from legitimate treatments (Eg: Steve Jobs) which may lead to worse outcomes because of the delay. And it wastes the precious time of both the patient and the medical staff, and promotes distrust of the very people who could likely help cancer patients the most. This is not a benign discussion.
On the technical aspects, anyon
Hmm, I think that the patients on which nonsense treatments actually work, likely were misdiagnosed and didn't have cancer in the first place, but were rather ill from something lesser, which was cured by their immune system as normal.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Wow, congratulations on beating the devil, but keep on being vigilant.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Won't happen. If any country finds a cure we'll bomb the shit out of them because, as Madeleine Albright stated so clearly, WE ARE AMERICA. Submit to our rule or be destroyed!
Well, you go first. Kill yourself. There goes part of the problem. Oh, are you telling me you will not because you're oh-so-special? You're part of an elite of superintelligent individuals whose survival is critical to civilization? Well, let me tell you one secret: you're not. You're shit, a piece of scum, a pile of crap. You are worth nothing. A waste of oxygen. I would suggest driving a screwdriver into your thick skull but there's nothing contained within worth skewering. Die in a fire, turd.
Won't happen. If any country finds a cure we'll bomb the shit out of them because, as Madeleine Albright stated so clearly, WE ARE AMERICA. Submit to our rule or be destroyed!
Could you please go back to reading the backs of road signs and trying to map out UN invasion routes?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If a company finds a cure for all cancers (emphasis on the plural form, cancer is not just one disease) they could demand any price at all and people would pay it.
It's even bigger than that. The best statement I've ever seen on the subject came from a Slashdot poster, and since I can't remember the specific post (or user, sorry!), I'll just paraphrase:
"Curing cancer" implies an incredibly high level of technical competence, so advanced that anything you touch would turn to gold. You could start to treat aging as a chronic disease.
This should ring true to anyone who understands the biological basis for "cancer". To start with: it's not one disease, it's many, they just all happen to take the form of uncontrolled cell proliferation, which can have many different triggers. Attacking specific molecular mechanisms is difficult because there are so many to choose from (and the targets tend to further mutate over time within each patient anyway, decreasing the efficacy of drugs). Also difficult: killing cancer cells without killing the rest of the patient. To actually treat all cancers at once - without lethal side effects - would require extraordinarily advanced knowledge of human biology and most likely a degree of personalization beyond anything we've experienced. It's the stuff of science fiction.
The supposed "cures" that are being suppressed are either poorly tested experimental leads (pharma companies have more than enough of these already), or dodgy experimental therapies that haven't undergone real testing either, some of which may be outright scams.
I take it that you flunked statistics.
And calculus.
And biology.
But keep it up, positive thinking is good for you.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Seriously, a load of bull. "If we can't kill Cancer". You'd like that, wouldn't you? No, the Medical industry and corporations would like that disinfo so they can keep selling placebo medicine and useless overpriced medicine to people, as well as all the devices and aperture. If we get a cure for Cancer, the corporations and medical industry stand to lose billions and trillions in the long term.
We've had the means and we know the means, to kill Cancer, for years. We've had the means to make a special bacteria, or use a special solution, that identifies a specific type of cell in the human body, any specific type.
If you have the means to identify it and designate it, then you have the means to eliminate it. Nano-technology helps there, if not specially designed bacteria.
I know! Let's improve this discussion by talking about vaccines.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If cancer was insta-kill instead of the slow-death-money-milking disease that it is
This ignores a basic fact about cancer treatment: standard chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery aren't very profitable for pharmaceutical companies, and for many cancers, that's all we have. They may be profitable for other sectors of the medical system, but these are also a huge drain on the economies of rich-world countries, who have a big incentive to keep costs down. If you get one of the cancers for which there isn't a $100,000/year drug, your only option is a quick course of debilitating treatment aimed at eliminating metastases, which will either work and leave you cancer free (if you're "lucky" and have one of the less aggressive types of cancer, and/or catch it early), or not work, and you'll die in a relatively short time. Or, if you're especially unlucky, the therapy itself will kill you. No pharma company is getting rich off these patients.
If you do get to take the $100,000/year drug, there's a good chance you'll only add a few years to your lifespan anyway. Which is part of the reason why these drugs are so expensive, of course. On the other hand, a drug that could either a) eliminate cancer outright, or b) suppress cancer permanently for as long as it's taken, would be worth an incredible amount of money, either up-front or over the course of decades. And insurance companies and governments would be much happier shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a treatment that might actually "cure" the patient in some meaningful sense (and enable him or her to keep paying taxes and/or insurance premiums!), rather than a treatment that probably isn't going to work over the long term.
This is true for "general" treatments. (Treatments applied to the whole body, EG-- "General Anesthetic") However, there are also local treatments that are more targeted that can change the environment locally.
Several such treatments exist. In the feild of cancer specifically, you have the various direct radiation treatments, the various nanoparticle+radiowave treatments, and of course, local excision treatments.
In the case of colon cancer, the inner wall of the colon has evoloved to handle some pretty extreme changes in pH, and also insane levels of salinity. Circumstances that if presented in the rest of the body would kill the patient in minutes. (If not seconds).
This tissue is also very thin, only a few millimeters thick.
The crime that the OP really has comitted is assuming that all cancers are interchangable as a general category. They arent.
In the case of colon cancer, a concentrated baking soda enema (or even a supository) would work to keep the ambient pH inside the colon quite low, and would be in direct or nearly direct contact with the cancer spreading in the colon wall at the same time. Healthy colon cells would be easily able to handle this environment, but diseased ones would not.
The major risk of complication comes from disruption of GI Flora from prolonged alterations of the pH in that environment (and from administration of probably not-very-sterile sodium bicarbonate solution directly introducing new microbial strains), and from the risk of possible impaction (if using a supository) or rupture (from overzealous enema use)
As long as the cancer has not yet metasticised, there is no real compelling reason not to couple such a clinically untested treatment like bicarbonate exposure along with a more well documented anti-cancer regimen, but some caveats apply. (If surgery was used to remove the cancer from the colon wall, then common sense applies. Dont use enemas unless directed to do so by your physician. You DONT want your colon to rupture, especially when you are immunosuppressed from having cancer.)
Just understand that not all cancers are created equally. Colorectal cancer is a very real, epidemic form of cancer. However, the ways you treat it are very different from how you would treat, eg, blood cell type cancers, or cancers in bone tissue. You dont need general application of treatment with some forms of cancer.
These may go undetected for years, at which point it is too well established to be totally eradicated.
Sorry bud. But that is some tiny thinking. There will be time, soon enough, where cancer will be no more dangerous than a simple infection.
Human cells get "cancerous" ALL THE TIME. But it's only some very specific ones that are ignored by the immune system and grow. The key to kill ALL types of cancers is to find a markers that the immune system can be stimulated to clean up. That is all.
These are not easy things to do and definitely require research, but these are not insurmountable problems. The days of broad spectrum chemo cocktails are numbered along with notion that "cancer is deadly".
Early detection is very important, survival is dependant on early detection and the effectiveness of treatment
This depends. One tumor is not like another. For example, with breast cancer today, it has been shown that all the effort spent on early detection do not really increase survival. Routine mammograms do increase false positives though. Another example is most common types of prostate cancer. On the other hand, melanoma is critical to have early detection.
sadly the cost of drugs is high and people are not always able to afford them, even in 1st world countries.
That is not a 1st world problem, except in America. Virtually everywhere else, these costs are socialized, as they should be.
do the right things, loose weight, build fitness, eat better, look out for body changes, get regular check ups. You can't live forever.
That is very true. You may not live longer, but you sure as hell will live better. There is a difference between living your last 10 years sitting in a wheel chair attached to oxygen tank, or being able to walk and run and swim.
Look it up. CBD helps change cancer cells structure to kill itself when it reproduces. AKA fucks cancer up. Try it, it works
That depends on what you mean by die. Seems pretty clear today, but technology is always blurring things. Did Henrietta Lacks die in 1951?
We're not ready as a society for elimination of aging. Currently, with money and power generally growing with age, death is the great equalizer. Rich or poor, everybody dies. This is the only thing stopping unfettered hoarding of wealth. Would Bill Gates give away his money if he never aged? I don't know, but it does seem less likely. We'd be stuck in a society where the elders own and control everything, and the young would fight to survive. Murder would replace age-related illness as the leading cause of death.
For this society to work, the time value of money has to be negative, not positive. Money has to decay with time, not grow. This is the way money should work today, but good luck convincing our overlords.
Isn't every cause of death medical?
Just like all the other times, we will have to adapt to the elimination of aging when the time comes. In the good old days before civilization and technology, there was no such thing as grandparenthood. As soon as the longest-lived individuals started to survive plague and war to live that long, we adapted to the new reality.
By the time we have cured aging, the cost of living will have dropped dramatically and the standard of living will have risen.
That or we all die off from bioterror or climate change.
> This is the only thing stopping unfettered hoarding of wealth.
Except for corporations, which have no lifespan limit.
"You can't live forever."
Provably not, but a good few hundred years seems achievable. We are only taught exactly what you said, but that doesn't need to be the end of it. A different view of aging seems in order as we go forward, rather than your defeatist attitude.
While I don't give in to the "sitting on a cure" thing myself, I don't really consider all of the pharma industries in the world just waiting at the edge of their seats to announce they found a cure either.
They're businesses. They gotta keep the money rolling in.
If they found a cure that worked very well, was easy to administer, safe to administer, and cheap to produce - it'd mean they'll be throwing out their billion dollar -treatment- routines that people keep having to come back to otherwise.
So I wouldn't be surprised they'd delay those kinds of cures as long as possible with "extensive testing and research".
If they found a cure that worked but they could conceivably charge a lot more for than treatment options.. sure. Since it'll only be the richest of the rich that will be able to afford it anyway and the treatments will still sell for the rest.
Thanks...
All accidents are "medical" in nature in that they cause damage to the body that is medically treatable to an extent, just like any other illness. Therefore, if we could "eliminate all medical causes of death", we would be immortal.
How our minds would survive such an ordeal is a whole different story.
This is what they have been looking for: long term drug therapy they can charge whatever they want for. Pay or die. A cure doesn't pay enough. Yes I am cynical.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I'm pretty sure grandparents existed long before agriculture.
The truth is that you're an ignorant dimwit who uses the standard conspiracist fallacy of affirmation of the consequent. Just because big Pharma benefits from some situation doesn't mean that situation obtains because big Pharma benefits from it. *Intelligent* people deal in *evidence*.
"I've seen one analysis that estimates that if all medical causes of death were eliminated, we would enjoy an average lifespan of about 650 before some accident would kill us."
I've seen an analysis that shows that I'm the Queen of Roumania.
Yes, she died, just as parents die even though their children carrying their DNA live on.
Raise your PH level in your body. Cancer cells robbed of oxygen will die.
I really doubt that it's possible to 'reprogram' cancerous cells. They usually have so many mutations (including seriously weird ones, like chromosome fusion or duplication) that it's a wonder they can still fission.
My daughter was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia in July of this year. she is currently in her second round of chemotherapy.
I doubt whether she will be given the opportunity of being part of this research, but I am really glad that there are continuing advancements happening in this field.
And as a personal point of pride, my son (age 15) was tested, and confirmed as a match for stem cell therapy this weekend ! He agreed without hesitation to help his sister.
Go to Youtube and search for "Run from the Cure"
It seems marijuana cures most cancers and many other diseases.
Of course, this will never be official news due to the Medical Industry, the Government with their U.N. treaty against marijuana, the Media with their livelihood dependent on government and all the people who see it as "too good to be true" because they never heard it from a doctor, the government or the media.
Not actually medicine that makes you high, this comes from vegetative plants in the pre-flower stage. You can't patent marijuana, so the medical industry will never be producing this cure.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Is telomerase antagonists. The key to all cancers is that the cells use a substance called telomerase to rebuild the telomeres each time the cell divides. In essence it makes the cells immortal. But block telomerase and the cell just undergoes apoptosis after so many divisions.
If they found a cure that worked very well, was easy to administer, safe to administer, and cheap to produce - it'd mean they'll be throwing out their billion dollar -treatment- routines that people keep having to come back to otherwise.
That's what patents are supposedly for. No matter how cheap it is to produce, they would have a limited monopoly on it, so they could charge much more than a free market would normally allow.
Not that I normally endorse free markets, I believe from a consumer point of view they break in half once you get two or three large players that shut out other competition.
He effected a bored affect.
People who worry can't enjoy life. What is the value of living if you can't enjoy it? You may be surprised if you knew the percentage of people who would rather live in ignorant bliss and happy and not having to worry about all the plagues of the world - until the day their symptoms start showing.
Cancer isn't a "thing" per se.
Think of your thermostat in your house. It normally maintains the temperature in a comfort range. Then imagine "something" in that control loop causes that feedback loop to fail. It could be the thermostat. It could be the furnace/heater. It could be the air conditioner. It could be any number of individual parts in heater or a/c that isn't working right. It could even be that you've left the windows or doors open. It could be the wiring between the thermostat and the hvac equipment. Basically, all of this, which is symptomatically described as "it's too damn hot - something's broken" is what cancer is when you apply the same kind of feedback loop to the human body. Except imagine not just one thermostat - imagine one in each room of the house operating either independently or interdependently. Multi-loop control systems are bleeding edge stuff for engineers - and one truth is that some amount of instability and some minimal variance for a set-point is actually required for such systems to even operate.
So when people say "cure cancer" or have a "war on cancer" it's as nonsensical as saying "I'm going to have a war on my house" because the heat is wrong. You could rip everything out and try to replace it. You could be more nuanced and try to adjust things and repair pieces that seem to be operating wrong. But you really can't "cure" it because even the set point both can't be controlled to arbitrary error levels without creating more instability and the set points of all parts of the system vary with environmental stimulus - when it's humid, the same temperature feels too hot compared to when the air is dry as a bone.
Unless the country would suddenly become a "terrorist country", and punished accordingly...
I know I'm very late to this discussion, but here goes anyway-- I work in a non-scientific role for the American Association for Cancer Research, so I'm pretty close to most of the research that goes on nowadays. There is no conspiracy to hide a real cure to cancer because cancer isn't one disease-- it's over 200 different diseases. They all involve irregular cell growth, but the similarities pretty much end there. The causes and mechanisms of cancers are many and varied and so the idea that there can be "a cure" for all cancers is ridiculous. There is one thing-- not a conspiracy, but a sad fact. As government research funding gets gutted in the interest of "fiscal responsibility" or some such nonsense, prevention research is suffering. Basic research into human physiology, biochemistry, and other subjects may not yield results for decades. Neither a corporation nor a philanthropic billionaire wants to wait to see the fruits of their efforts. That's where the government is in a unique position to take the reins and do this kind of long-term thing. The AACR is a key partner in the Rally for Medical Research. This is an alliance of over 100 organizations that are about all sorts of conditions and diseases-- not just cancer. They sponsor rallies and "Hill Days" to bend the ears of representatives in Washington, DC. I highly encourage anyone who is genuinely interested to get involved. Also, if you're looking for information on where we are in the fight against cancer from a reliable source, check out http://cancerprogressreport.or... We publish one of these every year at this time. The 2014 report will be released tomorrow and gives a great overview as to where progress has been made and where we are maybe losing ground and why (if we know).
Depends on semantics. By some definitions, you could say an accident/trauma isn't medical, while a heart attack is. I've certainly heard the word used that way. In any case, I think the point was: (i) consider aging to be a medical process, (ii) eliminate all medical reasons for death, (iii) it'd take an average of 650 years for a lethal accident to find you. Kind of a neat exercise.
Personally, if I had cancer I would try everything else before I would accept barbaric chemotherapy treatments. As the saying goes, "if the cancer doesn't kill you, the chemo will". .
And in my case the chemo mopped up the excess cancer cells from all the cancerous lymph nodes they couldn't remove via (barbaric) surgery. So it might be barbaric but in my case it worked. One more nodule removed, several unremovable but controlled by (barbaric) Avastin. So chemo is bad, very bad, but it can work. Of course there are the alternatives..... (no thanks).
The interesting thing with this is not the average, but the change in the distribution. Currently, the population curve has a sharp drop-off around the age of 70; with the elimination of medical causes of death, the curve will assume the shape of a decaying exponential, making that 650-year life expectancy more akin to a "half life".
If such a change happened today, of the 6 billion or so individuals currently alive, at least one of them could be expected to reach an age of over 20,000 years.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
And if you don't like the politics of today's 60-year-olds, imagine the political values o cautious, ultraconservative 20,000-year-olds.
"There's not a legitimate researcher on earth who wouldn't be all over this if there was any good evidence that it was effective."
You mean if any good evidence managed to pass through the peer-review system of a prestigious journal. As if they'd dare to be associated with quacksalvery. The problem is how publishing works ( or doesn't work ).
No it would probably not be very easy to get it published, because the journal won't want to be associated with quacksalvery.
"...cancer isn't one disease-- it's over 200 different diseases. They all involve irregular cell growth, but the similarities pretty much end there"
This is incorrect, nearly all (possibly all) cancer cells are aneuploid.[1] This was originally thought to be the "cause of cancer", but was largely abandoned because researchers could not find any *specific* anueploidy related to a given cancer.[2] As we know now, multiple genotypes can result in the same phenotype so the idea that the aneuploidy theory was wrong for that reason is incorrect. Now, even if aneuploidy is not the cause of cancer, it is definitely a shared characteristic of the vast majority. If we had a way of targeting non-diploid cells we would have a general "cure for cancer". We do not currently have a way of doing this, but there has also been very little funding for it.
One reason that this is so sparsely studied is because the main proponent of this theory since the 1980s has been Peter Duesberg, who combined this claim with one that HIV does not cause AIDS in a 1987 paper: "Indeed transformation appears to be a virus-independent, cellular event for which chromosome abnormalities are the only specific markers. Likewise the AIDS viruses are shown not to be sufficient to cause AIDS, and the evidence that they are necessary to cause it is debated."[3] Duesberg was then essentially blacklisted for the HIV claim and could no longer get sufficient funding for his projects.
Since then some researchers fear that if they are associated with him or his ideas the same will happen to them. Others are simply are not aware of this relationship, or do not put much effort into it since the main proponent has been "discredited". For example, I was not exposed to the relationship between aneuploidy and cancer *at all* during my graduate training. If there is near 100% correlation between aneuploidy and cancer it seems like something to mention, regardless of whose idea it was. So please, raise awareness of the anueploidy-cancer relationship amongst those you work with.
I personally was quickly convinced that this approach should receive far more attention/funding at the expense of the attempts at targeting specific point-mutations or signal transduction pathways. These approaches should not be expected to work long-term because cancer cells are genetically unstable and thus will acquire drug resistance. This is why generic chemo and radiation (targeting cell-division) are still the treatments of choice.
1) The chromosomal basis of cancer. Cell Oncol. 2005;27(5-6):293-318.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16373963
Also available here: http://www.davidrasnick.com/Claims_of_diploid_cancer_files/2005%20Cell%20Oncol%20Duesberg%20et%20al.pdf
2) Aneuploidy vs. gene mutation hypothesis of cancer: recent study claims mutation but is found to support aneuploidy.. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2000 Mar 28;97(7):3236-41.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10725343
3) Retroviruses as carcinogens and pathogens: expectations and reality. Cancer Res. 1987 Mar 1;47(5):1199-220.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3028606
lol no doubt..scientists in general can also be some of the most ego driven people alive, and there is a LOT of cancer researchers out there. we couldn't keep our own hemorrhoids secret if they were publishable. probably not a chance in hell any of us could sit on any significant finding without our head exploding. getting a well-cited paper in a high impact factor journal is too critical to career and epeen/testicular fortitude. hell, i'd kill everyone in my current lab for a Cell paper. :
with more and more targeted therapies showing promise, cancer treatment will continue down the path of personalized medicine to hopefully make cancer a more manageable disease like diabetes. it's a part of us and isnt going anywhere. but, all the magic bullets in the world wont stop the need for the nasty chemo agents/nuclear medicine any time soon, but they do lower the dose needed/side effects felt and raise effectiveness. (usually)
the great hope of priming the immune system has been around forever and just has not been as successful as hoped. it's a HUGE area of research, and should be, but generally speaking any tumor that grows to 1cm+ is pretty much invisible to immune surveillance. getting RNAi more viable as a human therapeutic, and to the needed area, will go a long way towards truly tailoring the cocktail to the patient's tumor and should be a monumental gain, in all aspects of patient care...not just cancer. too early to know how that will play out...complicated shit-storm of off-target effects and inflammation currently. works well in the eye though...
someone mentioned cost: when i was in school a question on my comps was the cost of ID/development and moving a lead target to FDA trials. i think it was ~$300-400 million for the tail end, and since most compounds fail clinical trials....well, there's no small pharm companies for a reason. that was well over 10 years ago. the newest drugs out can cost $7-12k+/month but it's not like those drugs are big money makers. (im not defending big pharm, they're more evil than ppl know.)