Every time I read about these cancer stories I get more frustrated. As a software engineer, I get really mad at developers who code without understanding the code first, and I end up applying this to doctors a bit: I have this constant feeling that the current doctors just don't know what they are dealing with at all, and that everything is trial-and-error based.
I thought about studying cancer myself just to see if I could come up with something... Maybe apply my methodical thinking to the problem, but alas, it's not what I like doing so it would be unlikely to happen.
I honestly feel like we need the Elon Musk of health at this point. Someone so incredibly passionate and knowledgeable, that would finally understand what's happening in the human body and propose a logical cure to this mess.
These days, at least here in Brazil, people become doctors only because of the money: Nothing else. This DOES NOT WORK. If there is no passion, there is no development. This applies to absolutely all areas.
When cancer spreads to other organs it's extremely rare for the patient to revover.
Is it even theoretically possible? Do we have a percentage to that?
I've always heard that cancer is incurable.
with Crispr and immunotherapy's they have made some minor breakthroughs in some forms of cancer, stopping/slowing metastization and helping in removal. I don't think it's crazy to say we're truly close to a serious breakthrough I'm cancer treatment
Again... I'm just not hopeful at this point. When will we stop with the trial-and-error approach and do something else? We need to "debug" the human code somehow... Do we need another Hitler to do that? Do we need to eliminate religion?
People don't fight against diseases, there's no effort a patient can have that'll improve his situation, especially when a point is reached where any treatment is merely paliative.
Is this really the case? I lost a close relative recently because they basically gave up: they starved to death instead of being killed by the actual cancer. I call that "not fighting".
;dr. cancer is really complicated
Is it though? It seems like everything is out of reach of doctors. The entire medical field is trial-and-error based. No one truly knows if a given food causes cancer. No one truly knows how a specific medicine seems to work from what I can tell. It's a massive pool of ignorance in the field.
That's horrible to hear, cancer is seriously one of the worst things on the face of this planet.
Agreed. So frustrating to have to keep dealing with such bullshit disease and have zero progress on actual treatment.
To really get an understanding of cancer, I suggest to read this book.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
That sounds interesting, thanks for the link.
the sad reality and one I argued at the time was it was a case of when not if his cancer would kill him... It could be decades but it get him in the end...
No point trying to keep false hope that he could "beat" cancer at that point...
Once it metastasized... it's grim.
Again, do we even know that? Aren't there stories about "miracles" (i.e. ignorant people not understanding something) where the cancer completely healed?
However, and this is again me speaking from my own experiences in cancer research, I personally don‘t get my hopes up to live long enough to see a viable treatment readily available
It's sad to hear this, as it confirms my suspicion from the outside. Very, very frustrating.
John was never going to "beat" this form of cancer. The objective of his treatment was to prolong his lifespan as much as possible.
What about the "miracles"? There must be something that can be done, or else those "miracles" would not exist in the first place.
I lost my dad to cancer and he was one of the unfortunate ones who had massive, intensive pain from day 1 in his foot, and then for 5 months on end he had to be on constant pain medications and that only helped to some extent. It was just misery. Pure, pure misery and his last days probably hurt until his consciousness faded away. It was like watching someone die from invisible beating and violence.
This was painful to read. I feel truly sorry for you. Fucking disgusting stupid disease.
My mom learned today that she has no chance of remission or cure, and that her chemo is just a block as long as it will last.
Again, that's probably bullshit. We cannot accept that, just because we don't know how something works, that it's impossible. People believed that the sun was a god, how incredibly stupid is that in hindsight... Same thing with cancer i tell you. It is something stupid that is 100% curable, we just didn't figure it out yet.
As a person who's working in this field, all I can say is not even close
Yet again, I hate reading this. Why on earth are we not close? What are scientists doing wrong? Maybe we need more passionate scientists and less greedy ones.
Absolutely love this attitude. We need more people with such mindset.