3 ms·

A good friend of mine is just starting what looks like will be a hard and long battle with cancer. Seeing the breakthroughs give me hope- but I also know they m

• mnw21cam 8y ago
  There are more than 100 types of cancer. Quite a lot of those types are very well treatable now, and others are far more difficult to treat. New discoveries like these move some more types from the "difficult" to "treatable" list, but I suspect that the last few on the "difficult" list will take a very long time to fully crack.
  • mabbo 8y ago
    Many of the recent breakthroughs seem to apply quite widely. Cancer may be 100 types, but they carry similarities, namely that human cells stop following the "multicellular organism rules" and go wild, while also tricking the rest of the body into letting them.
• agumonkey 8y ago
  If I may, from experience with our uncle T4 cancer, my biggest issues were: 1) medical view on cancer treatment: everything is standardized now, for good reason, they only give you battle tested things, but it also means that you only very average treatment since nothing exotic is accepted. [1] 2) moral support, depending on the team treating you, they may or may not spend a lot of time talking to the patient about what's cancer and how to deal with it. My uncle was given a death sentence and a choice to either stay at the hospital or go home, both case with pain killers and a mild chemo to smooth out growth. Few monthes later, his system was frail due to chemo, got an infection at home, not treated rapidly, killed him. I'm fairly convinced that with a different view on his disease he wouldn't have died this way. It also meant that he didn't want to try more since doctors only talked about these two choices. He didn't want to try dedicated centers (some were having very positive immunotherapy based results that could have motivated him and the whole family a lot more) [1] [1] Vince DeVita (ex-head of NCI) wrote a book about how cancer was treated in the early days. There were no standardized treatment since they were inventing them. It also meant they had a different approach to care, he was just trying to buy time until something better would come. He claims that it made people live for a year or two instead of a few months. In the case of advanced cancer I still believe it's the best way to go, but hospital don't want to hear that so you get the average treatment. I don't know how your friend would feel about this, but maybe that can give him a different option and more chances.
  • djmips 8y ago
    Most medical expense comes in the last months or even month of a person's life. It's an interesting moral dilemma on how to optimize expenditure vs the value of more time. I feel like one can invest a lot into very little return. My own anecdata from friends who are gone from cancer is a lot of expensive and even promising treatment to ultimately end in disappointments.
    • agumonkey 8y ago
      I believe your in the united states, in which case is so different from my country (france) that my comment above is not very useful. Here, most costs are covered by public health insurance. So that's one less burden to carry. Best wishes