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That's a tragedy. Colon cancer is most often avoidable. All one needs to do is go for a colonoscopy by age 45. Heck, why not just start when you are 25? (I

That's a tragedy. Colon cancer is most often avoidable. All one needs to do is go for a colonoscopy by age 45. Heck, why not just start when you are 25? (I had a great friend die at age 32 from colon cancer). So you get a colonoscopy every 5 years. Every year you get the colon cancer marker poop test. It looks for bits of RNA I believe. Or maybe it's PCR. Maybe those are the same. I dunno. Colon cancer typically grows slowly and the precursors are easily seen in the colonoscopy & the colon cancer poop test does a good job too.

codecamper 6y ago
There is also this: https://ezra.com/ https://ezra.com/ Not sure how great it works, but it's a good start. Also this: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blood-test-can-detect-50-different-types-of-cancer https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blood-test-can-det...
- cknoxrun 6y ago
  There's even a urine test for colon polyps (https://www.prlog.org/12825062-first-only-urine-test-for-colon-polyps-expands-across-the-us.html https://www.prlog.org/12825062-first-only-urine-test-for-col...)
hannob 6y ago
> Heck, why not just start when you are 25? The answer to that is almost certainly that balancing the pros and cons of preventive screenings is a surprisingly complicated science. Screenings can cause harms by causing unnecessary treatment of patients with false positive diagnoses. If you increase screening of patient groups with a very low incidence of something then you overwhelmingly will get more false positives. It requires careful evaluation of the scientific evidence to design screening programs that do what they should do: Improve patient outcomes and not cause more harm than good.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  "More harm than good" cannot be assessed objectively. How could you possibly weigh "one extra death" against "ten unnecessary treatments"? It has to be an individual decision. Give me the false positive rate and the harm of an unnecessary treatment and I'll weigh that against the risk of my premature death.
  - kerkeslager 6y ago
    I rarely downvote, but I when I do, I always try to leave an explanation. I downvoted this post because you made a claim with great confidence, despite it being clear you don't know how medical research works. > "More harm than good" cannot be assessed objectively. How could you possibly weigh "one extra death" against "ten unnecessary treatments"? Well, a very simple way would be to see how many deaths are caused by those ten unnecessary treatments. If those ten unnecessary treatments cause two deaths, I think the outcome is fairly clear. More specifically, you wouldn't assess this in terms of "deaths" because 100% of people die. Instead, you'd study this in terms of units of time alive, with a probability distribution and a quality factor applied. If a treatment reduces pain and but causes blindness, pain and blindness both correspond to quality factors. The quality factors, right now are generally treated as subjective and left to the patient as you suggest, but this is largely because we haven't gathered enough evidence for a general theory of quality of life based on health factors. Your claim that this "cannot be assessed objectively" is very much not in evidence--a great many scientists are assessing it objectively, looking at happiness, life satisfaction, satisfaction with care, societal effects, etc. There is an entire, mature field of study built around objectively assessing the thing you are claiming cannot be objectively assessed. Hundreds of billions of dollars are invested in the idea that this can be objectively assessed. You might have some criticism of medical research, but throwing out a claim like "this cannot be assessed objectively" with no evidence when millions of people and billions of dollars are invested in the opposite, sounds an awful lot like you aren't aware that strong counterarguments to your point exist which need to be addressed if you make such a claim. This is further supported by you talking about "deaths" when in fact that's not really the metric people use for assessing interventions. Source: worked a at a company that did medical study data warehousing. In a more general sense, I would caution you that just because you can't assess something objectively doesn't mean it cannot be assessed objectively.
- minerjoe 6y ago
  One of my mentors (age 75) went into the doctor and got tested for prostate cancer. Numbers were up, absolutely no symtoms. They recommended radiation. He bit. They fried the nerves in his lower half and he's attempting to learn how to live with the damage. His father died of prostate cancer, at 96. In this case, he would have probably been much better not being tested, or (IMHO) using the diagnoses to know what is up but then to persue natural and less risky treatments. He's now has no trust for the medical industry and he's persuing a treament of medicinal mushrooms. Lions Mane to potentially regenerate his nerves and Turkey Tail + others for the cancer. If you know anyone with cancer, the medicinal mushrooms seem to offer much hope. I've personally seen stage 4 cancers dissapear probably due to the use of medicinal mushrooms, which work with the immune system as opposed to destroying with chemo which can beat down the cancer but leaves the body with much less defenses to actually clean it out for good so often it returns.
fortran77 6y ago
While I'm all for getting colonoscopies, there's no need to blame the victim here. You don't know what treatment this individual had.

codecamper 6y ago

There is also this: https://ezra.com/ https://ezra.com/ Not sure how great it works, but it's a good start. Also this: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blood-test-can-detect-50-different-types-of-cancer https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blood-test-can-det...

cknoxrun 6y ago
There's even a urine test for colon polyps (https://www.prlog.org/12825062-first-only-urine-test-for-colon-polyps-expands-across-the-us.html https://www.prlog.org/12825062-first-only-urine-test-for-col...)

hannob 6y ago

> Heck, why not just start when you are 25? The answer to that is almost certainly that balancing the pros and cons of preventive screenings is a surprisingly complicated science. Screenings can cause harms by causing unnecessary treatment of patients with false positive diagnoses. If you increase screening of patient groups with a very low incidence of something then you overwhelmingly will get more false positives. It requires careful evaluation of the scientific evidence to design screening programs that do what they should do: Improve patient outcomes and not cause more harm than good.

gridlockd 6y ago
"More harm than good" cannot be assessed objectively. How could you possibly weigh "one extra death" against "ten unnecessary treatments"? It has to be an individual decision. Give me the false positive rate and the harm of an unnecessary treatment and I'll weigh that against the risk of my premature death.
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  I rarely downvote, but I when I do, I always try to leave an explanation. I downvoted this post because you made a claim with great confidence, despite it being clear you don't know how medical research works. > "More harm than good" cannot be assessed objectively. How could you possibly weigh "one extra death" against "ten unnecessary treatments"? Well, a very simple way would be to see how many deaths are caused by those ten unnecessary treatments. If those ten unnecessary treatments cause two deaths, I think the outcome is fairly clear. More specifically, you wouldn't assess this in terms of "deaths" because 100% of people die. Instead, you'd study this in terms of units of time alive, with a probability distribution and a quality factor applied. If a treatment reduces pain and but causes blindness, pain and blindness both correspond to quality factors. The quality factors, right now are generally treated as subjective and left to the patient as you suggest, but this is largely because we haven't gathered enough evidence for a general theory of quality of life based on health factors. Your claim that this "cannot be assessed objectively" is very much not in evidence--a great many scientists are assessing it objectively, looking at happiness, life satisfaction, satisfaction with care, societal effects, etc. There is an entire, mature field of study built around objectively assessing the thing you are claiming cannot be objectively assessed. Hundreds of billions of dollars are invested in the idea that this can be objectively assessed. You might have some criticism of medical research, but throwing out a claim like "this cannot be assessed objectively" with no evidence when millions of people and billions of dollars are invested in the opposite, sounds an awful lot like you aren't aware that strong counterarguments to your point exist which need to be addressed if you make such a claim. This is further supported by you talking about "deaths" when in fact that's not really the metric people use for assessing interventions. Source: worked a at a company that did medical study data warehousing. In a more general sense, I would caution you that just because you can't assess something objectively doesn't mean it cannot be assessed objectively.
minerjoe 6y ago
One of my mentors (age 75) went into the doctor and got tested for prostate cancer. Numbers were up, absolutely no symtoms. They recommended radiation. He bit. They fried the nerves in his lower half and he's attempting to learn how to live with the damage. His father died of prostate cancer, at 96. In this case, he would have probably been much better not being tested, or (IMHO) using the diagnoses to know what is up but then to persue natural and less risky treatments. He's now has no trust for the medical industry and he's persuing a treament of medicinal mushrooms. Lions Mane to potentially regenerate his nerves and Turkey Tail + others for the cancer. If you know anyone with cancer, the medicinal mushrooms seem to offer much hope. I've personally seen stage 4 cancers dissapear probably due to the use of medicinal mushrooms, which work with the immune system as opposed to destroying with chemo which can beat down the cancer but leaves the body with much less defenses to actually clean it out for good so often it returns.

fortran77 6y ago

While I'm all for getting colonoscopies, there's no need to blame the victim here. You don't know what treatment this individual had.