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This is newsworthy because the Swedish healthcare system recently discovered that prostate cancer patients who took oral Terbinafine to treat toenail fungus had

This is newsworthy because the Swedish healthcare system recently discovered that prostate cancer patients who took oral Terbinafine to treat toenail fungus had much better cancer outcomes. The same holds for Terbinafine and colon cancer. We are currently in the WTF is going on here phase. $5 of anti-fungal medication cuts some cancer death rates in half? Is a tiny amount of fungus in cancer tissue driving growth and metastasis? Does Terbinafine have some other anti-cancer mechanism?

smt88 4y ago
> $5 of anti-fungal medication cuts some cancer death rates in half? I read an interesting hypothesis that many cancers can be treated by changing (perhaps unpredictable) variables in the patient's body. We already know cancers thrive in nutrient-rich environments and that many tumors have a narrower set of survival conditions than the normal tissue around them. That's why chemo works: you start to kill the whole person and the tumor (hopefully) dies first. So what if you just randomly messed around with the conditions of the body? Give someone a diabetes drug, change their diet, add an antifungal... we've seen random successes like this, and the unifying theory might be that the cancer was thriving because it had exactly the right conditions, and now we can change them to cause the cancer to stop thriving.
dev_throw 4y ago
Thanks for giving me my reading material this week, as someone with stage 4 colon cancer :) I also read about promising outcomes with fenbendazole (dog deworming medicine) and colon/lung cancer, hope these finally unlock the fix for metastasis.
- yunobcool 4y ago
  Sorry to hear about the stage 4 prognosis. I know its insanely unlikely, but here's hoping for a quick game changing recovery that will flip the table on your cancer.

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This is newsworthy because the Swedish healthcare system recently discovered that prostate cancer patients who took oral Terbinafine to treat toenail fungus had

by jcampbell1 4y ago

smt88 4y ago
> $5 of anti-fungal medication cuts some cancer death rates in half? I read an interesting hypothesis that many cancers can be treated by changing (perhaps unpredictable) variables in the patient's body. We already know cancers thrive in nutrient-rich environments and that many tumors have a narrower set of survival conditions than the normal tissue around them. That's why chemo works: you start to kill the whole person and the tumor (hopefully) dies first. So what if you just randomly messed around with the conditions of the body? Give someone a diabetes drug, change their diet, add an antifungal... we've seen random successes like this, and the unifying theory might be that the cancer was thriving because it had exactly the right conditions, and now we can change them to cause the cancer to stop thriving.
dev_throw 4y ago
Thanks for giving me my reading material this week, as someone with stage 4 colon cancer :) I also read about promising outcomes with fenbendazole (dog deworming medicine) and colon/lung cancer, hope these finally unlock the fix for metastasis.
- yunobcool 4y ago
  Sorry to hear about the stage 4 prognosis. I know its insanely unlikely, but here's hoping for a quick game changing recovery that will flip the table on your cancer.