3 ms·

> No, it merely has to be about as reliable as a "cure for pneumonia". You're overlooking something very important -- we know what causes pneumonia, but we don

by lutusp 13y ago

> No, it merely has to be about as reliable as a "cure for pneumonia". You're overlooking something very important -- we know what causes pneumonia, but we don't know what causes cancer. When we treat pneumonia, we're treating a cause. When we treat cancer, we're treating a symptom. The reason for "remission not cure" is because we don't have any way to definitively say there won't be a recurrence, and this will remain true until we fully understand cancer.

maaku 13y ago
So? That's a state of our knowledge. When we learn more about cancer and find a way to treat the underlying causes, we will have actual cures: treatments which result in complete remission in >95% of cases. This will happen. It may take the tools provided by molecular nanotechnology, and a generation of oncological research, but it will. To accept that cancer is special is irrational deathism.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > When we learn more about cancer and find a way to treat the underlying causes, we will have actual cures: treatments which result in complete remission in >95% of cases. You clearly haven't decided what position you're taking. A cure is not remission in 95% of cases. A cure is a cure, with no chance of a recurrence if there is no further exposure to the responsible pathogen. Take malaria, for example -- do you think malaria victims experience spontaneous recurrences, far from the anopheles mosquito and its hitchhiker, plasmodium falciparum? > To accept that cancer is special is irrational deathism. In modern scientific medicine, anything we don't understand is special and deserves our attention. We don't understand cancer and it's deadly. Therefore it's special for perfectly scientific reasons. To call cancer just another disease is simply irrational -- and dangerous thinking.
  - maaku 13y ago
    And you clearly don't know how medical statistics work. Take the simple flu shot: chance of developing Guillain-Barre syndrome from the vaccination is about 1 in a million, and about 1 in 20 of those die from complications (odds are better if you seek prompt treatment). Does the flu shot provide benefit 100% of the time? No: in some cases it's killed people. So it goes with even the most advanced, futuristic cancer treatments. There will always be cases where the treatment kills the patient, or fails to affect the disease in any way. It will be the job of medical research to make those rare cases rarer. And by the way, if cancer is not a disease, then what the heck is it?
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > And you clearly don't know how medical statistics work. Both false and unrelated to the present topic. > Does the flu shot provide benefit 100% of the time? No: in some cases it's killed people. And cure still means cure. > So it goes with even the most advanced, futuristic cancer treatments. And none of them offers a cure. > And by the way, if cancer is not a disease, then what the heck is it? You must first locate where I claimed that cancer is not a disease.
refurb 13y ago
Sure we know what causes cancer, uncontrolled growth of a mutated cell! I see where you're coming from, but the differences between pneumonia and cancer aren't as great as you think. If you have pneumonia, they give you an antibiotic. They can test for the presence of the pathogen, but they can't ever say you are "cured". Take c. difficile infections. They treat the symptoms, but you can "relapse". In cancer you can test for the presence of the mutated cells (minimum residual disease). Often what they'll do is count the mutated cells from a biopsy, and with this current treatment, the number of remaining cells is less than the lower limit of detection. Of course, this is only true in the liquid cancers. Solid tumor cancers don't work the same way.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > Sure we know what causes cancer, uncontrolled growth of a mutated cell! That is an effect, not a cause. Your claim is like saying that auto accidents are caused by cars getting too close together. That's only a symptom of an underlying cause. > I see where you're coming from, but the differences between pneumonia and cancer aren't as great as you think. We know what causes pneumonia. Because of this, we can suggest behaviors that will prevent it before the fact, we can identify it unambiguously, and we can cure it after the fact. This isn't true about cancer -- we don't know what causes it, therefore we cannot proactively prevent it, we can't identify it very efficiently (there are always false negatives and positives) and we cannot cure it. There's no comparison. > They can test for the presence of the pathogen, but they can't ever say you are "cured". Of course they can. In infectious disease, they can test for the presence of the causative pathogen -- no pathogen, no disease. In cancer, to do this, we would first need to identify the cause. But we don't know the cause, we only know the effect. > In cancer you can test for the presence of the mutated cells (minimum residual disease). This is like saying we can test for the presence of a car crash by measuring bent bumpers and inflated airbags. That measures effects, not causes. > Often what they'll do is count the mutated cells from a biopsy, and with this current treatment, the number of remaining cells is less than the lower limit of detection. Counting abnormal cells only reveals how little we know. We detect cancer by detecting abnormal cell growth. We measure progress in symptomatic treatment by counting abnormal cells. We declare a remission by making that count approach zero using agents that kill abnormal cells. There are any number of cases where the count of cancerous cells was below the limit of detection, but still caused a recurrence. In 1979, smallpox was declared to have been globally eradicated. How? By identifying the responsible pathogen, then systematically destroying it everywhere it appeared. This was only possible because we know what caused smallpox, and we could treat the cause, not the symptoms. Because of what we knew, we were able to call smallpox permanently cured. We cannot do this with cancer, because we don't know enough about how it works. All we can do is tell people to avoid risky behaviors, behaviors that, for often-unclear reasons, increase one's chance to contract this disease. Then, once the disease's symptoms appear, we have crude methods to deal with it, like trying to kill the cell masses that represent the disease's primary symptom. Based on a comparison with other diseases, cancer treatment is unbelievably primitive -- it would be like treating a finger infection by cutting off a person's hand. And guess what? Before germ theory and before antibiotics, that was the treatment -- cut off the infected limb before the infection spread through the body. The reason we don't tell people they're cured of cancer is because of science. In science, there are no fairy tales -- everything depends on evidence. And we don't have the evidence science requires to declare cancer cured.

by lutusp 13y ago

maaku 13y ago

So? That's a state of our knowledge. When we learn more about cancer and find a way to treat the underlying causes, we will have actual cures: treatments which result in complete remission in >95% of cases. This will happen. It may take the tools provided by molecular nanotechnology, and a generation of oncological research, but it will. To accept that cancer is special is irrational deathism.

lutusp 13y ago
> When we learn more about cancer and find a way to treat the underlying causes, we will have actual cures: treatments which result in complete remission in >95% of cases. You clearly haven't decided what position you're taking. A cure is not remission in 95% of cases. A cure is a cure, with no chance of a recurrence if there is no further exposure to the responsible pathogen. Take malaria, for example -- do you think malaria victims experience spontaneous recurrences, far from the anopheles mosquito and its hitchhiker, plasmodium falciparum? > To accept that cancer is special is irrational deathism. In modern scientific medicine, anything we don't understand is special and deserves our attention. We don't understand cancer and it's deadly. Therefore it's special for perfectly scientific reasons. To call cancer just another disease is simply irrational -- and dangerous thinking.
- maaku 13y ago
  And you clearly don't know how medical statistics work. Take the simple flu shot: chance of developing Guillain-Barre syndrome from the vaccination is about 1 in a million, and about 1 in 20 of those die from complications (odds are better if you seek prompt treatment). Does the flu shot provide benefit 100% of the time? No: in some cases it's killed people. So it goes with even the most advanced, futuristic cancer treatments. There will always be cases where the treatment kills the patient, or fails to affect the disease in any way. It will be the job of medical research to make those rare cases rarer. And by the way, if cancer is not a disease, then what the heck is it?
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > And you clearly don't know how medical statistics work. Both false and unrelated to the present topic. > Does the flu shot provide benefit 100% of the time? No: in some cases it's killed people. And cure still means cure. > So it goes with even the most advanced, futuristic cancer treatments. And none of them offers a cure. > And by the way, if cancer is not a disease, then what the heck is it? You must first locate where I claimed that cancer is not a disease.

refurb 13y ago

Sure we know what causes cancer, uncontrolled growth of a mutated cell! I see where you're coming from, but the differences between pneumonia and cancer aren't as great as you think. If you have pneumonia, they give you an antibiotic. They can test for the presence of the pathogen, but they can't ever say you are "cured". Take c. difficile infections. They treat the symptoms, but you can "relapse". In cancer you can test for the presence of the mutated cells (minimum residual disease). Often what they'll do is count the mutated cells from a biopsy, and with this current treatment, the number of remaining cells is less than the lower limit of detection. Of course, this is only true in the liquid cancers. Solid tumor cancers don't work the same way.

lutusp 13y ago
> Sure we know what causes cancer, uncontrolled growth of a mutated cell! That is an effect, not a cause. Your claim is like saying that auto accidents are caused by cars getting too close together. That's only a symptom of an underlying cause. > I see where you're coming from, but the differences between pneumonia and cancer aren't as great as you think. We know what causes pneumonia. Because of this, we can suggest behaviors that will prevent it before the fact, we can identify it unambiguously, and we can cure it after the fact. This isn't true about cancer -- we don't know what causes it, therefore we cannot proactively prevent it, we can't identify it very efficiently (there are always false negatives and positives) and we cannot cure it. There's no comparison. > They can test for the presence of the pathogen, but they can't ever say you are "cured". Of course they can. In infectious disease, they can test for the presence of the causative pathogen -- no pathogen, no disease. In cancer, to do this, we would first need to identify the cause. But we don't know the cause, we only know the effect. > In cancer you can test for the presence of the mutated cells (minimum residual disease). This is like saying we can test for the presence of a car crash by measuring bent bumpers and inflated airbags. That measures effects, not causes. > Often what they'll do is count the mutated cells from a biopsy, and with this current treatment, the number of remaining cells is less than the lower limit of detection. Counting abnormal cells only reveals how little we know. We detect cancer by detecting abnormal cell growth. We measure progress in symptomatic treatment by counting abnormal cells. We declare a remission by making that count approach zero using agents that kill abnormal cells. There are any number of cases where the count of cancerous cells was below the limit of detection, but still caused a recurrence. In 1979, smallpox was declared to have been globally eradicated. How? By identifying the responsible pathogen, then systematically destroying it everywhere it appeared. This was only possible because we know what caused smallpox, and we could treat the cause, not the symptoms. Because of what we knew, we were able to call smallpox permanently cured. We cannot do this with cancer, because we don't know enough about how it works. All we can do is tell people to avoid risky behaviors, behaviors that, for often-unclear reasons, increase one's chance to contract this disease. Then, once the disease's symptoms appear, we have crude methods to deal with it, like trying to kill the cell masses that represent the disease's primary symptom. Based on a comparison with other diseases, cancer treatment is unbelievably primitive -- it would be like treating a finger infection by cutting off a person's hand. And guess what? Before germ theory and before antibiotics, that was the treatment -- cut off the infected limb before the infection spread through the body. The reason we don't tell people they're cured of cancer is because of science. In science, there are no fairy tales -- everything depends on evidence. And we don't have the evidence science requires to declare cancer cured.