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Before cancer kills, it cheats

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Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#41

Post by epmaybe »

tcj_phx wrote: post #33
epmaybe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is misleading. Certain cancers are indeed 'caused' by genetic changes, and researchers are actively looking for ways to prevent those genetic changes from occuring in the first place. But do you really tell someone with a familial mutation that we know causes thyroid cancer that they should be on a ketogenic diet? Most therapeutics today are developed knowing that they will not have a substantially more…

Your comment history suggests that you've been through medical school. I like to say that sometimes doctors do good work, and sometimes they make work for themselves. Please take this response as a gentle and well-intended effort to protest the standard practices that hurt patients by 'missing the forest for the trees', such as I've observed in my own family (who themselves are employed in the conventional approach t…

If one thinks that their ideas on alternative therapies are worth investigating, I would strongly urge them to connect with a scientist that shares similar views, and apply for funding through the NIH. There is a significant amount of funding for complementary and alternative medicine. It's not well known that such funding exists, so I try and let others know about it.

I have been tangentially involved with pain researchers that teamed up with chiropractors to study some of their maneuvers in a rigorous manner.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#42

Post by dang »

pnutjam wrote: post #14
homero wrote: post #3

A future where cancer is controlled but not cured is just as good and might be easier to achieve. I hope science gets there before I get cancer which is inevitable, unless I die from a heart attack.

So cancer will only kill poor Americans?

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#43

Post by TeMPOraL »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #35
scythe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an important difference between a tumor and an organism: one can sustain itself, the other is a parasite. So what would obviously put humans over the line? Establishing self-sufficient colonies off Earth seems to be beyond the reach of any swarm of locusts, but possibly viable in a 1000-2000 year timespan for people.

Ignoring timescale, modeling a single tumor as a parasite of humans seems the same as modeling humanity as parasites of nature/world/universe.

And if nature/world/universe was sentient, it would be angry at us and it would want to fight us. And if tumors were sentient, they would assert their rights to live and write their own rules.

Alas, we're the only sentient beings in this comparison, which makes tumors bad and universe a resource, by our standards - i.e. the only ones that matter.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#44

Post by tcj_phx »

leereeves wrote: post #37
tcj_phx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment history suggests that you've been through medical school. I like to say that sometimes doctors do good work, and sometimes they make work for themselves. Please take this response as a gentle and well-intended effort to protest the standard practices that hurt patients by 'missing the forest for the trees', such as I've observed in my own family (who themselves are employed in the conventional approach t…

> To figure out how to induce spontaneous remission of cancer cells would be a revolutionary advance. There's a lot of work being done on that front, primarily in the form of inducing an immune response to cancer. This work is being done in "allopathic" medical schools and hospitals and in biology labs that are the source of most allopathic medicine. If this work succeeds, it might lead to a cancer vaccine: the kind…

> This work is being done in "allopathic" medical schools and hospitals and in biology labs that are the source of most allopathic medicine.

'Allopath' is considered a derogatory term by the modern doctors who are aware of its origin.

> If this work succeeds, it might lead to a cancer vaccine: the kind of treatment sometimes opposed by homeopaths and naturopaths.

The core of the resistance to vaccines is an opposition to the idea that a disease's context doesn't matter. Improved sanitation, refrigeration, insights into adequate nutrition, and other improvements in technology have done just as much as vaccination to vanquish the diseases of antiquity.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#45

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tcj_phx wrote: post #33
epmaybe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is misleading. Certain cancers are indeed 'caused' by genetic changes, and researchers are actively looking for ways to prevent those genetic changes from occuring in the first place. But do you really tell someone with a familial mutation that we know causes thyroid cancer that they should be on a ketogenic diet? Most therapeutics today are developed knowing that they will not have a substantially more…

Your comment history suggests that you've been through medical school. I like to say that sometimes doctors do good work, and sometimes they make work for themselves. Please take this response as a gentle and well-intended effort to protest the standard practices that hurt patients by 'missing the forest for the trees', such as I've observed in my own family (who themselves are employed in the conventional approach t…

> Homeopathic medicine held that the body can fix itself when properly supported

“Homeopathy is a pseudoscience” [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy second sentence

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#46

Post by scottie_m »

tcj_phx wrote: post #33
epmaybe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is misleading. Certain cancers are indeed 'caused' by genetic changes, and researchers are actively looking for ways to prevent those genetic changes from occuring in the first place. But do you really tell someone with a familial mutation that we know causes thyroid cancer that they should be on a ketogenic diet? Most therapeutics today are developed knowing that they will not have a substantially more…

Your comment history suggests that you've been through medical school. I like to say that sometimes doctors do good work, and sometimes they make work for themselves. Please take this response as a gentle and well-intended effort to protest the standard practices that hurt patients by 'missing the forest for the trees', such as I've observed in my own family (who themselves are employed in the conventional approach t…

I always notice that when people talk about homeopathy they love to pick and choose which parts most appeal to them, and try to pretend the rest doesn’t exist. The core of homeopathy is the idea of “Water Memory” which is, to put it bluntly, horseshit sympathetic magic. The idea that water can retain a “memory” of a substance that’s been totally diluted out of it is ridiculous, so people tend to lead with some New Age, wish washy “let the body heal itself” crap.

Homeopathy is pure, unadulterated garbage, and proof that people will repackage old ideas such as sympathetic magic in new forms. You might as well rub a toad on your head. Homeopathy capitalizes on the same simple fact that most medical scams do, which is that most illness will indeed resolve with time. If you then take credit with placebo interventions for the body’s natural processes, you can fool a lot of people.

It’s funny, until someone decides to forgo treatment for a curable illness in favor of that magical thinking.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#47

Post by [deleted] »

domnomnom wrote: post #6

Here are some ideas: Look at the functional call stack. Its a slice of the linear address space that’s actively being used and it is strikingly similar to the promoter regions of the genome. Like some pathogens, hackers randomly try to hit that sweet spot that will jump to the special program. Operating systems are like simple biological organisms that evolve in response to various influences (cybersecurity it seems…

[deleted]

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#49

Post by leereeves »

tcj_phx wrote: post #44
leereeves wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To figure out how to induce spontaneous remission of cancer cells would be a revolutionary advance. There's a lot of work being done on that front, primarily in the form of inducing an immune response to cancer. This work is being done in "allopathic" medical schools and hospitals and in biology labs that are the source of most allopathic medicine. If this work succeeds, it might lead to a cancer vaccine: the kind…

> This work is being done in "allopathic" medical schools and hospitals and in biology labs that are the source of most allopathic medicine. 'Allopath' is considered a derogatory term by the modern doctors who are aware of its origin. > If this work succeeds, it might lead to a cancer vaccine: the kind of treatment sometimes opposed by homeopaths and naturopaths. The core of the resistance to vaccines is an oppositio…

> Improved sanitation, refrigeration, insights into adequate nutrition, and other improvements in technology have done just as much as vaccination to vanquish the diseases of antiquity.

I don't understand the relevance. Will sanitation, refrigeration, or nutrition protect you from polio, measles, or other diseases commonly vaccinated against?

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#50

Post by dnautics »

tcj_phx wrote: post #19
klmr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She rightly recognizes the key role of cell autonomous vs. cell non-autonomous processes in how multicellular organisms work. This is an odd comment: This realisation is quite literally at the core of cancer research, and every researcher in the field recognises this. Heck, it’s implied if not mentioned outright in the seminal Hallmarks of Cancer paper [1] that every cancer researcher (and probably generally most h…

> But it doesn’t hold any striking new insights. All of this is not merely known but in fact fundamental knowledge. A lot of "fundamental knowledge" in medicine is wrong. The genetic theory of cancer has always been a dead-end, because it reverses cause and effect. The cancer industry has encouraged "kill all the cancer cells" treatments because it's convenient for their business model. The cancer treatment situation…

Uh correct me if I'm wrong, but "kill all cancer cells" is less lucrative than "put you on a maintenance regime that you need to stay alive", and is a major part of the ethical debate surrounding gleevec.
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