This may be of interest: https://amp.abc.net.au/article/103610270
Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
151–160 of 380 posts
Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
#152Here’s a summary of all of the current treatments and near future treatments for GBM/glioma: https://docs.google.com/file/d/1kTa3eamaL91Smjh9r_0CYv5OYFX4....
This is as complete a list as you’ll find, written in plain English, with citations for every part of it. Slightly out of date but there hasn’t been much that’s new and different since last year. Vorasidenib was approved recently in USA and it’s the most effective IDH inhibitor - worth reading more about.
The document is focussed on glioma but there’s a lot of GBM research. Unfortunately the short answer is that there is no cure and there is treatment that might be a cure under development. There are treatments that slow the course, and the patient’s doctors know all of them and they will recommend what’s best. This is an area of medicine that is hard for amateurs to learn about, and a neurooncologist has decades more training than their patients. The reality is this is a horrible disease that currently has no cure - and the treatments that work are all complex medicines prescribed by specialists.
Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
#153Sorry friend, there no hacks from brain cancer. Mortality rate at Stage 4 is 100%. You're better off spending as much time as you can with them.
Unfortunately this is true, and there’s no near-term treatment that might change this outcome. There’s some treatments for slowing it down but there’s no proof of anyone being cured by any experimental method. There’s great progress being made and thousands of people working on paths to a cure but we’re still early days for some diseases.
Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
dont get why that upsets you. I have had a chronic disease my whole life and one of the people who offered help completely saved my life. If anyone else told me to eat apricots Id be grateful for their time and attention. I would probably eat the apricots and tell them it was fantastic, even if it had no effect. Sorry I just have rarely seen my friends or family offer any advice. - Back to OP, Ive always remembered P…
Not everyone wants to be reminded of their situation or turn major aspects of their life into a struggle.
first: the person who doesn't want to be reminded is probably not the person that is approaching you and actively telling you that they are approaching the end of their life.
second: speaking to them about their plight isn't the struggle; DEATH IS -- and we're all in that same boat.
Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
#155Keto diets seem to have at least a positive anecdotal effect. Putting aside the cancer part, a strict adherence to the caloric restriction diet has general health benefits. Whether the positive health benefits impact the cancer itself is unknown. It may simply be that being healthier helps patients deal with the impacts of chemo and radiotherapy.
Also possible is that caloric restriction helps to put the body into a biology mode that helps to combat cancerous tissue.
There's no solid science behind any of this, but generally being healthier helps with any medical treatments.
Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
If diet could stop cancer, we'd be done by now. I guarantee every cancer will mutate to overcome any change in diet you can throw at it.
All cancer treatments are probabilistic. There are no cures, just interventions that increase survival rates. There are no honest sentences that begin with "every cancer".
There is no diet that will even intervene with cancer, unless the patient dies.
Cancer is the patient's own cell that has mutated to a point beyond apoptosis and adapted to be able to draw nutrients from cells around it. It started from just one cell. It has already evaded dietary fluctuations and adapted.
EDIT: the reason I'm a spaz about this is I feel too many people focus on diet as the focus of cancer. While it might be good for some prevention, it will not stop it, and I want people to focus on real treatments.
Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
To give a practical example, grapefruit juice contains some compounds that inhibit CYP3A4, a metabolic enzyme that influences the metabolism and absorption of many drugs, which is why many prescriptions tell you not to drink it while taking a given medication. This interaction was not discovered until 1989, and not reported until two years after that. So before 1991, a simple dietary intervention that affected like h…
The problem is you can't figure out where to pick it; it's lost in a sea of superstitious noise. Even if you could find this fruit easily, "a food that cures cancer when eaten" does not exist. That would surface in epidemiological studies very quickly.
I admire your optimism in epidemiology. In point of fact, though, we have a rough natural experiment in the form of a food that doesn't cure a disease, but rather makes half of all drugs worse. That's very valuable knowledge, and under ideal epistemic conditions it might have been discovered within a few years of organized drug discovery as such. Yet was not widely known until the 1990s. So that's a failed positive control, which suggests that our practical capabilities to detect these kinds of effects are limited. Understandably so, given that there is no general requirement for dietary logging in clinical trials.
That said, "a food that cures cancer when eaten" is not the bar for experimentation. More realistic might be something like "a dietary or behavioral protocol that, in some way, ameliorates this or that illness".
For organisms with our body plan, "a cure for cancer" is like talking about "a cure for defection". But clearly there's "stuff that is efficacious against particular instances of cancer", a lot of which we found through techniques like natural product screens, i.e. "just trying stuff", rather than via rational drug design.
Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
dont get why that upsets you. I have had a chronic disease my whole life and one of the people who offered help completely saved my life. If anyone else told me to eat apricots Id be grateful for their time and attention. I would probably eat the apricots and tell them it was fantastic, even if it had no effect. Sorry I just have rarely seen my friends or family offer any advice. - Back to OP, Ive always remembered P…
It can be bit annoying because people people think "can't hurt to try" but there's thousand unfounded things to try, little time, no way to pick and some of them could hurt. There's no harm in listening to ideas, being expected to implement them is another thing.
a) Nobody here is talking about unfounded things nor demanding anyone do anything.
b) There are not thousands of things to try. In fact in most cases there will be no options since you will need to be in a clinical trial, asking a Doctor to try something unproven and unethical or need substantial resources.
Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
#159Have you looked into ivermectin and fenbendazole? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3158014/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7505114/
Mel Gibson was just on Joe Rogan talking about it
Re: Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
All cancer treatments are probabilistic. There are no cures, just interventions that increase survival rates. There are no honest sentences that begin with "every cancer".
There is no diet that will even intervene with cancer, unless the patient dies. Cancer is the patient's own cell that has mutated to a point beyond apoptosis and adapted to be able to draw nutrients from cells around it. It started from just one cell. It has already evaded dietary fluctuations and adapted. EDIT: the reason I'm a spaz about this is I feel too many people focus on diet as the focus of cancer. While it…
I don't understand unreasonable positions like this.
Nobody is saying that people should stop "real" treatments or that diet must be the primary or sole focus for treatment. But given that a change of diet (a) costs nothing, (b) has no downsides, (c) potentially may work it seems strange not to do it.