11–20 of 48 posts
It is entirely possible that we can completely cure cancer. Not just a treatment, but actually prevent anyone from ever getting cancer in the first place. It would be super duper difficult, but we know it is possible because of the naked mole rat. Naked mole rats are essentially immune to cancer (I say essentially because this February scientists dicovered two individuals that had cancer, the only two documented case…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't you have insurance? It's mandatory now.
It's not mandatory in the US; you just pay a penalty the next time you file your taxes if you went too long without insurance. Spoiler: the penalty is far less than the cost of having insurance, which means it's still cheaper to just be uninsured (so long as you stay relatively healthy) and pay up on your tax return.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't you have insurance? It's mandatory now.
It's not mandatory in the US; you just pay a penalty the next time you file your taxes if you went too long without insurance. Spoiler: the penalty is far less than the cost of having insurance, which means it's still cheaper to just be uninsured (so long as you stay relatively healthy) and pay up on your tax return.
Does he just want a more dourer PR campaign? I suppose "We probably won't cure cancer, but, I guess this is better than nothing" would be more realistic.
Well of course any medical treatment for anything just leads to more medical treatment in the future; that's not a profound statement, not as long as people are mortal. And it's not limited to cancer. It used to be, in the bad old days, that some people became almost completely bedridden as their joints gave out, and then either died early or wished they did; now we have arthritis medications and joint replacement surgeries that let many of them (not all, but very many) enjoy decades of their retirements. Does this lessen the need for future orthopedic treatment? Obviously not, since it extends their lives and keeps them on their feet long enough to develop other joint problems. Does that make orthopedics and rheumatology pointless? As someone who needed the intervention of rheumatologists, I assure you that it doesn't.
In the case of cancer, nobody believes that one can make people live forever by curing their cancers; of course, they will live long enough to die of something, maybe even another cancer. Still, I personally know people in their 70s and 80s who would have been dead and buried 20 years ago if it wasn't for cancer treatment; and the idea of the "cancer moonshot" is to give the same chance to a lot more people. I came home today after visiting a very dear friend whose cancer is, with the current level of medicine, close to untreatable. Will she live forever if some treatment is developed for it? Well of course not. Would it be worthwhile to change the several months that she has left to live into several years? Of course, and yes, it would mean that she would require more cancer treatment, not less.
We can debate if the "moonshot" model is right for cancer (personally, I think it has merits), but these pseudo-profound dismissals of medicine are simply vulgar and annoying.
It is entirely possible that we can completely cure cancer. Not just a treatment, but actually prevent anyone from ever getting cancer in the first place. It would be super duper difficult, but we know it is possible because of the naked mole rat. Naked mole rats are essentially immune to cancer (I say essentially because this February scientists dicovered two individuals that had cancer, the only two documented case…
Ok I'll state the obvious: people are not rats.
This is obviously far off, but genetic modification opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
We are essentially temporary cell colonies evolved to relay life to the next generation, and as long as we are human, there will always be another cancer. That sentence made that great article awesome.
"as long as we are human" could also be read as "as long as we are built on legacy hardware" ;-)
I am going to go against the grain of the usual sympathetic responses to this type of articles, and I am going to say that this is a case of pernicious and pointless casuistry. Apparently, this now passes for some kind of deep thought on the human condition. Well of course any medical treatment for anything just leads to more medical treatment in the future; that's not a profound statement, not as long as people are…
I am going to go against the grain of the usual sympathetic responses to this type of articles, and I am going to say that this is a case of pernicious and pointless casuistry. Apparently, this now passes for some kind of deep thought on the human condition. Well of course any medical treatment for anything just leads to more medical treatment in the future; that's not a profound statement, not as long as people are…
We've definitely moved on since then. Moonshot or no, anything that helps make that experience less likely has to be a good thing.
I am going to go against the grain of the usual sympathetic responses to this type of articles, and I am going to say that this is a case of pernicious and pointless casuistry. Apparently, this now passes for some kind of deep thought on the human condition. Well of course any medical treatment for anything just leads to more medical treatment in the future; that's not a profound statement, not as long as people are…
He's right that an ever-older population will bring about more cancers- so we'd better have ways to treat them. And he's right that the "cancer moonshot" likely won't provide the singular, all-out cure, but no one outside of politicians claims it would; instead it will help provide partial cures that can reclaim thousands of healthy human-life-years, a worthy use of the money. That a professor of medicine draws such a poor picture of these issues sounds downright pathological.