Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leukemia Has Won

alex.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–196 of 196 posts

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#191

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

agent008t wrote: post #188
HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The earlier the better. Depending on the cancer type early diagnosis of e.g. skin cancer has almost 100% survival( cure) rates. Early diagnosis of lung cancer gives the option of removing the whole section of the lung. Decreases the maximum oxygen supply rate but not enough to affect daily life. Generally speaking if it's early we can cut it more easily, radiate the specific area instead of many different ones that c…

So are there some specific symptoms one should look out for? Some comprehensive periodic tests? Maybe combined with some genetic pre-screening? Given how important it can be to diagnose these things early, I think most people have no idea how they could or should do it - apart from maybe breast and testicular cancer. If you were to design a policy for someone that wanted to maximize their survival probability with re…

>So are there some specific symptoms one should look out for?

Not something overly specific. And it also depends on cancer type. Lung cancer is mostly without any symptoms until it's very advanced and you start coughing blood.

>If you were to design a policy for someone that wanted to maximize their survival probability with regards to potential cancers while still leading a normal life, and money was no object, what would that policy look like?

I would say the best bang for your buck would be an annual MRI test. It won't show absolutely everything but it would show most stuff.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#192

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

jmromer wrote: post #164
HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy. Here's more "feel good" language change suggestions. No. Just not. This kind of thing is extremely hypocritical and insulting to all those who are actually fighting cancer. Both the patients, the doctors and research teams. >Cure seems like a goal that isn't realistic anymore. Where did you get that from? Both cure and 5 year survival rates are higher than ever and are slowly encroaching advanced stages of ca…

> I've seen people give up and accept their low chances of survival. It's very rare. This strikes me as being normatively loaded in a way that's unhelpful, at a minimum. There's a cost-benefit analysis that has to take place by patients and their families and there's a choice to be made between optimizing for length of life and quality of life. I don't have any issue with the "fight" language, but the associations I…

>This strikes me as being normatively loaded in a way that's unhelpful, at a minimum. There's a cost-benefit analysis that has to take place by patients and their families and there's a choice to be made between optimizing for length of life and quality of life.

That's what a person who isn't in that position would think. In reality most people just want to live. So it's as much of a fight as a non-combat situation can be. And there is literally a battle between the cancer and your body going on.

>In general though, all this talk of "fight", "battle", "never giving up", etc, strikes me as being somewhat American (in a pejorative sense of the term) -— it bespeaks an immature relationship with death.

And I'm not even american. I don't think there's anything wrong with people wanting to live and get rid of a fairly "unfair" disease. Because cancer can indeed be unfair in many cases. An e.g. smoker knows it's probably coming. But the very nature of cancer as a probabilistic disease means some people get the sort end of the stick without bringing it on themselves.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#193

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

rland wrote: post #179
HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy. Here's more "feel good" language change suggestions. No. Just not. This kind of thing is extremely hypocritical and insulting to all those who are actually fighting cancer. Both the patients, the doctors and research teams. >Cure seems like a goal that isn't realistic anymore. Where did you get that from? Both cure and 5 year survival rates are higher than ever and are slowly encroaching advanced stages of ca…

Death is a very personal thing. Would you tell the author of TFA that they are "giving up?"

>Death is a very personal thing. Would you tell the author of TFA that they are "giving up?"

Tell it to them? No. When the treatment effort starts, you make it clear that they can drop off the therapy at any time they want. When and if that happens you sugar coat it as much as you can and help them make peace with the world and their families etc. At that point no benefit will come to the patient from telling them the truth.

But it totally matters when discussing e.g. health policies or future directions of treatments. These people do actually give up and we should face that. We should ask what parts of our current treatment methods are the most unbearable and how we can improve those in the future. How to better approach the patients from the beginning. Things like that.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#194

Post by jrobn »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #78
jrobn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death is the ultimate joke. We spend so much time worrying about it. Avoiding it. Writing poetry and books about it. Maybe, If your a Religious being, even shaping our entire life around it because of the “ultimate judgement” in the end. Death is a construction to make sense of our physical reality.

What could you possibly mean by that last sentence?

that the physical reality around you that you perceive through your mind might not be the end-all-be-all and death is just a small part of it all. I don’t know. You’ll find out sometime.

Re: Leukemia Has Won

#195

Post by jmromer »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #192
jmromer wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've seen people give up and accept their low chances of survival. It's very rare. This strikes me as being normatively loaded in a way that's unhelpful, at a minimum. There's a cost-benefit analysis that has to take place by patients and their families and there's a choice to be made between optimizing for length of life and quality of life. I don't have any issue with the "fight" language, but the associations I…

>This strikes me as being normatively loaded in a way that's unhelpful, at a minimum. There's a cost-benefit analysis that has to take place by patients and their families and there's a choice to be made between optimizing for length of life and quality of life. That's what a person who isn't in that position would think. In reality most people just want to live. So it's as much of a fight as a non-combat situation c…

> That's what a person who isn't in that position would think. In reality most people just want to live.

That's an exceptionally and offensively clueless thing to say. I speak from hard experience.

Post reply on HN