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Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion
41–50 of 66 posts
Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion
#42Ironically, living in Germany makes me scared that I won't be able to pay for a therapy by someone like Dr. Nagourney as our governmental health insurance providers are very eccentric when it comes to paying for treatments. That combined with my high tax-rate and only slightly above average salary means I won't be able to save enough money to afford it to send a loved one to him when it becomes necessary. That is cra…
I'm a developer who has been living for 4+ years in Germany. Does that mean that it is a good idea to perhaps change to private insurance?
I thought that when I get old here, as I pay all those fucking taxes, I would get a good treatment for whatever diseases I may have until it's my last day.
That sucks. I feel ripped off.
Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cancer has always existed regardless of pollution. It's cell mutation, which is part of evolution. You can't fix it by getting rid of pollution. You fix it by making your own immune system recognize it again so that it can not the cell properly. Either that or restore the proper cell death instruction. Cancer deaths have been going down for years, firstly due to less smoking and less salted meat in our diets and now…
There was an interesting study here [1]. They researched the prevalence of cancer in ancient societies using a variety of methods - remains, reporting, etc. The goal was to determine whether the relative lack of cancer in ancient societies was driven by some sort of external factor such as inability to detect cancer in remains, poor reporting, lower life expectancies, etc or rather it was simply because cancer was si…
How does this paper account for the increase in life expectancy? Many types of cancer appear in people of older age and reaching that age was not nearly as common in ancient societies.
Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion
#44Ironically, living in Germany makes me scared that I won't be able to pay for a therapy by someone like Dr. Nagourney as our governmental health insurance providers are very eccentric when it comes to paying for treatments. That combined with my high tax-rate and only slightly above average salary means I won't be able to save enough money to afford it to send a loved one to him when it becomes necessary. That is cra…
I'm a developer who has been living for 4+ years in Germany. Does that mean that it is a good idea to perhaps change to private insurance? I thought that when I get old here, as I pay all those fucking taxes, I would get a good treatment for whatever diseases I may have until it's my last day. That sucks. I feel ripped off.
I think the OP is confusing a few things here. Public health insurance will always pay for whatever treatment you need. Age is only a factor in very few cases. What matters is that the doctor or hospital is also in Germany. The system allows you a huge amount of freedom in choosing who to get care from. But the system doesn't cover getting care from foreign facilities. Private health insurance policies have the same restriction.
Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would be the value in finding a cure for cancer for a patient who is already dead if that patients particular mutation is unlikely to be found in another person?
As has already been stated you can use the prior tissue to better individualize current treatment. For example I'm a really rare patient, most people in my situation are already dead by this point in their treatment. Chemotherapy worked so well most of my primary tumor was gone within days and they haven't seen it since my 6th treatment. They still think it's there but it's generally too small to be seen. They didn't…
What kind of cancer did/do you have and at what stage did you begin treatment?
This is truly astonishing, by the way.
Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So a profit motive will always beat out a non-market based approach, which isn’t really news Call me a dreamer, but I wonder if that would remain true in a UBI-style environment?
if there is a scarce useful resource being used and acquired then yes?
I think people would be tempted to try more and crazier things to earn more money because the risk of failure is lessened in that scenario.
Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was an interesting study here [1]. They researched the prevalence of cancer in ancient societies using a variety of methods - remains, reporting, etc. The goal was to determine whether the relative lack of cancer in ancient societies was driven by some sort of external factor such as inability to detect cancer in remains, poor reporting, lower life expectancies, etc or rather it was simply because cancer was si…
How does this paper account for the increase in life expectancy? Many types of cancer appear in people of older age and reaching that age was not nearly as common in ancient societies.
Two ways. By looking at the causes of death of those that did live to old age as well as by considering cancers (such as bone) that tend to occur disproportionately in young people.
Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion
#48Yep, if we really want to cure cancer, we need to go back into the tissue archives and study every single cancer that's ever been diagnosed, at the molecular level, to start getting our heads around what really happened to all those people. 10 million people a year. Every year. For a the last 6-7 decades of chemotherapy. Meanwhile, there's this perverse medicolegal incentive to retain the excised tissue samples for t…
I think there is a problem even on a higher level. I am not aware for example that the detailed history of cancer patients, is recorded centrally for later data analysis. Which treatment worked, which did not? Even airlines now share data about flights to help engineer around the world to find remedies for problems with small incidence levels. I wonder why that is so complicated in the case of cancer
Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a developer who has been living for 4+ years in Germany. Does that mean that it is a good idea to perhaps change to private insurance? I thought that when I get old here, as I pay all those fucking taxes, I would get a good treatment for whatever diseases I may have until it's my last day. That sucks. I feel ripped off.
I think the OP is confusing a few things here. Public health insurance will always pay for whatever treatment you need. Age is only a factor in very few cases. What matters is that the doctor or hospital is also in Germany. The system allows you a huge amount of freedom in choosing who to get care from. But the system doesn't cover getting care from foreign facilities. Private health insurance policies have the same…
> What matters is that the doctor or hospital is also in Germany.
Given that ~90% of cancer research is funded in the United States [0], that might work for established therapies but anything on the cutting edge might be hard to get?
According to this article from MGH, cutting edge immunotherapies cost ~$1M per patient: http://protomag.com/articles/solid-tumor-barrier
And this one demonstrates the delays in their availability in Europe. Sucks big time for the people currently needing treatment: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-12/novartis-...
[0] #62 Peter Attia M.D. podcast with Keith Flaherty MGH
Re: Every Cancer Patient Is One in a Billion
#50Yep, if we really want to cure cancer, we need to go back into the tissue archives and study every single cancer that's ever been diagnosed, at the molecular level, to start getting our heads around what really happened to all those people. 10 million people a year. Every year. For a the last 6-7 decades of chemotherapy. Meanwhile, there's this perverse medicolegal incentive to retain the excised tissue samples for t…
I think there is a problem even on a higher level. I am not aware for example that the detailed history of cancer patients, is recorded centrally for later data analysis. Which treatment worked, which did not? Even airlines now share data about flights to help engineer around the world to find remedies for problems with small incidence levels. I wonder why that is so complicated in the case of cancer
Researchers can usually request that data from the hospital records (needs to be specifically requested due to HIPAA i believe) and some of it is already in public databases like tcga.