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Comment by drjackal | Hacker News Reader

On Monday I got the worst phone call of my life. My sister, who is in her 40s has been diagnosed with Leukemia. The variant she has is Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) which has a 5 year survival rate of only about 30%. She seemed healthy just a few days before diagnosis, she was just a bit tired and had low appetite. Then she noticed some abnormality in her vision and that's when she did a blood test and found extremely low hemoglobin count.

Shows how quickly your world can come crashing. Cancer is awful. Cancer and global warming are where most of the worlds research dollars should be going. This story brings hope for the future.

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With respect, and empathy given that I have lost several close family relatives to cancer, I disagree with you.

Many cancers are in fact overfunded relative to their societal impact. Moreover too much money is spent on chasing cures rather than prevention:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411479/ http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2013/02/07/where_do_the_mil...

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And yet we still sell cigarettes. And though WHO proved processed meats cause cancer the deli counter line is still very long. There are things that you can teach people to prevent doing, don't stick a knife in the electric socket, and then there are the things that take a monumental effort to change.

Prevention education is important, but I wonder if the meat counter will be restricted to 18 and over to purchase and come with a warning from the surgeon general.

I'm being unusually sarcastic, but I've had this conversation several times in my own head and I can't figure out a solution.

Leaded gasoline was poising the nation, but no one stopped driving. Only when the government forced the corporations to change did the lead poising stop.

You can't make someone change, you can't force an individual to change but if you never allow it to enter their world then it has been prevented right?

The obvious solution is to change incentives. The solution that will actually work, but will bring endless accusations of cruelty and heartlessness and Godwin's law, is simple:

Bring back shaming. Encourage fat shaming. Encourage alcohol shaming. We still encourage smoke-shaming, and it has resulted in a reduction in smoking. We need to stop being so afraid and sensitive to shame. It is a natural human tendency to police behaviors with negative externalities via shame.

Pass all the laws you want, but social shame is far more effective.

Shaming would only make things worse. From my experience alcoholics and over-eaters do not respond well to negative social stimuli. i.e. they will eat and drink more.

This reminds me of a Black Mirror episode where at some point in the future, fat shaming was brought to such an extreme, that everybody's job was just to pedal stationary bikes. And if you slacked, you got fat, and if you got fat, you got fired, and then you had to wear a bright yellow uniform and appear on fat shaming reality tv shows and clean up everybody's trash.

And yet we still sell cigarettes. And though WHO proved processed meats cause cancer the deli counter line is still very long.

And we still go skiing, and we still take nonessential car trips. Things have benefits as well as costs.

I'd love to know what the benefits of cigarettes are.

It's so common I start to think society is too dumb-smart and optimize for cure to idiotic problems rather refactoring itself.

I wish you both all the very best in this awful situation. I have been in the same position as you and in the same position as her. Your love and support will be so important to her.

My condolences. My 2 year old daughter was recently diagnosed with Leukemia as well, it's a horrible message to get and I wish your family well.

One thing we try to remember is that those five year cohorts lack all the advances in the previous half decade. The five year survival percentage could have improved dramatically!

Look, I'm not comfortable discussing my own circumstances, but making it to mid-30s has been a huge blessing. Getting diagnosed after 40 years on this earth is a tough pill to swallow. I can't disagree that it feels like one of the most devastating things that could happen.

Yet, you know, there are actually cancers that strike kids before they even have a chance to reach puberty. One in particular is Rhabdomyosarcoma which is a cancer of muscle tissue that essentially is a death sentence. The treatments that exist are limited, and funding does exist to work on it, but it's not a well known issue until it hits a family, which means funding is pretty much dependent on foundations willing to spend money on a hard challenge that isn't glamorous.

What do I mean by glamorous? I mean breast cancer. Pancreatic cancer. Colon cancer. The things that are likely to hit a large group of people.

I sincerely hope the best for your sister, I really do. She's about to enter a world which is a new perspective on life. Over time I've learned that a lot of people don't value what they have until it's in jeopardy, and when the bubble gets burst, when mortality is staring strong, that's when it's time to get real, to bite down on the belt and take the pain if it means survival. Stay strong, and tomorrow holds a future that none of us can predict.

Pancreatic cancer research is far from "glamorous" and is sorely underfunded. Despite having one of the highest mortality rates of any cancer, it has some of the lowest funding.

Why global warming?

Because it's 2015

Because many people will die in horrible ways from its effects.

same reason gun control is a good idea?

Really? You're going to be that person?

Oh, so it's political. Never mind then.

(If it is not political, I still would like to see the answer.)

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