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Comment by untilHellbanned | Hacker News Reader

Professor at a med school here.

Regardless of whether you think the specifics presented in this article (e.g., NSAIDS-esophageal cancer) are right, it’s great to see this kind of philosophical approach to biomedical research. We need more people like this professor.

That she started with a plant and that made her think about humans was a great insight. She rightly recognizes the key role of cell autonomous vs. cell non-autonomous processes in how multicellular organisms work.

That she is a woman and someone not at an Ivy League school is also very refreshing to see getting publicized by Harvard. There are so many great scientists aground the world doing great stuff. Let’s keep finding them and reporting on them!

Please media, more of these types of stories and less clickbait please! I loved this article. My faith in humanity was restored just a touch here.

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> She rightly recognizes the key role of cell autonomous vs. cell non-autonomous processes in how multicellular organisms work.

This is an odd comment: This realisation is quite literally at the core of cancer research, and every researcher in the field recognises this. Heck, it’s implied if not mentioned outright in the seminal Hallmarks of Cancer paper [1] that every cancer researcher (and probably generally most human biologist) has read.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a well-written article explaining the biology to a lay audience. But it doesn’t hold any striking new insights. All of this is not merely known but in fact fundamental knowledge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer

> Don’t get me wrong: it’s a well-written article explaining the biology to a lay audience. But it doesn’t hold any striking new insights.

This "article" in the Harvard Gazette is basically a press release about an invited lecture that happened at Harvard. If it manages to clearly and correctly explain any science, then it's already going above and beyond its main purpose.

Edit:

* Here is Athena Aktipis' lab site: http://www.aktipislab.org

* Here is a 2015 NYT article about her work that goes into more detail than this press release: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/science/cellular-cheaters...

* This is the scientific article: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1673/2014...

> But it doesn’t hold any striking new insights. All of this is not merely known but in fact fundamental knowledge.

A lot of "fundamental knowledge" in medicine is wrong. The genetic theory of cancer has always been a dead-end, because it reverses cause and effect. The cancer industry has encouraged "kill all the cancer cells" treatments because it's convenient for their business model. The cancer treatment situation is similar to how the use of bloodletting persisted for hundreds of years [0], in spite of the low rates of success.

[0] http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/theodoric-of-yo...

There's no need for new insights, the old insight needs to be fully developed. Your link has a subsection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer#Deregu...

Warburg's nobel prize was in 1931; we're finally realizing he was probably right all along.

(minor edit)

Your comment is misleading. Certain cancers are indeed 'caused' by genetic changes, and researchers are actively looking for ways to prevent those genetic changes from occuring in the first place. But do you really tell someone with a familial mutation that we know causes thyroid cancer that they should be on a ketogenic diet?

Most therapeutics today are developed knowing that they will not have a substantially more beneficial effect than current therapies. We still develop these because even if they are not better they could reduce adverse events caused by our current best meds.

As far as I can tell in the last 80 years the Warburg effect has led PET scanning a viable way to detect the progression of many cancers.

To suggest that increased research into the Warburg effect is going to be the thing that leads to an explosion in novel therapeutics for cancer is wishful thinking, as far as I'm concerned. Cancer is complex, and while we could stand to learn more about metabolic changes in cancer, there's not going to be a magic pill for this one.

Your comment history suggests that you've been through medical school.

I like to say that sometimes doctors do good work, and sometimes they make work for themselves. Please take this response as a gentle and well-intended effort to protest the standard practices that hurt patients by 'missing the forest for the trees', such as I've observed in my own family (who themselves are employed in the conventional approach to medicine), and my girlfriend (who is being harmed by allopathic psychiatry).

Did you know that the term 'allopathy' was coined by a homeopath? At the time bloodletting, calomel, and blister agents were the standard of care. Homeopathic medicine held that the body can fix itself when properly supported (diet, clean environment, etc). Allopathic medical practitioners engage in the heroic struggle against disease [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_medicine

Allopathic medicine never went away, it just changed form. While conventional medical practitioners are doing much better than 200 years ago (w.r.t. not killing their patients), from my perspective, conventional psychiatry and conventional cancer treatments leave much to be desired.

> To suggest that increased research into the Warburg effect is going to be the thing that leads to an explosion in novel therapeutics for cancer is wishful thinking, as far as I'm concerned.

I have some great anecdotes about cheap metabolic therapies. But they're just my non-rigorous anecdotes... The one person who I'd most like to experiment on, trusts her doctors because they wear the halo of 'conventionality'.

> Cancer is complex, and while we could stand to learn more about metabolic changes in cancer, there's not going to be a magic pill for this one.

Consider the possibility that cancer is much simpler than the geneticists have led us to believe. Sometimes 'we must unlearn, what we have learned'.

Edit: google scholar turns up some papers about 'spontaneous remission' of cancer. To figure out how to induce spontaneous remission of cancer cells would be a revolutionary advance.

> To figure out how to induce spontaneous remission of cancer cells would be a revolutionary advance.

There's a lot of work being done on that front, primarily in the form of inducing an immune response to cancer.

This work is being done in "allopathic" medical schools and hospitals and in biology labs that are the source of most allopathic medicine.

If this work succeeds, it might lead to a cancer vaccine: the kind of treatment sometimes opposed by homeopaths and naturopaths.

> This work is being done in "allopathic" medical schools and hospitals and in biology labs that are the source of most allopathic medicine.

'Allopath' is considered a derogatory term by the modern doctors who are aware of its origin.

> If this work succeeds, it might lead to a cancer vaccine: the kind of treatment sometimes opposed by homeopaths and naturopaths.

The core of the resistance to vaccines is an opposition to the idea that a disease's context doesn't matter. Improved sanitation, refrigeration, insights into adequate nutrition, and other improvements in technology have done just as much as vaccination to vanquish the diseases of antiquity.

> Improved sanitation, refrigeration, insights into adequate nutrition, and other improvements in technology have done just as much as vaccination to vanquish the diseases of antiquity.

I don't understand the relevance. Will sanitation, refrigeration, or nutrition protect you from polio, measles, or other diseases commonly vaccinated against?

If one thinks that their ideas on alternative therapies are worth investigating, I would strongly urge them to connect with a scientist that shares similar views, and apply for funding through the NIH. There is a significant amount of funding for complementary and alternative medicine. It's not well known that such funding exists, so I try and let others know about it.

I have been tangentially involved with pain researchers that teamed up with chiropractors to study some of their maneuvers in a rigorous manner.

I also have some conventional/non-controversial ideas that ought to be verified - interventions that I have personally verified work as expected. I will look into the NIH's programs for funding these investigations.

Thanks for the suggestion!

> Homeopathic medicine held that the body can fix itself when properly supported

“Homeopathy is a pseudoscience” [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy second sentence

I always notice that when people talk about homeopathy they love to pick and choose which parts most appeal to them, and try to pretend the rest doesn’t exist. The core of homeopathy is the idea of “Water Memory” which is, to put it bluntly, horseshit sympathetic magic. The idea that water can retain a “memory” of a substance that’s been totally diluted out of it is ridiculous, so people tend to lead with some New Age, wish washy “let the body heal itself” crap.

Homeopathy is pure, unadulterated garbage, and proof that people will repackage old ideas such as sympathetic magic in new forms. You might as well rub a toad on your head. Homeopathy capitalizes on the same simple fact that most medical scams do, which is that most illness will indeed resolve with time. If you then take credit with placebo interventions for the body’s natural processes, you can fool a lot of people.

It’s funny, until someone decides to forgo treatment for a curable illness in favor of that magical thinking.

Uh correct me if I'm wrong, but "kill all cancer cells" is less lucrative than "put you on a maintenance regime that you need to stay alive", and is a major part of the ethical debate surrounding gleevec.

Reading between your lines, perhaps incorrectly, it seems you are in the camp that cancer treatment is ineffective and it won't get better because it is making people money they way it is.

But the fact is there have been great strides in the survival rate of many kinds of cancer over the past 40 years, even though some are more stubborn than others. It hasn't been dramatic advances for most of it; most of the gains have been slow, incremental improvements that add up over decades.

Improved cancer survival rates may be related to shifting diagnostic patterns. "Pre-cancer" might not have deteriorated into full-blown cancer, but since it was caught it was treated, and marked as a success.

> most of the gains have been slow, incremental improvements that add up over decades.

I read something 1 to 2 years ago about how breast surgeons aren't recommending prophylactic mastectomies anymore. The message hasn't spread very far. The official approach to breast health is at odds with what's actually been discovered by physiologists.

I know a lady who had "colon cancer". I think her actual problem was emotional stress about her son... But she had her colon shortened, and is probably counted as a success by the official medical statisticians.

I agree, it also struck me as an odd comment. To be honest parent post gives me the feeling of having a mansplaining tone to it.

I was talking to a friend in med school, and I feel the difference between what exists in biology as we understand it currently, and what is clinically relevant is gigantic. That paper definitely educated a generation.

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