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Comment by hising | Hacker News Reader

He may be a smart dude, but this answer is out there:

> "DER SPIEGEL: Cancer is a silent killer that might get diagnosed long after the exposure, when it is too late.

> Lovelock: I've had 10 cancers in the last few years and it hasn't been very bad. They just appear and grow. If you go to a good oncologist nearby, they'll take it out. It's just unfortunate for people who let it happen and it grows and grows until it's inoperable. I mean, nowadays, I think middle class and fairly wealthy people don't die of cancer."

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I seem to remember a turtleneck guy that got felled by cancer. He was running a fruit company, perhaps there isn't that much money in fruits afterall.

And he is infamous for refusing medical treatment until it was too late. For months he tried alternative treatments, before saying he regretted it.

And it's been almost 10 years since that.

The treatment you refer to was a “whipple” procedure, or pancreaticoduodenectomy.

A very invasive procedure that has significant detrimental effects on your quality of life, and still doesn’t guarantee long-term survival.

A tough call for even the most rational of patients.

>Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department,[172] said, "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable.... He essentially committed suicide."

I’m not sure it is that tough of a call.

Steve spent $100,000 to decode his DNA:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/appleinsider.com/articles/11/10...

Billionaires would probably spend quite a bit of money if they knew they might get a disease in 20 years.

Bill Gates is funding Alzheimers research. His dad has it.

Turtleneck guy would have survived easily. But he started to trink herbal tea to cure his cancer. Surprisingly, it didn't work.

So did my Aunt. She had cancer a bunch of times before it eventually took her out. The toll that your body takes after chemo and/or radiation therapy makes the cancer that will materialize later in your life a lot more threatening, in addition to how your body decays over time. So basically, the older you get and the more chemo you've had, the higher likelihood you have of cancer taking you out. If Lovelock has had "10 cancers in the last few years", he's going to die of cancer in the next 10.

Considering he's over 100, I doubt he's concerned about such a fate. Also, he might be talking about skin cancers, which are easily removed, yet people often wait until they've metastasized.

I have doubts. You typically don't see an oncologist for skin cancers unless it has metastasized. Mortality is high at that point. I don't count the number of simple skin cancers anymore.

What exactly is wrong here? Many cancers are now treatable - no longer a death sentence. Cancer treatment improvements have snowballed.

According to Craig Venter, early detection is what we need to eliminate cancer: https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8?t=15m37s

Oh, so many wrongs in his statement:

1. He extrapolates from his own experience of cancer 2. He blames people for not taking care of it (so dying of it is their fault) 3. He talks about a disease group that kills a lot of people like it is a cold

as far as #2 is concerned, he lives in a country with nationalized healthcare so he doesn't really see a reason not to get it taken care of and get bi-annual checkups.

And this is the age of the smartphone, so anyone, including him, could just look up empirical summaries over Wikipedia. There's really no need to summon individual stories of cancer to tell people how dangerous (or harmless) it really is.

I'm unclear what is "out there" exactly in his statement.

According to the WHO cancer is the 4th leading cause of death for High-Income Countries [1].

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...

> I mean, nowadays, I think middle class and fairly wealthy people don't die of cancer.

Some of the richest people in the world have died of cancer. It kills anyone and everyone, eventually.

His answer is so ignorant that I stopped reading his words right there, I don't trust his information processing.

“out there” is a pretty charitable description.

I stopped reading the article there. I am not interested in reading the crazy ramblings of someone disconnected from reality.

Seriously, how out of touch can you be.

Yeah, the reading went from: "I wonder what this old, smart man has to say" to checking url if it is the onion

I also stopped right there. I don't trust anything about how this guy thinks after that.

yes, disconnected from reality, unlike the people that think that we are ever going to go to Mars.

Humans have hardware operating on Mars right now.

Sure, and humans have hardware exiting the solar system. A very different story to put a person there.

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