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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

From a non-medical professional's perspective it doesn't seem that strange. Medical treatments for cancer include "let's slowly irradiate you and hope the cancer dies first" and "let's slowly poison you and hope the cancer dies first". "let's slowly starve you to death and hope the cancer dies first" doesn't seem all that different.

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Such treatments attempt to concentrate the radiation and poison where the cancer is, however.

Insofar as cancer cells need more energy, starvation is also specific.

That is not entirely true... The prevalent chemotherapy is detrimental to cells all over the body and it has no way of distinguishing cancel cells vs non-cancer cells. Targeted therapies are different and are becoming more widely used but are still small in percentage of patients compared to "classic" chemotherapy.

"the prevalent chemotherapy is detrimental to cells all over the body" I'm not a doctor, but isn't the case that the prevalent chemotherapy is detrimental to new/growing cells all over the body, which is a way of distinguishing cancer cells (and a few types of tissue e.g. hair) vs most types of non-cancer cells?

Yes, that's correct! My bad for not being more clear!

Quite some time I had classes on this - but I believe chemo (some at least?) is designed to attack cells with same growth-rate as cancer cells. So they're not attacking just everything in a non-discriminatory fashion - but cells with similar growth as cancer cells, become collateral damage, so to speak.

This is why some chemo will result in for example hairloss; Because the cancer you're being treated for, has the same growth rate as the cells in your hair - and thus the chemo will also kill those cells.

Cancer cells are among the fastest growing cells. Limiting available nutrition - specifically for growth - should do them the most damage, is the thinking.

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