Immunotherapy came from left field as a cancer therapy - and for stage 4 cancers, the 4/5-year survival rate is much better than control groups - about 50%.
Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel prize in medicine for their work in cancer immunotherapy.
There's an interesting documentary on Jim Allison's work - see https://www.breakthroughdoc.com/ (for USA PBS viewers: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/jim-allison-breakt..., for TVOntario viewers: https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/jim-allison-breakthr...)
I read that post too, going from a tiny undetectable bump under the skin that only his partner noticed, to unbearable pain pressing against his spine making him unable to sleep and think clearly.
It seems like 4 months were wasted just getting appointments.
If you're an american, remember that FMLA only lasts a quarter, so if you can go back to work after the surgery but before the chemo i strongly suggest you do that if there's any concern about insurance or whatever, since you're probably going to want to sleep for the first few weeks worth of chemo dosing. Good luck to 1/2 of the american population, because that's the rate of cancer in the US.
That's the NHS "free" healthcare at play.
Remember, you get what you pay for!
Does it, though? Is there anything that suggests the mental state of the patient is a factor in the efficacy of treatment?
Pieter Hintjens has written a bit against the "fight" model.
This was simply about the user experience itself. A dramatic way of saying that people grasp for hope, not that "beating cancer" requires glimmers of hope, only that the "user experience of cancer" involves the patient/host/victim grasping for them. I'm surprised you read it any other way, but I can see how, yeah this definitely wasn't one of those unquantifiable "beat cancer because they're a strong fighter [and everyone else that didn't was a useless weak wimp that gave up]" voodoo posts. His blog post was one of those glimmers of hope. It is predictable that people do that because they have nothing else. No more, no less.
The point is that deep down he still knew the odds and that his mortality was still in question.
Its "the last good day", a trope in cancer, where things seem normalizing and improving, but you don't know its the last good day.
Unfortunately the UK health system is struggling with the huge COVID overload. It's one of the additional tragedies in countries with high infection rates: the acute care for COVID patients also decreases the care for all other illnesses.