The Surprising Reason for the Decline in Cancer Mortality | Hacker News Reader

The Surprising Reason for the Decline in Cancer Mortality

theatlantic.com

12 pointsfortran777 comments

> The decline in cancer mortality for men in the past 30 years is almost entirely for a handful of cancers—lung, prostate, colon, and rectal.

I mean they're pretty common cancers no? My dad had prostate cancer and is still alive. Apparently with treatment it doesn't really affect your life expectancy anymore. I'd say that's pretty good progress!

Well, that’s depressing. According to this article cancer treatments haven’t advanced much in the past 30 years.

The more you dig into it too, the more it seems that treatments we have are actually far inferior to what common perceptions would imply. Chemotherapy certainly saves some people for example, but meta analyses of cancer treatments show that on average… They dramatically reduce quality of life for shockingly low extensions of life.

Again, chemotherapy really could save someone and extend their life by decades. In theory. But the average, not individual outcome is gut-wrenchingly dreary.

Coupled with how expensive these treatments are, it seems like our common perceptions should be much different. But this is very subjective and dependent on one’s wealth and interests.

These are expensive only because of profit taking at all levels. Cancer treatment could and should be cheaper.

I wonder about this, lately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmxUsAI29fw

I'm not surprised. A few years ago I read a convincing article (it might have been in The Atlantic actually) that most advances in medical quality of life in the last 150 years have actually been in public health and prevention measures. Things like sanitation, screening, building code, vaccines, dental cleaning, and so forth. The exceptions also tended to be broad-based treatments like antibiotics.

This would be in line with that. Better treatments would certainly be great but sometimes I think prevention is underrated.

https://archive.is/0cLfq

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