I would hope we eventually start to put money towards prevention to reduce cancer to begin with. Prevention will always be less cost and less suffering.
The reason it seems like everything causes cancer is because everyone is at risk for cancer. Living is a cancer risk. A lot of people don't die from cancer because they don't live long enough, but prevention will never happen. Cancer is inevitable.
Except of course for all those that do live long enough, I don't think the centenarians and beyond die of cancer http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/60/7/862...
From what I can see at FastStats http://seer.cancer.gov/faststats/selections.php?series=age incidence does go up with age, but there's still plenty of cancers that happen at relatively young ages, and if you look at the trend, going back to 1975 which is not that much really, you can see a marked increase towards 1990 and then a stabilization, which to me suggests it's quite likely that environmental and lifestyle factors do come in play, as similar trends occur in other health related issues (metabolic syndrome). Markedly lower Vit-D levels, our increased consumption of n-6 poly-unsaturated fatty acids and processed foods, all likely play a role.
I short, I agree with gp in that there is surely a bigger payoff in prevention, but that doesn't mean that cures wouldn't be welcome too. I can't agree that cancer is inevitable.
Edited to add links, formatting.
There are people immune to AIDS as well. These are the outliers. Just because people die of disease before they get cancer doesn't mean they wouldn't have gotten cancer otherwise.
>it's quite likely that environmental and lifestyle factors do come in play
Yes, I accepted that in my post. There are ways to increase your risk of cancer. My opinion was that there is never a statistically relevant zero risk for cancer. Prevention of cancer will never completely stop cancer from forming unless we know and can avoid all possible risk factors of cancer (impossible). Prevention is a good step, but finding a way to reverse cancer is the only way to keep people from dying from it.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I'll look for some underlying data once I get out of class.
AFAIK the problem isn't necessarily "best practices prevention" per se but the fact that we massively over-consume health care because of bad incentives.
I'm pretty sure the original comment you replied to assumes the same meaning, that of promoting healthy behavior _before_ you become ill, not the newer and distorted meaning of "early detection".