Woman who had pioneering cancer treatment 18 years ago still in remission

Ha! I'm afraid to admit how much thought I've put into avoiding words that overlap with the "naughty list", like (statistical) bias and (electrical) polarization.

A dead comment says this is all a myth but from somebody in the trenches...it's not. No access to the Federal Register means no meetings to evaluate grants, which means no more grants going out at all.

I agree that Democratic reps don't have a ton of power right now, though some have voted to approve some poor Trump cabinet picks.

I think it's still important to call both them, and your Republican reps. They keep track of how many people call on issues, and what side they take. I think a lot of reps are worried about retaliation from the POTUS, and the only thing that gives them ammunition is constituents on their side.

I wonder if they could do two phases. Like first engineer T cells that mark the target cell but don’t kill it. And then, if the marked cells are sufficiently scoped to cancer cells, use the same targeting mechanism for cancer-destroying T cells.

Wouldn't that likely have a better prognosis than most cancers?

If the therapy had not worked would that be evidence that the therapy is not effective? If so the fact that it did work must be at least some evidence that the therapy is effective. Simple Bayes factor, you can't have one without the other.

Additionally, if there is enough similar cancers we can know the rate of spontaneous remission within a particular band of time. This would be much lower than spontaneous remission at any time so that a spontaneous remission at the specific time of treatment could be a rather unlikely event and start to look like decent evidence.

Not disagreeing that cancer treatment isn't a shit show but I would suggest that such evidence cannot be easily dismissed due to the lack of the gold standard large scale double blind study.

You are partially correct. But here a broader picture - you may have to get in touch with the person(s) who is claiming the cure to draw a conclusion. Sometimes they may have done multiple trials within their own circle, or if it's a physician on his patients. They generally will have documented their patients. They generally will not have the means to do large scale trials. (I heard that it cost about 10 million, and about 10 years to get an FDA approval). When a unknown/non credentialed practitioners or a physician claim something it is generally ignored - as far as I'm concerned the cancer treatment cartel industry is real (As with almost every other industry), if by the rare chance it does get some publicity (as it happened with the Linus Pauling, Nicholas Gonzales), the cartel indulges in accusations of quackery and character assassination.

Now I'm not saying that the small time practitioners are always correct, in fact they are mostly wrong. But they deserve some investigation.

Why not both? It's not like those are the only two things in the world. Maybe they're both way more useful than a thousand other ways we spend our money.

Yeah, "remission" comes from the Latin "remit," which liter means "to return or restore."

When illness originates outside the body, it's usually possible to completely kill/eradicate it, at which point you're "cured." But some things either linger forever (certain viruses, like how chicken pox can come back as shingles) or originate inside your own body (cancer, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis). In the latter case, treatment makes it possible to return to a baseline normal, but there's no guarantee it's all the way gone or won't ever return, so we say it's in remission rather than cured. Cancer lurks; autoimmune diseases go dormant but don't die.

(One autoimmune exception: if you have ulcerative colitis, completely removing your colon cures most people, since the problem lies in that specific organ. But that goes to show how drastic a true cure is!)

There are also some conditions, notably MS, that are described as "relapsing/remitting" because they alternate between periods of relapse and remission. So you'll feel fine for a while, then the symptoms come back, then they go away again, etc.

I know that's generally true, but apparently sometimes the odds of recurrence are so low they stop worrying about it. I have a relative who was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma a decade ago. She got three doses of immunotherapy and her tumors immediately shrank by 2/3, and eventually disappeared entirely. For a while they kept scanning her twice a year, but several years ago they told her it was gone and stopped the scans.

I appreciate your reply, but I think calling diet and exercise “traditional” and saying the research is “limited” plays into the downvoters’ prejudice.

I see this sort of sentiment a lot on this forum: it’s only “science” if it’s pharmaceutical, (see: any thread about semaglutides) when in reality cancer response to diet research is well trodden, and I would argue the better science.

Better science because it has stronger controls on variables.

When you read about diet research the patients are all given the same pharmaceutical regiment and the variable is the diet, whereas on the flip side the diets of the patients are completely ignored.

That’s bad science. It may be great research, but it’s still bad science.

It’d be like the diet researchers allowing the patients to choose their own doses for the pharmaceutical side of their treatment, which would be an absurd confounding variable.

Cancer cell metabolism is thoroughly researched.

The leading cause of death is heart disease, and the leading cause of heart disease is build up of fatty deposits, ie diet.

I’m unsure why people act surprised that the same factors play into the body’s ability to respond to cancer.

Read a study on chemo from the 90s and tell me what’s more “quackery”: the pharmaceuticals they tried back then that now would result in a malpractice suit if given to a patient today, or the diet guidelines that have remained consistent over the same time period?

I made it clear in my op that both are necessary, I just want the pharmaceutical side to acknowledge that reality too.

Something > 0, which is all we need to know about single point data sources.