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Comment by observationist | Hacker News Reader

>>> ... the study found that removing the parachute prior to jumping led to a shocking increase in mortality among skydivers.

When there's a clear causal mechanism, additional research that doesn't propose a clear resolution to the underlying problem doesn't negate the clear causal mechanism. Releasing a bunch of loose cancer into the body is a clear causal mechanism, so unless you're filtering it or killing the loose cancer somehow, I'm not sure what those studies could tell you that overcomes the underlying problem. And until they address that problem, it's going to be limited to a quality of life type application - stopping the tumor from killing you now with the certainty of metastasis killing you later.

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The thing about this kind of 'just so' story causal mechanism is that we still have to actually do the science to find out. Your body does filter and kill potentially cancerous cells all the time already. And cancer cells aren't like, some super thing that evolved to kill you specifically. My just-so story goes like this: 'the cancer cells die because they're suddenly outside of the specific bodypart that they were exploiting'. And we're probably both right, depending on the location of the cancer, the type of cancer, etc.

All life, from humans to cells to chromosomes, has only one purpose - to survive. It turns out that reproduction is an effective way to survive. Also, cooperation is an effective way to survive. The cells in our bodies cooperate for survival. Sometimes cells survive better by no longer cooperating, and reproducing as fast as possible. This winds up killing the host, but the cancer cells don't know that.

And so humans evolve to enforce better cooperation among the cells.

So, no, cancer cells did not evolve to kill you. They do evolve for short term gain, however.

It's an endless struggle.

It's not unlike the struggle between civilized people and criminals.

So what's the problem? The vast majority of cancer treatments seek only to put the condition into remission for a while. Realistically that's often all that can be done.

Putting it into remission is basically the opposite of causing it to metastasize.

The evidence seems to be that the cells are destroyed, not just split up: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9404673/

How do they prevent good cells from being destroyed on the way? Shaped sound waves adding up locally?

Yes exactly - focus at a point. You don't reach threshold pressures until you have sufficient summed waves.

Some tumor types metastasize well, others not so much. But the article doesn't say anything about metastasis, or leaving any cells behind from the target. Rather, it talks about destroying the targeted cells entirely, leaving behind only proteins.

> Releasing a bunch of loose cancer into the body is a clear causal mechanism

I'm not in cancer field, but I'm not sure it is. AFAIK the cells that metastasize need to undergo EMT. Simply releasing them from the tumor doesn't mean the cells can attach and survive in the distal site.

The surface of cancer that protects it from the bodies defenses breaking up + parallel chemo or clonal antibody treatments should take care of that. But the principle critical view is correct.

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