Health Do you think we'll have a cure for cancer in our lifetime?

[F1980]

It's a disease humans have known about for thousands of years. There's heiroglyphics found in Egypt depicting breast cancer. We've made significant advances and even now, through chemo and radation therapy, cancer is no longer a guaranteed death sentence. The survival rate for cancer patients is increasing every year. But still, chemotherapy and radiation therapy is basically poisoning your body. Not really much of a cure.

Do you think we'll have a cure for all types of cancer in our generation?

 

[Sonny Qc]

No, because it's too profitable.

/

Over 100 billions $ were spent on cancer reasearch in the last 25yrs

and cancer cases continue to go up every years by a lot.


it's either too profitable or protecting the food industry or else that they know causes it.

 

[Takes Two To Tango]

In our lifetime, probably not. In the distant future, perhaps. I don't know.

 

[eddymotto]

Anybody who thinks that curing cancer would not be incredibly lucrative has spent way too much time online. If there were a real, repeatable “cure,” it would be one of the most valuable intellectual properties in human history.

There are treatments for specific cancers that are already close to a cure, including testicular cancer (cure rates close to 95%), certain childhood leukemias (90% long term), Hodgkin lymphoma (> 80%), and thyroid cancer (> 95%). Cervical and liver cancers are largely preventable with vaccines.

My guess is that we will continue to experience the gradual compounding of better cancer treatments and some of them will verge on being "cures" for or effectively prevent specific type of cancers. Less likely that there will be some eureka moment when all cancers are suddenly cured by one technology.

 

[syct23]

Of course we have…

 

[Stoic1]

First post nailed it.

 

[johnsmithjohnson]

It's a disease humans have known about for thousands of years. There's heiroglyphics found in Egypt depicting breast cancer. We've made significant advances and even now, through chemo and radation therapy, cancer is no longer a guaranteed death sentence. The survival rate for cancer patients is increasing every year. But still, chemotherapy and radiation therapy is basically poisoning your body. Not really much of a cure.

Do you think we'll have a cure for all types of cancer in our generation?

I don't think they'll develop a vaccine to cancer, that's the only way to truly cure all cancers in our lifetime. I do think they'll gradually develop more and more treatments for the hyper rich first who are rapidly aging and eventually it will trickle down to common people probably within 50 years but no sooner than 30. Too much money would be lost and it would a decade to find it.
Some cancers have near perfect treatments now the hyper rich enjoyed a decade plus ago that are common now.
Eventually science will be refined enough and cheap enough a single doctor will have a polio vaccine moment, my guess 100+150 years but by then there will be new plagues

 

[ricc505]

No, because it's too profitable.

/

Over 100 billions $ were spent on cancer reasearch in the last 25yrs

and cancer cases continue to go up every years by a lot.


it's either too profitable or protecting the food industry or else that they know causes it.

I agree, I wonder if cancer is increasing in line with population increases or is it outpacing it

 

[Otto!]

No, because it's too profitable.

/

Over 100 billions $ were spent on cancer reasearch in the last 25yrs

and cancer cases continue to go up every years by a lot.


it's either too profitable or protecting the food industry or else that they know causes it.

This. Treatment is a lot more profitable than a cure unfortunately.

 

[Jesus X]

The key to curing cancer in the future will be that we will have exponentially better methods of detecting cancer while it is still treatable like some sort of hand held machine and it will get to the point where you can get over the counter meds to cure cancer. We will still have ALS to cure and other terminal diseases.

 

[Bia]

The key to curing cancer in the future will be that we will have exponentially better methods of detecting cancer while it is still treatable like some sort of hand held machine and it will get to the point where you can get over the counter meds to cure cancer. We will still have ALS to cure and other terminal diseases.

I think this is where AI will excel in, early diagnose and detection.

 

[Ezekiel 25:17]

It's a disease humans have known about for thousands of years. There's heiroglyphics found in Egypt depicting breast cancer. We've made significant advances and even now, through chemo and radation therapy, cancer is no longer a guaranteed death sentence. The survival rate for cancer patients is increasing every year. But still, chemotherapy and radiation therapy is basically poisoning your body. Not really much of a cure.

Do you think we'll have a cure for all types of cancer in our generation?

Never. Money not in the cure homey. The medications they give people can sometimes make things worse and keep you dependant.

 

[William Huggins]

Nearly every drug is a poison given in various doses to obtain a reaction in the body.......

 

[PBAC]

No, because it's too profitable.

/

Over 100 billions $ were spent on cancer reasearch in the last 25yrs

and cancer cases continue to go up every years by a lot.


it's either too profitable or protecting the food industry or else that they know causes it.

they do know what causes it just that it has so many triggering causes on microscopic level it is difficult to exactly how it develops.

 

[TheNinja]

Anybody who thinks that curing cancer would not be incredibly lucrative has spent way too much time online. If there were a real, repeatable “cure,” it would be one of the most valuable intellectual properties in human history.

There are treatments for specific cancers that are already close to a cure, including testicular cancer (cure rates close to 95%), certain childhood leukemias (90% long term), Hodgkin lymphoma (> 80%), and thyroid cancer (> 95%). Cervical and liver cancers are largely preventable with vaccines.

My guess is that we will continue to experience the gradual compounding of better cancer treatments and some of them will verge on being "cures" for or effectively prevent specific type of cancers. Less likely that there will be some eureka moment when all cancers are suddenly cured by one technology.

This. I'm not sure a "cure" or a vaccination in that sense. But definitely much better ways of treating it that will continually improve the success rates.

 

[Jesus X]

Nearly every drug is a poison given in various doses to obtain a reaction in the body.......

 

[dildos]

There is most likely already a cure. It’s just never been released.

 

[Spounman]

I guess it depends. My aunt had brain cancer and they wanted to do surgery but she chose chemo and after 6 months of that all they could find was scar tissue, the cancer was gone. They said if she ever gets cancer again it will be something new, not from the brain cancer that she had.

 

[MDoza]

Cell replication isn’t perfect. Live long enough and there will be errors.

Wear sunscreen. Consume antioxidants. We are lucky the process is as efficient as it is.

Mutations have proven beneficial over the long term, as they provide a basis for variation and natural selection.

 

[Natural Order]

Maybe. But I feel like understanding it enough to "cure it" is something along the lines of also discovering the meaning of life.

It's not some oddball thing unique to humans that is necessary to overcome for our long term survival. It's a natural evolutionary mechanism observed in almost all multicellular life on earth. It's not the devil being mean.

It's an unfortunate reality of our current evolutionary timetable and will eventually solve itself, with or without us.