When Cancer Was Conquerable
Bottom line up front: If you have good points, make them. Don&#x27;t lie to me.<p>Ways this article misuses statistics and history (lies):<p>0. Title: When Cancer was Conquerable.<p>Response: Cancer has never been conquerable. Chemotherapy increased survival rates. Also, cancer is not a single disease.<p>1. &quot;The first attempt to treat cancer in humans with chemotherapy happened within days of doctors realizing that it reduced the size of tumors in mice.&quot;<p>Response: True, but misleading. Critical question: What treatment is being replaced? When nothing else worked, you might as well try something. Going from 0% effective treatment to 20% effective treatment is huge enough to warrant extreme risks. Going from 50% to 55% may not warrant the same risks.<p>2. &quot;Cancer deaths have fallen by a total of just 5 percent since 1950.&quot;<p>Response: Everyone will die eventually, some people die of cancer; many more people die with cancer (but not necessarily because of cancer). A better metric would be a combination of things like added years of life due to treatment and quality of life factors.<p>3. &quot;It is now nearly impossible to conceive of going from a eureka moment to human testing in a few years, much less a few days.&quot;<p>Response: Thank goodness. First, all the easy solutions have been tried. Second, if there is a reasonably, or even partially effective solution in place, the new proposal MUST at least shown to be safe - something that cannot be done in a few days.<p>4. &quot;To find cures for cancer, we need novel approaches that produce dramatic results. The only way to get them is by lowering barriers to entry.&quot;<p>Response: The only way to reproduce the dramatic results of the past is to stop treating cancer, and then replace the lack of treatment with a new treatment. Also, there is no such thing &quot;the only way&quot;. There is &quot;the only thing I thought of&quot; or &quot;this is the way I think will work&quot;<p>5. &quot;Running a clinical trial now requires getting &quot;protocols&quot; approved.&quot;<p>Response: Among other things, if you just run a study and then try to find some benefit, you will ALWAYS find some benefit.<p>6. &quot;The problem is clear: Despite tens of billions of dollars every year spent on research, progress in combating cancer has slowed to a snail&#x27;s pace.&quot;<p>Response: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Potato_paradox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Potato_paradox</a><p>7. &quot;Years ago, a Cato Institute study estimated the loss of life resulting from FDA-related drug delays from 1962 to 1985 in the hundreds of thousands.&quot;<p>Response: Did Cato also do a study to show lives saved by FDA (and IRB, and safety testing) drug cancellations? New drugs are not risk free.<p>8. &quot;We used to think cancer was conquerable. Today, that idea is often laughed off as utopian. But there are countless reasons to believe that progress has slowed because of organizational and governmental problems, not because the disease is inherently incurable.&quot;<p>Response: We also used to thing we&#x27;d have anti-gravity and moon bases by this point. There is also a much deeper understanding of the class of diseases known as cancer.