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one can (never) cure cancer?
#16
(11-25-2014, 03:26 AM)Rynn Wrote: [..] In terms of curing cancer there are plenty of advances that have helped improve survival rates over time. Hopefully this will continue and I'm optimistic about it. I'm not in cancer research but a few things that I think are quite interesting (if not promising) are:

- Drug delivery systems for conventional treatments. [..]

- Theranostics. [..]

- Cancer Immunotherapy. [..]

These are just three of many, many different experimental cancer treatments.

Just wanted to add another potential future treatment to this list:

Antisense therapy

Although it's interesting to note that even though doctors successfully treated rhesus monkeys against Ebola using Antisense in early 2006 there doesn't seem to be any successful anti-Ebola drugs based on this nine years later. Well maybe this is normal after all, because tests on new drugs can take as long as 20 years (and noone thought that a cure for Ebola would be so urgently needed in 2014 and 2015). But maybe these kind of treatments will appear around 2030... Or maybe the problem is with the constant hype, the media are causing around new advances in medicine. Each new discovery is heralded as a breakthrough and then the doctors either discover a problem with the "breakthrough" and the media go silent on the story so that they don't have to discredit themselves by reporting that the breakthrough was not a breakthrough after all but another incremental step in the right direction or the "breakthrough" was not a breakthrough from the start but just got hyped up by the media. Yes, the more I think about it the more it seems that the media are the problem. Articles, which constantly talk about breakthroughs in some scientific area sell better than articles, which objectively talk about incremental advances in the right direction. And when people get disillusioned with medicine or any other scientific area, which gets hyped up like that, conspiracy theories (Big Pharma, etc.) start to sprout. (Although some conspiracy theories may contain a grain of truth:

http://vadamagazine.com/11/07/2014/lifes...sippi-baby

Quote:One of the major barriers to finding a cure for HIV is funding – treating the virus is very lucrative for pharmaceutical companies and the cost of clinical trials is expensive.

The head of Infectiology/HIV at the University Clinic Bonn and former president of the German AIDS Society, Professor Jürgen Rockstroh, confirms this: ‘The climate for private investment in HIV/AIDS research these days is very limited.’

)

So to sum it all up:
  • Articles, which constantly talk about breakthroughs in some scientific area sell better than articles, which objectively talk about incremental advances in the right direction.
  • Medicine, which doesn't heal the patient but keeps a disease in check generates more money than medicine, which heals the patient ( ? ).
"Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people." -- Edward Robert Harrison
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Messages In This Thread
one can (never) cure cancer? - by chris0033547 - 11-25-2014, 12:48 AM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by Rynn - 11-25-2014, 03:26 AM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by chris0033547 - 01-19-2015, 07:42 PM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by Rynn - 01-19-2015, 09:01 PM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by Rynn - 01-19-2015, 10:37 PM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by Rynn - 11-26-2014, 07:06 AM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by Matterplay1 - 11-26-2014, 02:55 PM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by iancampbell - 11-27-2014, 06:44 AM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by Rynn - 11-28-2014, 08:57 AM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by iancampbell - 11-28-2014, 09:59 AM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by Rynn - 12-24-2014, 08:31 PM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by Rynn - 01-04-2015, 01:07 AM
RE: one can (never) cure cancer? - by Rynn - 01-28-2015, 03:21 AM

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