As a society, we have the option of greatly reducing cancer deaths whenever we so choose. Let’s do that rather than raging against something that feels nothing.
It has been over 15 years since the Last Lecture and we still have done little for pancreatic cancer, for example.
As someone who lost a sibling to cancer, thanks for the translation.
I wish people would use "You are not alone" or "We also have suffered due to cancer. It is awful. You have our empathy and we offer our condolences." or something else instead of the shorthand "Fuck cancer". But I'll accept "Fuck cancer" too.
I generally agree. I used to be so angry when someone said it. Fuck cancer? Fuck you. What do you know about how I’m feeling?
I learned two things over the years : 1. everyone “knows something” about cancer. 2. I can’t control culture and language.
To be honest though, many years later… I still haven’t found a single phrase anyone can say that doesn’t make me think, “I wish we could just not be having this conversation.” I remind myself that there are no words but people are still trying.
We also have a lot of data on ways to reduce cancer before it happens. Reduce obesity. Reduce pollution. Etc.
Yet we really aren't doing an awful lot about those things.
Imagine for example if we had an obesity tax - everyone obese must pay 30% of their earnings into a Medicare fund. Sure it would be unpopular, but obesity would very quickly be solved, and cancer rates would plummet.
> "Imagine for example if we had an obesity tax - everyone obese must pay 30% of their earnings into a Medicare fund."
Imagine for example if we taxed the shareholders of CocaCola instead, they're the ones who got wealthy from obesity. And before you say "it was the consumer's choice", what was CocaCola's $4b/year advertising spend for, then?
“Fine company” will just turn into higher costs for consumers.
If raising the price of Coke is the goal, I believe there are already proposals for a sugar tax in various jurisdictions.
Let’s tax the hell out of processed foods so they become at least on par with the price of healthy food.
It’s very tricky since taxes like that will hurt low income households the most.
Another option: ban advertising of heavily processed food, and while we’re at it let’s also ban advertising prescription drugs (as is the case already in Canada)
But walking into a typical US grocery store feels like a place where cheap, quick, processed foods are the focus with healthy food being secondary (perhaps because they’re optimizing their store layouts in response to consumer demand for sh*t food). Rarely is healthy food promoted on isle endcaps.
I do 100% of my day to day shopping at a (very expensive) health food store for this sole reason. At the health food store, they don’t stock soda, chips, etc (or if they do it’s locally made, organic, etc… “healthy” junk food). You can’t buy things like Oreos or Coke because they simply don’t carry it.
For me, removing unhealthy options when grocery shopping led to 40+ lbs of weight loss - with no other lifestyle changes and no additional exercise over 2 years.
When I make the occasional visit to a normal grocery store, I’m always in awe at how much real estate “bad” food gets. It’s the majority of the store.
All of this is to say, another place to look at are grocery stores themselves and the food they decide to carry and promote in their stores, including the layout of the stores, % real estate given to crap food vs. healthy food, etc.
Processing is a chance to use seconds - damaged or ugly potatoes that nobody would buy, and it packs more product into less space and with an easier storage mechanism (freeze) than properly packing to keep it fresh. Employees can throw boxes of frozen food onto a belt where they have to gently place boxes of fresh food.
Even with a well run shipping company and no problems you'll have a fair bit of spoilage and it means that every box is at risk of full rot (a bad apple...) and needs a human to sort through and pull it out. There are buyers of last resort at every stage of the journey who will take freshly damaged produce for immediate usage but they're often soup kitchens who can barely afford to pay.
I know we want to believe it was somehow a blame or fault of someone who develops cancer. The reality is I've seen unhealthy people never get cancer and healthy people, children even, who get cancer.
Many of those cancers might be caused by pollution... For example, UV in sunlight is thought to be the main cause of skin cancer. UV is far higher today than 100 years ago because we destroyed most of the ozone layer. But we don't actually know how thick the ozone layer used to be or how much UV used to reach ground level because we never measured it before destroying it. So possibly skin cancer was very rare 100 years ago.
The same for cancer's from nitrous oxides from car exhausts. The same for particulate pollution. Same for microplastics. The same for all the kinds of pollution we don't yet know about or measure.
You're conflating trends within aggregated data and individual data points. Moving towards a healthier population would reduce cancer rates across the total population. It would not remove cancer entirely. Likewise any arbitrary person might be in complete health & get cancer and vice versa as you say. The two are not contradictory.
A similar example is with early detection. The data show that at population scale a lot of early detection efforts cause more harm than good. The problem is that any arbitrary person might have their life saved by said early detection. It's impossible to know who those arbitrary people will be.
Well, possibly polluters are to blame? Amongst developed countries, seems like USA stands out as having had a pretty cavalier attitude for decades about polluting land and water with carcinogens, allowing all sorts of cr*p in food etc. The reactive attitude "we'll permit this chemical until we run into any problems with it". vs the EU's "this chemical is suspect , so banned until we find clear evidence that it isn't dangerous". Of course EU not perfect either, plenty of scare stories in other places too. But the attitude in the USA baffles me, why isn't there more public pressure to reduce exposure to dangerous chemicals. is it just people are uniformed, or they think lets just dump it in a poor area or something.... ?
That will probably do nothing for obesity rates except fleece obese people. I’d be more interested in seeing appetite drugs like semaglutide become cheap and easy to get, something that helps instead of buying into punitive measures for absolutely everything.
Interesting enough, the person on Twitter seems fit and not very old.
15 years ago Randy Pausch was also fit a year before he died.
So, instead of blaming people for poor choices imagine if 16 years ago, when the US National Debt was a mere $9 trillion, if enough people were inspired that on our way to $31 trillion in debt, we spent a few trillion of that on cancer research.
It's crazy how we are still not screening everyone for genetic susceptability to diseases and pairing them together with good early detection tests. A lot of missed opportunities here to decrease so much suffering.
Those approaches -- reducing pollution, etc -- aren't popular in part because humans are terrible about not knowing how to count the deaths that didn't happen.
Obesity is caused by lack of access to quality food, being too scarce or too expensive. Sugar and fats are cheap, so most of the pre-made foods are just that. So increase the quality of the food available to the masses and do proper education regarding nutrition and healthy living, and the obesity rate will decrease.
Most of the obese people are like that not because they choose, but because they cannot do better.
People were cooking with lard for 1000s of years until the US decided fat is bad and people started substituting fat with sugar because when you remove fat, you remove flavour.
Do some actual research. People regularly got heart attacks throughout recorded history even if dying earlier from other things was common.
The history of coronary syndromes and sudden death, and apoplexy or stroke, goes back to antiquity and has been thoroughly treated by historians and experts from many disciplines. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a heart attack with myocardial infarction was well known to cause death, but comprehension of it as a syndrome that one might survive was much delayed.
…
Part of the historical delay and confusion in recognizing heart attacks apparently lay in the Greek word, kardialgia, which could mean either abdominal or precordial pain. Biblical and Talmudic references abound, however, about chest pain of a life-threatening nature, and Hippocrates mentions sudden death related to an episode of chest distress (Leibowitz 1970).
Leibowitz points out that the great Italian anatomist Morgagni failed to tie it all together, but nevertheless clearly described in 1761 the late pathology found in survivors of myocardial infarction in his well-known dictum: “The force of the heart decreases so much more in proportion as the greater number of its parts becomes tendonous instead of being fleshy” (ibid., 4).
http://www.epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/essay/history-of-heart-attack-...
No they didn't. Death rates from now treatable diseases were higher in the past. But if you managed to escape those and not die in a tragic physical accident, you lived basically as long as anyone else.
Go back 1,000+ years and people did occasionally live to be say 70, the difference was they where also less likely to live to be 71. And at 71 they where less likely to live to be 72 etc.
Given a large enough population you would still see very very rare cases of extreme age but you are something like 1,000 times more likely to live to 115 today than you where back in 1,000 AD. Combined with a smaller population and it’s likely nobody live to 115 until quite recently.
Anecdotally, I know people with the same wealth as me or even wealthier who eat copious amounts of sweets in all forms and are also obese. Some people just don't have control.
But yes, proper education regarding nutrition is something that is sorely needed as most people are unaware of the dangers of eating sugar rich and calorie rich foods in large amounts.
"Fuck Cancer" is what I feel and what I will share.
When we cure cancer, I'll back down. Until then, in memory of the folks I have lost and with empathy to those experiencing it or watching loved ones experience it, fuck cancer.
The issue with current early detection methods is that they tend to cause more harm than good at population scale. Between getting dosed with radiation in the process, false positives causing at best psychological trauma if not unnecessary treatment, and it's hard to tell if you just detected a cancer you'll die with instead of dying of - and thus another form of unnecessary treatment.
The blood tests remove some, but not all of that. Yes, for any arbitrary person it might be lifesaving, just like current methods. But at population scale it's not a panacea.
All the best to you and your wife.