I have never once seen a promising cancer treatment I've heard of on the news help people. You hear about the breakthrough treatments all the time, but when people get cancer, all you ever hear about is people getting chemotherapy and radiation. Same old scary shit.

Well, I guess Leukemia has been somewhat cured I heard, so that's pretty huge. When I was a kid it was a death sentence IIRC.

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tombert 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not a doctor, but in some fairness, I think there has been a lot of progress in chemotherapy and radiation. "Increasing 5-year-survivability by 0.5%" doesn't make a fun sexy headline, but that's still an achievement that required a lot of hard work and enough of those happening still adds up.

I agree with your overall point though; it's a little annoying that every few weeks we hear about a new experiment that seems to indicate that we'll have a radically new and effective form of treatment for cancer only for it to never materialize.

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bruce511 5 days ago | parent [-]

"Cancer" is a term that covers a lot of diseases. So there is a lot of research going into a lot of different things, and hence lots of announcements.

"Chemotherapy" again is a loaded term covering a lot of different drugs, drug combinations, protocols and so on. So yeah, a lot of cancer treatment us "chemo" - but today's chemo is far removed from 2000 chemo.

5 year survivability has increased tremendously over the last decades. We're not talking 0.5% here, breast cancer for example has gone from 72% to 93%. Early detection of prostrate cancer has near 100% survivability.

But you're right, improving survivability doesn't make for sexy headlines. Yes there's a social media appetite for "breakthroughs", but the underlying "boring" stuff is doing well, and getting better all the time. It's just not "news".

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johnwheeler 4 days ago | parent [-]

My mom died of cancer and had to suffer through chemo. It was in the early 2000s, so I'm curious to know if you know anything about these new chemos and what makes them different.

	▲	bruce511 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		My condolences for your loss. Discussing things in general terms,while having a lived experience must be painful. There are different cancers, different stages different, different chemos, and of course different people. Ultimately individual experiences of chemo run the whole gauntlet. At one end it can be little more than a bit of fatigue, at the other end a horrendous nightmare. Yes, chemo has, as it's goal, a poison function. It sets out to poison you, hopefully killing the cancer first. It's never going to be the "fun" part of treatment. I'm not a Dr, much less a medical historian. I would be ill equipped to quote specific drugs or dosages. Outcomes however are easily Googled, and those don't seem to be controversial. I get that improved statistics don't make individual loss any easier.

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perlgeek 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are a few factors at play here, I think

* Many breakthroughs from the first research stages never make it into medical application.

* Many breakthroughs are touted as some kind of "novel treatment", but when they get into the hands of the doctor, they talk about it as chemotherapy, because it kills cancer cells. So you might not even notice that you're getting something novel.

* Many breakthroughs take decades until they actually land in mainstream treatment.

* Many breakthroughs are specific to some kinds of cancer.

That said, in most developed countries, survival rates/times for cancer have been steadily improving for decades.

It's a bit like with solar cell and battery tech breakthroughs: you hear about them all the time, but it takes 20 to 30 years until they make it to production. But both have been improving steadily for an impressively long time.

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stubish 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, you only hear about the initial breakthrough. The regular news doesn't report the trials unless things go spectacularly wrong. And you don't hear about the successes using the therapy on patients where traditional treatments didn't work. And you don't hear about the treatments successful enough that they replace the traditional treatments. But they are there, being used and saving lives. A family member's prostate cancer metastasized after 20 years of hormone therapy, they refused chemotherapy, and had their life saved by radioligand therapy, a treatment not available just months earlier. No side effects beyond a dry mouth, and now off the more debilitating hormone treatments.

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mr_toad 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody_therapy

These are not your parents cancer treatments.

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asdff 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Keytruda (pembrolizumab) has been pretty monumental.

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mcmoor 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There's also AIDS that I heard have been practically cured. Since then I have became less pessimistic about drug progress

	▲	vibrio 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		AIDS has been treatable for a few decades, with good progression getting it to developing world and some towards a cure. That said, some of this recent progress has been impeded due to differing beliefs of some current governmental regulatory and research leadership, and beliefs that infectious disease treatments and vaccines are not needed for most people that are 'healty'.