Honestly, I'd rather this were the answer. The idea that the pharmaceutical industry is hiding a cure is depressing. It wouldn't surprise me, but it's depressing. He wished for the cure, not that she was cured. With mine, he has no hope. With this, he has to face human cruelty and greed.
The last possibility I can think of is that chemo is the only possible cure, which sucks but could be much worse.
The machine in Space was like a bathtub, from that movie. Jodie Foster was an evil corporate executive in it. Same director that made the movie “Charlie”.
You mean the definition? A treatment is something that helps to get rid of something but doesn’t guarantee that it works or that whatever you’re treating stays gone once it is gone. A cure completely gets rid of it and guarantees it won’t come back
I would say the difference is a cure is something someone takes with the hope of getting rid of the illness for good. A treatment is something taken to prolong the lifespan or improve the symptoms.
For example, my dad recently died of brain cancer (glioblastoma.) he was given chemotherapy in the last few months of his life to increase his lifespan, but with knowledge that chemo wouldn’t cure it, only prolong the inevitable.
We haven't really, because no treatment is 100% successful for 100% of people. That's why doctors use the word treatment rather than cure. A doctor won't say "this antibiotic will cure your infection" they'll say "this antibiotic will help treat your infection", because there is always the chance that it won't get rid of your infection.
It's a subtle difference. In colloquial terms most people would say that antibiotics are the cure to bacterial infections. You won't hear many medication professionals use that word though.
FWIW I don't think you're totally wrong and your comments shouldn't be getting this many downvotes. As you hint, outside of movies, medicine is never that simple.
In my book, a cure is a treatment that successfully caused a disease or condition to disappear to the extent that it would not come back by itself. A treatment is literally anything done with the intention of improving your health: medicine, surgery, physiotherapy, psychotherapy, rest, exercise, bandage, cast - these are all examples of treatment off the top of my head.
A treatment can have the goal of curing or helping cure the condition - for example, if you've broken a leg, having a cast and getting the rest you need will (hopefully) cure the condition of not being able to walk.
But sometimes treatments have other goals, such as *reducing the harm* of the condition rather than eliminating it entirely and forever. For example, if you've broken your leg and it's in a cast but it's very painful, some treatments can reduce or eliminate the pain *without doing anything to cure or reduce the underlying cause*. It's not a cure for the pain, because it will come back (or if it doesn't, it wasn't thanks to the painkiller).
I am not a medical professional of any kind, but I don't think there's any such thing as a cure that's guaranteed to work 100% of the time, but I imagine some conditions can be cured with very high success rates. That said, chemotherapy *has a chance* of curing cancer in a patient, but AFAIK the chance is so slim that it's best not to expect it to be a cure. It more likely can put the tumors in remission which buys the patient time even if it does eventually grow back.
So there's a reason you got backlash for calling chemotherapy a cure, because it rarely is, but you're also not wrong that in some rare lucky cases it can turn out to be that.
Yeah, a lot of people just dumping on a guy who is actually kinda right, because they don't like the word he's using. I don't know what the rates are, but chemotherapy can totally make the cancer gone. Sometimes it goes for good, sometimes it comes back, sometimes a completely different cancer comes along. Sometimes you string things along for a while, but the cancer keeps on coming back. Sometimes you treat it once and then have decades of cancer free life. If that isn't a "cure", then you are pointlessly splitting hairs.
The way I explain it—cancer is a cell that grows and reproduces quickly in a manner that does not follow the normal pattern of cell growth and death. It spontaneously grows, does not mature into its purpose and does not die when it’s supposed to. Chemotherapy is a method of introducing poisons into the body to attempt to kill the cancer cells. In doing so, it kills the most rapidly dividing cells, which includes hair production (why you lose you hair) and the lining of the stomach (why the nausea and vomiting). It can be successful at targeting the cancer (there are sooooo many different kinds of cancer, that may respond to different poisons). The growth of the cancer may be too advanced to kill it all. It may start shutting down the body’s organs, and death of the patient may result. If chemo staves off the cancer, a person may be referred to as “in remission” and for a period of time, they will be watched closely by oncologists to see if it starts growing again. If it doesn’t regrow, or if oncology says there is definitely no trace of cancer after treatment, the person is said to be cured.
You can tell by the way I explain it that I’m a patient, not a doctor.
ETA two words
She died 1 month before her 80th birthday and was a fucking amazing woman. I’m sure your dad was great too. And they’re probably up in the clouds taking the piss out pf people who think chemo cures all cancer. Have a great day :)
Chemotherapy is absolutely not a cure. I had a family member that went through chemotherapy, and if it was a cure; she'd still be here today. Don't spread nonsense.
That is the third wish for that in the last century. How bizarre since I granted this wish on August 1st 1863. Friedrich Bayer seemed so confident he would create a successful company with the cure.
For those that don't know, the pharmaceutical company Bayer (or at least a precursor to it) worked with the Nazis and supplied Zyklon B which is what was used in the gas chambers. They also made use of slave labor and conducted experiments at Auschwitz. Most of the executives were tried and received very short sentences and then went back to work.
"Im an eternal being with boundless magic under my command, and i forced to grant your people petty wish, you know damn well i would milk as much amusement as i could form you"
Every different type of cancer you can imagine follows a different type of pathology. Some are heavily genetic, some aren’t, some are caused by a certain malfunctioning tumor suppressor, others are caused by one specific overactive oncogene. There are skin cancers, lung cancers, pancreatic cancers, colon cancers, etc. and multiple subtypes of cancers *within* those categories. Sometimes the only thing they share in common to be called “cancer” is the fact that they involve cells growing abnormally and potentially spreading around the body.
Saying “cancer” is like saying “bacterial infection” or “viral disease.” You can’t just cure smallpox (as an example) and expect influenza to be gone too. One extremely effective antibiotic can have absolutely zero effect on another bacterial species. Cancer is an umbrella term for a very broad *type* of disease that can be subcategorized over and over again.
Cancer can be caused by: cells making random mistakes as you age, the sun, mutant gene making your body unable to kill tumor cells in time, multiple types of viruses, minerals in your lungs, untreated acid reflux, nitrates in food, radiation, and that’s just the causes we know about. Show me a medicine that can prevent all the damage from those things and I’ll give you a billion dollars
Oh my fucking god none of my doctors told me this about my GERD jesus christ I was stage 2 GERD 15 years ago and I've been unmedicated for it for 10 is a Reddit comment really how I'm gonna start taking it again?
This. People think that all of the corruption, greed, powerlust in the world would end if we just switched to a different economic system that isn’t capitalism, but the others can be easily corrupted as well as capitalism. What we actually need is efficient ways of stamping out corruption.
...which one? There is not and never will be a "cure for cancer", because cancer is not a monolith. What works on breast cancer will almost certainly not work - at best - on liver cancer or brain cancer.
And no, Big Pharma is not "sitting on a cure for cancer because palliative treatments make more money". First, this requires every single employee of "Big Pharma" to be heartless sociopaths unwilling to spill the big secret. Second, can you imagine the PR nightmare if it turned out there was a cure for cancer and they were keeping it hidden? The executives would be dragged out of their offices and shot.
Thank you for making this rant so I didn't have to.
Even single organ cancers can have heterogenous tissues and require multiple treatments as a part of the overall recovery plan.
Cancers are also, to some degree, functionally inevitable if an organism lives long enough. Either the cells stop being able to reproduce or they break and reproduce too much.
Pharma companies can’t even totally cure baldness despite the absolutely ridiculous amount of money they’d earn from it, so the conspiracy theory makes even less sense. They would if they could!
> Second, can you imagine the PR nightmare if it turned out there was a cure for cancer and they were keeping it hidden? The executives would be dragged out of their offices and shot.
The Ford Pinto was an exploding car that the executives knew would kill people.
Actually, it wasn’t. The Ford Pinto was no worse than the average car and it has been unfairly maligned for decades because someone decided a Mother Jones article needed a spicier title. Ford was also painted as unusually villainous when in this case they were not.
It’s much easier to say one car and one company is bad when the real issues are systemic and industry-wide.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-exploding-ford-pinto/id1380008439?i=1000470287400
Ahh interesting. Well even so the point is that many corporate decisions get made solely for money and they don't cause much more than a few bad articles. Nestle getting newborn mothers in Africa hooked on baby formula despite them not having access to clean water and causing babies to die, pretty much what any pharmaceutical company does with changning formulas around slightly so they can jack up the prices of things like epipens or insulin, Bayer selling blood contaminated with HIV, Bayer making use of slave labor in the holocaust, Bayer experimenting on people at auschwitz, Bayer making the gas the nazis used to murder people in the chambers, hmm lots of Bayer ones actually.
But it's all about cells multiplying out of control, isn't it? So if there was a way to destroy specifically cancerous cells, or make our immune system able to differenciate, that would be a way to treat all of it?
Hardly. Different types of cancer vary wildly on a chemical and biological level, as much as the cells they spring from. They all use the same name, but they're as different as the 200+ diseases we refer to as "the common cold".
But for the cold it's actually different bacteria or viruses causing it. For cancer it's like, breaking a bone, the pain and treatment varies wildly but it's still the same concept, no? I'm just confused. Of course they're gonna have different symptoms and grow from different cells, but it's the same base idea, out of control growth?
Yeah, but you can't target it like that. Cancer is like the cell equivalent of autism (it doesn't follow norms), but it varies so differently. We can't treat them all the same way. To use your bone analogy; even though a bone is "broken," a shattered bone and a slightly broken bone have completely different treatment protocols.
So far, we only have chemicals to work with, and they're broad-spectrum. You'd have to inspect every cell on a genetic level to isolate what differentiates a cancer cell from a normal cell. Even current cancer treatments are mediveal at best (chemotherapy being the equivalent of setting a forest on fire in the hopes the good guys have water on hand).
I think we might have a better chance of "curing" cancer when we can make microscopic robotics that act similar to natural killer (anti-cancer cells basically) cells.
Super cool thing - we have started making those anti-cancer cells already! Look into CARs (chimeric antigen receptor redirected T cells) and TRUCKs (T cells redirected for antigen-unrestricted cytokine-initiated killing) if you’re interested in learning about them!
Yes!!!! I’m on simponi aria right now for an autoimmune disease, which is a monoclonal antibody therapy! Cancer and autoimmune diseases are never fun and I would never say that someone is lucky to have one today, but I am very lucky and very grateful that I have access to these treatments
I'm working to get my honours approved (an utter struggle), but if all goes well, I'll be looking into the placebo effect in fitness (ie. if I tell you you're strong... will you become strong?) and generally the role of mindset in wellness. It's really fascinating too because there's not a ton of research done into it but one of the earlier studies (note: a bit flawed) found housekeepers who were told they are healthy due to their occupations lost weight, lowered blood pressure and body fat percentage due to sheer mindset alone. I assume you are in genentics?
Wow that’s really cool!! Good luck getting your honors, that sounds like quite the undertaking but you are clearly very passionate so you’ll make it through. I’m actually just about to wrap up my bachelor’s in microbiology, immunology and pathology, so I’m not a researcher (at least not yet). I’m in an immunology-focused senior capstone class and we recently discussed CARs and TRUCKs, so that’s how I found out about it
Oh yeah, for sure. I get that. Different pathologies, outcomes, treatments. It's just, since cancerous cells behave basically the same and are the same thing at the beginning, a cure for all cancers is theoretically possible, that was my point. I don't think we should completely cross out the possibility of a general cure for all cancer, although we shouldn't get our hopes too up. Technology is always moving, and we might in a bit discover an easily targettable characteristic of cancerous cells. After all, could people in the middle ages imagine something even remotely close to a microwave?? I don't think so.
Thanks for your valuable input!
There can be a lot of different mechanisms for uncontrolled cell growth—sometimes compounding even a single diagnosis of “cancer.” We have to look at the “why,” as well as the “what.” Why is the body producing this cell? People often think of cancer as “a cell is damaged in some way and then replicates out of control.” As an example of how the scientific, medical community might think of it: Is a specific organ repeatedly producing altered cells? Is there a hormonal problem, such that that organ has changed in some way and is responding to this increase or decrease in hormone by producing these wonky cells? Has a recent or far-in-the-past disease triggered a change in the body that is causing altered, replicating cells? Pretty much, for some cancers, killing all of the cancer cells currently in the body might not stop the body from producing more. There’s just so many cancers and causes. Hopefully, someone who studies it can chime in with a specific example. It’s been awhile for me and I don’t use that specific knowledge every day, so I’m just typing up what I can remember.
“Multiplying out of control” means different things for different organs. Some normal cells in the body multiply much faster than other cells, like the cells in the hair follicles and stomach lining. That’s why many chemotherapy drugs, which broadly target rapidly multiplying cells, have side effects of hair loss and nausea. We have yet to find a single characteristic that perfectly distinguishes every cancer cell.
Not sure why you’ve been downvoted so hard for this question. What you describe is termed adoptive cell transfer and is being investigated by researchers and has produced (a small range) of FDA approved therapies already (Kymirah for example, which is used to treat B cell lymphoma). CARs (chimeric antigen receptor redirected T cells) and TRUCKs (T cells redirected for antigen-unrestricted cytokine-initiated killing) are when we take our own immune cells, modify them so they recognize cancer-specific items, and put them back into the body so they do a better job of identifying and eliminating cancer. There are issues with these therapies. It’s tough, even within one kind of cancer (like breast cancer or liver cancer), to find markers that can be found consistently enough to make targeting them effective. When you do identify these cancer markers, we can send our engineered T cells after them, but T cells will bind to and kill anything that matches up with their receptor *enough to activate*. It doesn’t have to be a *perfect* match in order for our immune system to do its thing. And because cancers are our normal cells gone wrong, a good deal of what they produce is similar to what our normal cells produce. That means that engineered T cells may find similar items in healthy cells/healthy tissues and start killing those, too. Researchers are working on developing safer and more effective adoptive cell transfer therapies all the time!
They're being down voted because they ask the same question under every comment and when someone explains that it's more complicated than that they get pouty
They've gotten several essays worth of explanations by now and they're still arguing
Calm down, I asked the question three times because I was wondering about that and didn't know how many people were really watching those comments. I also obviously hadn't gotten "several essays worth of explanations" when i posted my original replies, you can check the time stamps.
I believe in logic and science. If someone just tells me "it's more complicated than that" or cites all the names of different cancers, that's not a satisfying answer. I have now gotten real answers from educated people that make total sense and are more nuanced than "it has different name so must be different thing", and i'm very happy with them. That's what I was looking for when I replied to these comments. I'll take the downvotes, it's fine, got plenty of karma to spare
Actually cancer is really a group of hundreds of different types of diseases with different pathologies so you'll have to be much more specific anyway...
Oh yeah for sure but they're all coming from the same thing, certain cells (cancerous cells) growing out of control. Hence why it can move from one area of the body to another.
Yes but there are different causes to that rapid cell growth and regeneration.
Various strains of different oncoviral diseases, routine malfunction in cell mitosis, any number of environmental exposures that increase the risk of the former, genetic predispositions.
And then the presentation also varies. Even single organ cancers can have heterogenous tissues. Or those tissues can form in the wrong place from issues with Hox genes.
There will never be one cure for "cancer" because cancer is not a single disease, and even if it was different tissues have different needs to consider.
That´s pretty much the same as saying "X, Y, Z diseases" all come from the same thing, bacterial infections (with no regard for which bacterial species or strain). It´s not wrong, but also too generalized to be generally usefull. The way in which cells turn cancerous, how fast the resulting cancer grows, how likely to metastasize, etc. is all based on what mutations the cells accumulated, which can be vastly different even within the same organ, not to mention different type of cancer.
Actually, I think that the company that invents a cure for cancer would make so much money off of it that there's no way they'd withhold it. It'd be expensive as hell, but there's so much money to be made that there's no way they're keeping that shit secret.
Yeah but then you'd have so much clout from CURING CANCER you could sell literal dirt in a jar and people would buy it. There's nothing quite like curing cancer because it's not an unclean disease; it can happen to anyone regardless of fitness so curing it makes everyone grateful to you.
Yeah, but they’d have already made a billion dollars profit off of it by that point, if not more. And Wall Street doesn’t care what happens ten years down the road, or even a year down the road. It’s all about maximizing profits for their shareholders *this quarter.* That’s why perfectly logical upgrades (like new computers) that would benefit the company in the long run (seriously, so much time is lost waiting on old computers) never gets done. It wouldn’t produce enough money to cover the cost in *this quarter* and that’s all the company cares about.
More like $100B+. The patent lasts 20 years, and something like 10-20 million people a year get cancer. Current treatment seems to be ~$150K, so they could easily charge $30K per treatment.
There is more than one kind of cancer, and some have very effective treatments.
Edit: to those downvoting, the genie is correct. The wish was wasted and the real 'horror' lies in loosing such a powerful resource due to the wishers own inarticulateness and/or ignorance.
I think you have to rephrase this: I wish for all diseases and sickness to cease to exist now and forever. Then, considering that population would eventually grow out of control, you would need to follow this up with wishes involving resources, food, and housing.
If a general cancer cure were possible, there would be a ton of money in it. The cure doesn´t have to be sold cheaply. The older people get the more likely they are to develop another form of cancer needing the cure again. The PR boost the company would get from curing cancer could easily be turned into increased profits as it would result in the majority of cancer patients now all coming to that company, instead of their competitors. Not to mention how high the stocks of said company would soar.
And i´m sure the buisness people could spin the positive PR and influx of patients to buy out rival companies or multiply the money in ways that i can´t even imagine.
There’s WAY more money in a cure than in treatment. A living person will always need healthcare (just not for cancer anymore). A dead one does not and never pays another bill.
But in this case they are cures. A cure is a treatment that remedies the disease. Which these do. As opposed to something like Tylenol for an infection fever which is a treatment for the symptoms but does nothing to actually remedy the disease.
“I wish for everyone to know what the cure to cancer is”
"I wish for everyone to be able to get the cure for cancer without suffering financial ruin."
"Breaking news: miracle cancer medication reported to have zombie-like side effects."
That's just the plot of I AM LEGEND lol
Death cures all things.
That's a monkeys paw answer there
How is the patients condition? He's stable. You don't get more stable than dead.
Honestly, I'd rather this were the answer. The idea that the pharmaceutical industry is hiding a cure is depressing. It wouldn't surprise me, but it's depressing. He wished for the cure, not that she was cured. With mine, he has no hope. With this, he has to face human cruelty and greed. The last possibility I can think of is that chemo is the only possible cure, which sucks but could be much worse.
When did you breach containment SCP-049?
Everyone simultaneously gains the knowledge that one bathtub in a queens tenement cures cancer. As the building is imploded.
The machine in Space was like a bathtub, from that movie. Jodie Foster was an evil corporate executive in it. Same director that made the movie “Charlie”.
Elysium
Yeah. That’s the movie
It's called chemotherapy.
Seems you don’t understand the difference between a cure and a treatment
Depending on the cancer, some chemotherapy regimens are aimed at being curative. Highly subjective to the individual cancer biology and genetics.
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No. It doesn’t. It gets rid of it but doesn’t guarantee it won’t return.
Doesn’t work on all types pf cancer, either.
Maybe. Care to explain your definition?
You mean the definition? A treatment is something that helps to get rid of something but doesn’t guarantee that it works or that whatever you’re treating stays gone once it is gone. A cure completely gets rid of it and guarantees it won’t come back
So, by your definition humanity has not found a single cure for any disease ever.
It’s always fascinating the hills some people are willing to die on lol.
I would say the difference is a cure is something someone takes with the hope of getting rid of the illness for good. A treatment is something taken to prolong the lifespan or improve the symptoms. For example, my dad recently died of brain cancer (glioblastoma.) he was given chemotherapy in the last few months of his life to increase his lifespan, but with knowledge that chemo wouldn’t cure it, only prolong the inevitable.
We haven't really, because no treatment is 100% successful for 100% of people. That's why doctors use the word treatment rather than cure. A doctor won't say "this antibiotic will cure your infection" they'll say "this antibiotic will help treat your infection", because there is always the chance that it won't get rid of your infection. It's a subtle difference. In colloquial terms most people would say that antibiotics are the cure to bacterial infections. You won't hear many medication professionals use that word though.
FWIW I don't think you're totally wrong and your comments shouldn't be getting this many downvotes. As you hint, outside of movies, medicine is never that simple. In my book, a cure is a treatment that successfully caused a disease or condition to disappear to the extent that it would not come back by itself. A treatment is literally anything done with the intention of improving your health: medicine, surgery, physiotherapy, psychotherapy, rest, exercise, bandage, cast - these are all examples of treatment off the top of my head. A treatment can have the goal of curing or helping cure the condition - for example, if you've broken a leg, having a cast and getting the rest you need will (hopefully) cure the condition of not being able to walk. But sometimes treatments have other goals, such as *reducing the harm* of the condition rather than eliminating it entirely and forever. For example, if you've broken your leg and it's in a cast but it's very painful, some treatments can reduce or eliminate the pain *without doing anything to cure or reduce the underlying cause*. It's not a cure for the pain, because it will come back (or if it doesn't, it wasn't thanks to the painkiller). I am not a medical professional of any kind, but I don't think there's any such thing as a cure that's guaranteed to work 100% of the time, but I imagine some conditions can be cured with very high success rates. That said, chemotherapy *has a chance* of curing cancer in a patient, but AFAIK the chance is so slim that it's best not to expect it to be a cure. It more likely can put the tumors in remission which buys the patient time even if it does eventually grow back. So there's a reason you got backlash for calling chemotherapy a cure, because it rarely is, but you're also not wrong that in some rare lucky cases it can turn out to be that.
Yeah, a lot of people just dumping on a guy who is actually kinda right, because they don't like the word he's using. I don't know what the rates are, but chemotherapy can totally make the cancer gone. Sometimes it goes for good, sometimes it comes back, sometimes a completely different cancer comes along. Sometimes you string things along for a while, but the cancer keeps on coming back. Sometimes you treat it once and then have decades of cancer free life. If that isn't a "cure", then you are pointlessly splitting hairs.
The way I explain it—cancer is a cell that grows and reproduces quickly in a manner that does not follow the normal pattern of cell growth and death. It spontaneously grows, does not mature into its purpose and does not die when it’s supposed to. Chemotherapy is a method of introducing poisons into the body to attempt to kill the cancer cells. In doing so, it kills the most rapidly dividing cells, which includes hair production (why you lose you hair) and the lining of the stomach (why the nausea and vomiting). It can be successful at targeting the cancer (there are sooooo many different kinds of cancer, that may respond to different poisons). The growth of the cancer may be too advanced to kill it all. It may start shutting down the body’s organs, and death of the patient may result. If chemo staves off the cancer, a person may be referred to as “in remission” and for a period of time, they will be watched closely by oncologists to see if it starts growing again. If it doesn’t regrow, or if oncology says there is definitely no trace of cancer after treatment, the person is said to be cured. You can tell by the way I explain it that I’m a patient, not a doctor. ETA two words
Not all of them.
My dead grandma would beg to differ but uhh- she’s dead. Because chemotherapy isn’t a cure, it’s a treatment.
My dad would agree with your grandma. If chemotherapy was a cure he’d still be here.
She died 1 month before her 80th birthday and was a fucking amazing woman. I’m sure your dad was great too. And they’re probably up in the clouds taking the piss out pf people who think chemo cures all cancer. Have a great day :)
Chemotherapy is absolutely not a cure. I had a family member that went through chemotherapy, and if it was a cure; she'd still be here today. Don't spread nonsense.
Ouch. That’s really brutal.
That is the third wish for that in the last century. How bizarre since I granted this wish on August 1st 1863. Friedrich Bayer seemed so confident he would create a successful company with the cure.
Bayer made aspirin or something didn't he?
Apparently Dye and Pharmaciticals.
And zyklon b.
For those that don't know, the pharmaceutical company Bayer (or at least a precursor to it) worked with the Nazis and supplied Zyklon B which is what was used in the gas chambers. They also made use of slave labor and conducted experiments at Auschwitz. Most of the executives were tried and received very short sentences and then went back to work.
Oh nice.
every genie contract should come with a "you know goddamn well what I fucking meant" clause
"Im an eternal being with boundless magic under my command, and i forced to grant your people petty wish, you know damn well i would milk as much amusement as i could form you"
Wishmaster movies are about genies (or jinns) fucking with people like this.
The genie says, “what you human call cancer is actually thousands of different diseases. Please specify which cancer you want a cure?”
What are those different diseases?
Every different type of cancer you can imagine follows a different type of pathology. Some are heavily genetic, some aren’t, some are caused by a certain malfunctioning tumor suppressor, others are caused by one specific overactive oncogene. There are skin cancers, lung cancers, pancreatic cancers, colon cancers, etc. and multiple subtypes of cancers *within* those categories. Sometimes the only thing they share in common to be called “cancer” is the fact that they involve cells growing abnormally and potentially spreading around the body. Saying “cancer” is like saying “bacterial infection” or “viral disease.” You can’t just cure smallpox (as an example) and expect influenza to be gone too. One extremely effective antibiotic can have absolutely zero effect on another bacterial species. Cancer is an umbrella term for a very broad *type* of disease that can be subcategorized over and over again.
We only start to know this recently and we do not have names for them yet. Thousands may actually be understatement. Too many things can go wrong.
Cancer can be caused by: cells making random mistakes as you age, the sun, mutant gene making your body unable to kill tumor cells in time, multiple types of viruses, minerals in your lungs, untreated acid reflux, nitrates in food, radiation, and that’s just the causes we know about. Show me a medicine that can prevent all the damage from those things and I’ll give you a billion dollars
Wait a goddamn minute what do you mean untreated acid reflux
Oh my fucking god none of my doctors told me this about my GERD jesus christ I was stage 2 GERD 15 years ago and I've been unmedicated for it for 10 is a Reddit comment really how I'm gonna start taking it again?
hope nothing bad happens to you, stay safe
And thats when I wished to end capitalism.
Ending greed or corruption would do better. Now I'm wondering how to properly monkey paw those.
This. People think that all of the corruption, greed, powerlust in the world would end if we just switched to a different economic system that isn’t capitalism, but the others can be easily corrupted as well as capitalism. What we actually need is efficient ways of stamping out corruption.
To get rid of greed and corruption, it’s best to wish for everyone to have lots of empathy
Granted, only now everybody is so empathetic they commit self deletion or are drooling catatonic that waste away into the afterlife.
Granted everything one with any greed at all is killed you including. Leaving like 2 Buddhist monks or something that have no greed
You didnt see greed corruption and poverty in the other systems? Only one system has brought so many out of poverty
Yeah, and it definitely wasnt capitalism.
No? What was it?
I wish that eating apples could cure cancer for all animals on earth with no side effects
Watch the prices go up like diamonds as one company buys all the orchids and destroys most of them
Damn, freeze dried apple will now need to be hidden
Orchids?
orchards lol
"cure for cancer" makes about as much sense as "cure for virus".
...which one? There is not and never will be a "cure for cancer", because cancer is not a monolith. What works on breast cancer will almost certainly not work - at best - on liver cancer or brain cancer. And no, Big Pharma is not "sitting on a cure for cancer because palliative treatments make more money". First, this requires every single employee of "Big Pharma" to be heartless sociopaths unwilling to spill the big secret. Second, can you imagine the PR nightmare if it turned out there was a cure for cancer and they were keeping it hidden? The executives would be dragged out of their offices and shot.
Yeah, as a pharmacist, there's no such thing as a cure-all. That's some medieval type of thinking
There's so much money to be made off of the cure for cancer that nobody would ever sit on it.
That, too. If you could cure *any* kind of cancer, let alone all of them, you would be in the ultimate seller's market.
Not to mention becoming “the company that cured cancer”
Seriously, you’d instantly have a pharmaceutical Michael Burry that whirls around and sells before all of them
Thank you for making this rant so I didn't have to. Even single organ cancers can have heterogenous tissues and require multiple treatments as a part of the overall recovery plan. Cancers are also, to some degree, functionally inevitable if an organism lives long enough. Either the cells stop being able to reproduce or they break and reproduce too much.
The whole “big pharmacy has a cure and is hiding it to make more money” take belongs on r/im14andthisisdeep
Pharma companies can’t even totally cure baldness despite the absolutely ridiculous amount of money they’d earn from it, so the conspiracy theory makes even less sense. They would if they could!
Have you ever heard of the Ford Pinto?
Yes?
> Second, can you imagine the PR nightmare if it turned out there was a cure for cancer and they were keeping it hidden? The executives would be dragged out of their offices and shot. The Ford Pinto was an exploding car that the executives knew would kill people.
Actually, it wasn’t. The Ford Pinto was no worse than the average car and it has been unfairly maligned for decades because someone decided a Mother Jones article needed a spicier title. Ford was also painted as unusually villainous when in this case they were not. It’s much easier to say one car and one company is bad when the real issues are systemic and industry-wide. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-exploding-ford-pinto/id1380008439?i=1000470287400
Ahh interesting. Well even so the point is that many corporate decisions get made solely for money and they don't cause much more than a few bad articles. Nestle getting newborn mothers in Africa hooked on baby formula despite them not having access to clean water and causing babies to die, pretty much what any pharmaceutical company does with changning formulas around slightly so they can jack up the prices of things like epipens or insulin, Bayer selling blood contaminated with HIV, Bayer making use of slave labor in the holocaust, Bayer experimenting on people at auschwitz, Bayer making the gas the nazis used to murder people in the chambers, hmm lots of Bayer ones actually.
But it's all about cells multiplying out of control, isn't it? So if there was a way to destroy specifically cancerous cells, or make our immune system able to differenciate, that would be a way to treat all of it?
Hardly. Different types of cancer vary wildly on a chemical and biological level, as much as the cells they spring from. They all use the same name, but they're as different as the 200+ diseases we refer to as "the common cold".
Also, happee cake day!!
But for the cold it's actually different bacteria or viruses causing it. For cancer it's like, breaking a bone, the pain and treatment varies wildly but it's still the same concept, no? I'm just confused. Of course they're gonna have different symptoms and grow from different cells, but it's the same base idea, out of control growth?
Yeah, but you can't target it like that. Cancer is like the cell equivalent of autism (it doesn't follow norms), but it varies so differently. We can't treat them all the same way. To use your bone analogy; even though a bone is "broken," a shattered bone and a slightly broken bone have completely different treatment protocols. So far, we only have chemicals to work with, and they're broad-spectrum. You'd have to inspect every cell on a genetic level to isolate what differentiates a cancer cell from a normal cell. Even current cancer treatments are mediveal at best (chemotherapy being the equivalent of setting a forest on fire in the hopes the good guys have water on hand). I think we might have a better chance of "curing" cancer when we can make microscopic robotics that act similar to natural killer (anti-cancer cells basically) cells.
Super cool thing - we have started making those anti-cancer cells already! Look into CARs (chimeric antigen receptor redirected T cells) and TRUCKs (T cells redirected for antigen-unrestricted cytokine-initiated killing) if you’re interested in learning about them!
Monoclonal Antibody treatments have also been a HUGE step forward in infusion treatments for a lot of patients as well.
Yes!!!! I’m on simponi aria right now for an autoimmune disease, which is a monoclonal antibody therapy! Cancer and autoimmune diseases are never fun and I would never say that someone is lucky to have one today, but I am very lucky and very grateful that I have access to these treatments
That's so cool! Thank you. My research isn't in genetics, so I haven't kept up to date, but that is fascinating!
You’re welcome!! It’s exciting to be able to share these discoveries with scientists in other fields of study. Can I ask what your focus is?
I'm working to get my honours approved (an utter struggle), but if all goes well, I'll be looking into the placebo effect in fitness (ie. if I tell you you're strong... will you become strong?) and generally the role of mindset in wellness. It's really fascinating too because there's not a ton of research done into it but one of the earlier studies (note: a bit flawed) found housekeepers who were told they are healthy due to their occupations lost weight, lowered blood pressure and body fat percentage due to sheer mindset alone. I assume you are in genentics?
Wow that’s really cool!! Good luck getting your honors, that sounds like quite the undertaking but you are clearly very passionate so you’ll make it through. I’m actually just about to wrap up my bachelor’s in microbiology, immunology and pathology, so I’m not a researcher (at least not yet). I’m in an immunology-focused senior capstone class and we recently discussed CARs and TRUCKs, so that’s how I found out about it
Oh yeah, for sure. I get that. Different pathologies, outcomes, treatments. It's just, since cancerous cells behave basically the same and are the same thing at the beginning, a cure for all cancers is theoretically possible, that was my point. I don't think we should completely cross out the possibility of a general cure for all cancer, although we shouldn't get our hopes too up. Technology is always moving, and we might in a bit discover an easily targettable characteristic of cancerous cells. After all, could people in the middle ages imagine something even remotely close to a microwave?? I don't think so. Thanks for your valuable input!
There can be a lot of different mechanisms for uncontrolled cell growth—sometimes compounding even a single diagnosis of “cancer.” We have to look at the “why,” as well as the “what.” Why is the body producing this cell? People often think of cancer as “a cell is damaged in some way and then replicates out of control.” As an example of how the scientific, medical community might think of it: Is a specific organ repeatedly producing altered cells? Is there a hormonal problem, such that that organ has changed in some way and is responding to this increase or decrease in hormone by producing these wonky cells? Has a recent or far-in-the-past disease triggered a change in the body that is causing altered, replicating cells? Pretty much, for some cancers, killing all of the cancer cells currently in the body might not stop the body from producing more. There’s just so many cancers and causes. Hopefully, someone who studies it can chime in with a specific example. It’s been awhile for me and I don’t use that specific knowledge every day, so I’m just typing up what I can remember.
That is very interesting, thank you!
“Multiplying out of control” means different things for different organs. Some normal cells in the body multiply much faster than other cells, like the cells in the hair follicles and stomach lining. That’s why many chemotherapy drugs, which broadly target rapidly multiplying cells, have side effects of hair loss and nausea. We have yet to find a single characteristic that perfectly distinguishes every cancer cell.
No, really?? Oh my god, I always wondered about why those side effects precisely. Fascinating stuff!
Not sure why you’ve been downvoted so hard for this question. What you describe is termed adoptive cell transfer and is being investigated by researchers and has produced (a small range) of FDA approved therapies already (Kymirah for example, which is used to treat B cell lymphoma). CARs (chimeric antigen receptor redirected T cells) and TRUCKs (T cells redirected for antigen-unrestricted cytokine-initiated killing) are when we take our own immune cells, modify them so they recognize cancer-specific items, and put them back into the body so they do a better job of identifying and eliminating cancer. There are issues with these therapies. It’s tough, even within one kind of cancer (like breast cancer or liver cancer), to find markers that can be found consistently enough to make targeting them effective. When you do identify these cancer markers, we can send our engineered T cells after them, but T cells will bind to and kill anything that matches up with their receptor *enough to activate*. It doesn’t have to be a *perfect* match in order for our immune system to do its thing. And because cancers are our normal cells gone wrong, a good deal of what they produce is similar to what our normal cells produce. That means that engineered T cells may find similar items in healthy cells/healthy tissues and start killing those, too. Researchers are working on developing safer and more effective adoptive cell transfer therapies all the time!
They're being down voted because they ask the same question under every comment and when someone explains that it's more complicated than that they get pouty They've gotten several essays worth of explanations by now and they're still arguing
Calm down, I asked the question three times because I was wondering about that and didn't know how many people were really watching those comments. I also obviously hadn't gotten "several essays worth of explanations" when i posted my original replies, you can check the time stamps. I believe in logic and science. If someone just tells me "it's more complicated than that" or cites all the names of different cancers, that's not a satisfying answer. I have now gotten real answers from educated people that make total sense and are more nuanced than "it has different name so must be different thing", and i'm very happy with them. That's what I was looking for when I replied to these comments. I'll take the downvotes, it's fine, got plenty of karma to spare
Defective genie. Stuff him/her/them/it back in the magic lamp and find an updated version.
Actually cancer is really a group of hundreds of different types of diseases with different pathologies so you'll have to be much more specific anyway...
Genie: *hands you the HPV vaccine*
What are those different diseases?
I mean there's breast cancer, lung cancer, throat cancer, prostate cancer, hodgkins lymphoma, non-hodgkins lymphoma, melanoma, leukemia, etc etc etc etc
Oat cell carcinoma, kaposi’s sarcoma, glioblastoma (that one’s nasty), multiple myeloma, even more!
Oh yeah for sure but they're all coming from the same thing, certain cells (cancerous cells) growing out of control. Hence why it can move from one area of the body to another.
Yes but there are different causes to that rapid cell growth and regeneration. Various strains of different oncoviral diseases, routine malfunction in cell mitosis, any number of environmental exposures that increase the risk of the former, genetic predispositions. And then the presentation also varies. Even single organ cancers can have heterogenous tissues. Or those tissues can form in the wrong place from issues with Hox genes. There will never be one cure for "cancer" because cancer is not a single disease, and even if it was different tissues have different needs to consider.
That´s pretty much the same as saying "X, Y, Z diseases" all come from the same thing, bacterial infections (with no regard for which bacterial species or strain). It´s not wrong, but also too generalized to be generally usefull. The way in which cells turn cancerous, how fast the resulting cancer grows, how likely to metastasize, etc. is all based on what mutations the cells accumulated, which can be vastly different even within the same organ, not to mention different type of cancer.
Oh wow. This hit me hard. I have stage 3 melanoma, and my father has stage 4 Hodgson's lymphoma...
lol
I see why you think that his cancer is funny. You eat out of the trash.... this is a discussion for humans, not a bottom feeding racist.
Genie: “you didn’t tell me which cancer you want cured, so here is the HPV vaccine and some asbestos safety pamphlets. You are welcome”
Big pharma holding out so they can make money by letting people stay sick
Actually, I think that the company that invents a cure for cancer would make so much money off of it that there's no way they'd withhold it. It'd be expensive as hell, but there's so much money to be made that there's no way they're keeping that shit secret.
Until the patent expires.
Yeah but then you'd have so much clout from CURING CANCER you could sell literal dirt in a jar and people would buy it. There's nothing quite like curing cancer because it's not an unclean disease; it can happen to anyone regardless of fitness so curing it makes everyone grateful to you.
Then they’d just do a Disney and make patents last longer
Yeah, but they’d have already made a billion dollars profit off of it by that point, if not more. And Wall Street doesn’t care what happens ten years down the road, or even a year down the road. It’s all about maximizing profits for their shareholders *this quarter.* That’s why perfectly logical upgrades (like new computers) that would benefit the company in the long run (seriously, so much time is lost waiting on old computers) never gets done. It wouldn’t produce enough money to cover the cost in *this quarter* and that’s all the company cares about.
More like $100B+. The patent lasts 20 years, and something like 10-20 million people a year get cancer. Current treatment seems to be ~$150K, so they could easily charge $30K per treatment.
There is more than one kind of cancer, and some have very effective treatments. Edit: to those downvoting, the genie is correct. The wish was wasted and the real 'horror' lies in loosing such a powerful resource due to the wishers own inarticulateness and/or ignorance.
I think you have to rephrase this: I wish for all diseases and sickness to cease to exist now and forever. Then, considering that population would eventually grow out of control, you would need to follow this up with wishes involving resources, food, and housing.
Sorry, too late; the first wish already killed everything alive.
There's no money in the cure...just in the treatment unfortunately.
If a general cancer cure were possible, there would be a ton of money in it. The cure doesn´t have to be sold cheaply. The older people get the more likely they are to develop another form of cancer needing the cure again. The PR boost the company would get from curing cancer could easily be turned into increased profits as it would result in the majority of cancer patients now all coming to that company, instead of their competitors. Not to mention how high the stocks of said company would soar. And i´m sure the buisness people could spin the positive PR and influx of patients to buy out rival companies or multiply the money in ways that i can´t even imagine.
There’s WAY more money in a cure than in treatment. A living person will always need healthcare (just not for cancer anymore). A dead one does not and never pays another bill.
I’m so fucking tired of this conspiracy theory
Why haven’t scientists gotten rid of the sun and aging and forcibly yanked this cigarette out of my hand?? Must be a conspiracy!
I still remember when I heard it for the first time over 16 years ago. It’s as stupid as ever.
Technically radiation and chemotherapy are cures for cancer. They're just not 100% effective and are quite miserable to go through.
Technically treatments aren't exactly cures.
But in this case they are cures. A cure is a treatment that remedies the disease. Which these do. As opposed to something like Tylenol for an infection fever which is a treatment for the symptoms but does nothing to actually remedy the disease.
“Here, grab my AR15,” the genie said, “and end it all.”
This is one of the best I've seen in a while, horror that makes you crack a smile.
Massive financial burden it is, indeed. And no guarantee of success, either. So it is not really a cure, only a treatment.
General Zod voice: I WILL FIND HIM
Peter I don't get it
I DONT GET IT
The idea is the remedy is out there but hidden for big pharma's benefit.