I assume you've read Sid's book on cancer too? Nothing groundbreaking in terms of current medicine but an excellent explanation of how we got to where we are.
Meanwhile, IBM Watson for Oncology is mostly hype and horseshit:
https://www.statnews.com/2017/09/05/watson-ibm-cancer/
this does not come as a surprise to me. At MWC 2016 they demonstrated a Watson-based expert system that was meant to advise you what to do when the network went down. Its response to a BGP MD5 mismatch was just...baroquely wrong.
I enjoyed this article. Thank you for sharing it.
I liked the article, and it reinforced my belief that we're all full of cancer all the time, and it's a matter of.... something else whether it takes off.
Possibly not a useful response, but I hope offensive to none and interesting to some:
Cancer incidence per gram of tissue per unit time in mammals of widely varying sizes and life expectancies varies by many orders of magnitude. Here is a special issue about this question. Some papers are speculative, but I find the basic facts cited pretty interesting.
Along with the fundamantal questions, a persistent surprise from murine models of human cancer is that the equivalent human cancer frequently responds less well to treatment than the Mouse one. I suspect that basically early detection of tiny tumors which haven't yet reproduced much in mice is either much of the reason or possibly all of it.
Apologies if any of this is the wrong tone for anyone considering particular treatment or living with the disease.
I read an article with an interview with an oncologist who said "We've gotten really good at curing cancer... in mice."
Everything IBM Watson-related is basically bullshit. It's only a matter of time before the Jeopardy victory is revealed to have been a bunch of trivia experts hidden in a box like the original Mechanical Turk.
The thing that blew my mind was when I first heard that mets can spread before the primary tumor ever forms!
We can cure just about everything in mice.
I wonder if somebody went out and caught a free batch of wild mice, would we be able to cure them as well as the mice we've domesticated for science?
My oncologist told me that my particular tumor's subtype is most likely to reoccur within two years of finishing treatment, which will be this November. Doesn't mean I'll be out of the woods, but at least my chances of staying cancer-free improve.
That's encouraging, J! I'm continuing to hope things get better for you. Bodies are stupid and endlessly frustrating but we don't really have decent alternatives.
J, did you see any positive results from the depression treatment?
Unrelated, but I've been curious.
I was particularly interested in the 1985 study of thyroids and the cancers that were found in people who died of other causes. I have sometimes wondered how true this is of other cancers. Specifically, pancreatic cancer, which has a reputation for being quite nasty, might have some of that reputation because it isn't encountered until/unless it's quite nasty - nobody is noticing a suspicious lump on their pancreas.
(I am not a cancer researcher and have no medical training, as should be obvious)
[right thread this time]
There are some sensitive techniques being developed for detecting circulating tumor cells in blood. I wonder if they can do a similar study of people who have died of other causes if they're preserved a blood sample. Or of everyone, I guess- if they roll out this method to a wide population and suddenly 50% of people are found to have shed tumor cells in their blood.
I found this article useful. I've had dcis and calcifications ID'd in my tits, leading to one surgical biopsy and an incessant tally of follow up mammography and ultrasounds. I'd have had multiple invasive procedures if the initial panic leading to surgical bio hasn't led me to develop a strong fighting-back response to all the pushing to do more more more. I felt manipulated & bullied, not helped by incompetence on the part of two of the doctors. Eventually I've settled into a reasonable relationship with a radiologist and a surgeon who are willing to have a reasonable discussion of risk and recognize the huge limits on their knowledge.
I'm glad you've found a setup that works, sissi. My experience this summer with what turned out to be very weird very deep mastitis just like the initial urgent care doctor thought and (thank goodness) treated promptly was a fascinating/horrifying descent into this world where "cancer" wasn't a word anyone said at all because that worked so well with Voldemort until the young woman asking questions before the mammogram and ultrasounds said "and have you ever had cancer before?" to which I helpfully replied that I didn't even know that I had cancer now since that was the point of the testing. But yes, mail me biopsy-prep information on creepy pink ribbon paper, whatever, apparently. (I do have some concerns about why I got a weird infection in my breast after lots of weird infections in my throat and shingles at 35 and dangerous gall bladder infection almost a decade before that. I'd like to think the answer is just that I don't rest enough or lead a low-stress life, but I'm not going to explore other alternatives until my stupid ankle is fixed anyway. And on that front, I've done water aerobics two days now and I hate my body less than when I wasn't moving it, so that seems like a win.)
(Sorry all I talk about is my idiotic body, but it's on my mind to the point I'm embracing dualism more openly I guess. Gah.)
16. How's the false positive rate with those? There are lots of non-cancerous neoplasias in the body. Specific markers often are found to exist, but as far I as I have read it's not that easy to find good marker molecules.
13: By the end, my depression scores had improved, but I didn't actually feel much better. One month out, I notice the improvement, but it hasn't been as dramatic as I had hoped. I'm glad I tried it, and would recommend it to others, but it hasn't been a silver bullet or anything like that.
I know somebody who treated depression with Coors Light. I don't recommend it.
19: Yay, hating bodies less!
18: The uncertainty of DCIS would stress me the hell out, and I'm glad to hear you have a radiologist you trust. It's a classic example of how much we don't know about assessing the risks of breast tumors, and the degree/type of treatment depends on the personal preferences of one's doctor to an extent that most people would find shocking.
... the degree/type of treatment depends on the pecuniary interests of one's doctor, the pharmaceutical companies, the treating hospital or clinic, and one's insuror to an extent that most people would find shocking.
Possibly one topic: This morning I got an email reading "In terms of rodent Gait deficit measurement, how can we help you?" This did not go to spam.