Comments on: Wasted Cancer Hope

By: consider

consider — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:56:45 +0000

SRT501 , a GSK resveratrol based drug that will likely never get marketed because it may be too close to regular resveratrol, is being tested on 15 colon/liver cancer patients. 5g a day.

The resuts are due this month.

One promising sign is last month’s study that showed regular resvertarol stopped the spread of cancer (liver?) in 70% of mice taking it as opposed to jusr 4% in the control group.

Multiple Myeloma results for SRT501 will be in late next year. Alzheimes and Prakisons also on dock for trials.

It looks like GSK is banking on the much more powerful SRT1701 or SRT2401 drugs they hope to market in 2012-2014.

By: Psychohistorian

Psychohistorian — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:05:11 +0000

It’s weird, but it actually has some truth behind it. An analysis of health care costs (discussed in Overtreated) finds that the more religious, “red” areas in the middle of the country have a much higher expenditure on this type of questionably useful end-of-life prolonging care as compared to the coastal “blue” areas, which are significantly less religious.

Of course, saying that it is specifically religion that causes this difference doesn’t follow. But it would not surprise me if the same type of mentality supports both high religiosity and high faith in ineffectual medical intervention.

By: sabril

sabril — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:36:35 +0000

I don’t know a lot about medicine, but hasn’t the same thing basically happened with AIDS? i.e. treatments that extended life a little bit, and then more, and then more, until treatments got effective enough to extend one’s life for years and years?

If so, then from a selfish point of view, I’m kinda glad that people are spending money to extend their lives a few months. Maybe by the time I or my loved ones get cancer (and realistically there’s a pretty good chance it will happen), a few months will have turned into 15 or 20 years with most of the misery at the very end.

By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:13:04 +0000

I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma on my 38th birthday in 1996. I entered a clinical trial and became the first person in the world with intermediate grade NHL to receive Rituxan as well as the regular chemotherapy. I’m still here, and Rituxan is now the world’s #1 selling cancer drug.

By: mike

mike — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:18:54 +0000

Good point. People who aren’t religious are totally unafraid of dying. Everyone’s atheist in a foxhole, right? Nothing terrifies me more than the thought of going to heaven.

This has to be the most dimwitted rationalization of anti-religious bigotry that I’ve ever seen.

By: Jeffrey Soreff

Jeffrey Soreff — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:59:04 +0000

Good point. That might wind up being true, and it is a factor in the right direction. On the other hand, if Professor Hanson is right about how fiercely ems will wind up competing and replicating, they/we may impoverish themselves to the point where the electronic equivalent of death by famine is a frequent and lifespan-limiting event.

By: Eric Yu

Eric Yu — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:46:09 +0000

On average, revived ems have longer to live than surviving cancer patients.

By: Jeffrey Soreff

Jeffrey Soreff — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:35:24 +0000

‘scuse the double posting on the same topic – I hadn’t located the
quote that I needed earlier.
From Break Cryonics Down

Your chance of being usefully revived in 2090 as an em is roughly the product of these ten conditional probability terms. Ten 90% terms gives a total chance of ~1/3. Ten 80% terms gives a total chance of ~10%, except step 4 might be a 50% chance, for a total chance of ~6%, which seems about right to me.

Contrasting cancer treatment and cryonics, we have a
20% successful treatment and a 6% effective (estimated) treatment,
both with costs on the order of $100,000 or so per patient.

Professor Hanson: You seem to be advocating moving resources
out of cancer treatment and into cryonics, yet this seems at odds
with your own estimates of their benefits. Can you explain this?
I’m comparing these purely in terms of returns on resources
expended, setting aside any questions of incentives, who pays
what, etc.

By: Jeffrey Soreff

Jeffrey Soreff — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:52:56 +0000

He admits his profession wastes vast resources selling false hope, but we are supposed to let that slide because he is proud to be “hopeful”?

How, on a per-patient basis, is this a worse bet than cryonics?
At least the anti-cancer drugs have been through an FDA screening
for efficacy. Cryonics’s efficacy currently rests wholly on theoretical
analysis. This isn’t an intrinsically bad position to be in – but it is more
nearly equivalent to drug leads than to drugs
which have passed clinical trials. The only reason one can’t make an
exactly analogous complaint about cryonics wasting vast resources
selling false hope is that so few of us are signed up for it, so the
aggregate numbers are smaller.

By: Floccina

Floccina — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:45:06 +0000

Some times I think that we would better off not knowing that we have cancer or some other diseases.