5 ms·

try to get your cancer treated in 1960 and let me know how much you like 2010

• dredmorbius 4y ago
  Cancer treatments are highly specific. There's been marked progress in some areas (breast, bladder), and remarkbly little in others (pancreatic, brain, lung). A very close friend died of a cancer in the early 1990s for whom treatment has advanced little from the late 1960s, and is largely based on compounds developed in in the 1910s, for chemical warfare during the Great War. Other than genetic sequencing now telling us what specific chromosomal mutation is responsible for the disease, the situation remains largely unchanged to this day. (This is one of the messages I continually send Past Me, who was as is all to typical, bombarded with "information" about "novel treatments" promising to aid in their disease. Those were, and are, utter bildge.) The largest improvements in health outcomes, measured by decreases in mortality and increases in life expectency, occurred during the decades of the 1910s (women) and 1920s (men). The largest increases since have largely come about through improved healthcare access (especially to the poor and minorities, with Black women and men making huge increases in life exepctancy since the 1950s) and through te elimination of risks: air pollution, asbestos, lead, cigarettes, reductions in alcohol consumption, IV drug use, overdoses, unprotected sex, and the like. AIDs and other novel infectious diseases have been a counter-trend. 5-year survival for my friend's cancer was and remains about 1 in 5. 60 years after 1960.