Blog, Cancer Treatment Options Forum - December 28th, 2009 - 4 Comments
Who believes there is a cure for cancer out there?
My boyfriend and I are in a debate on whether or not there is a cure for cancer. He believes that somewhere out there is a cure but no one will release it for the fact that they make billions of dollars off of cancer patients. I think this is absurd and that if there was a cure, it would be released instantly to save millions of lives. What is your opinion?
A little cynical on the bf’s part but there would be huge amounts of money lost if there was a universal cure.
Had the misfortune of cancer in the family & will say its come a long way….slowly.
Many cancers that were guaranteed fatal are now treatable & curable .
If there was a universal cure announced there would be rioting & bloodshed in the streets by people who wanted to be first in line.
When my son was sick I would have done everything I could to get it for him & certainly become a madman if I found the rich or "important" were getting it first.
Can see world society falling apart if such an announcement were made.
Overall I do not think it will happen that way.
Ethically & morally an enormous dilemma .
I think it should unannounced to the public or patients to prevent the chaos that woul certainly follow.
Just quietly treat as many as possible as quickly as possible.
If it could be stockpiled & distributed it would take massive worldwide effort at government levels to administer & huge numbers would still suffer & die waiting while knowing a cure was possible.
Dont think we are at that point yet.
Don’t think I would want to know.
best regards
The problem with cancer is that it’s really not just one disease. It’s a couple thousand. Each cancer is essentially unique, has its own progression, and we can only vaguely group them by what sort of cells they come from and how they progress.
But basically you’re right. If someone were to come up with a cancer treatment that even cured a few dozen cancers reliably and for a long period of time (cancer does tend to come back), rich only begins to describe what they’d get. There’s undoubtedly a Nobel prize in it as well.
In just the last two years we’re starting to see some very promising treatments come out with the use of chemical based gene therapy and genetically engineered T-cells. Basically in the latter case they take T-cells from a person, then genetically alter them to attack cancerous cells very specifically and the putting them back in the body. In some lab trials (we’re talking not even clinical use, just testing to see if it works slightly in the lab) it’s exterminated several cancers that were essentially death sentences. However, given that this has been done in the lab, mostly on mice as little as 1-2 years ago, it’s a long way from being demonstrated safe, or effective to actually use. Let alone inexpensive enough that there’s enough money in the world to do it on more than a thousand people or so.
But the lab data looks awesomely promising. So perhaps in about 5-10 years we’ll start seeing the above being used as an actual treatment.
Besides, conspiracy theories are so blah. Keep in mind that when doing this research it’s not one guy at a company. It’s usually between 2-30 doctors, god knows how many grad students, possibly hundreds of lab techs and support staff. And yet they’re somehow -all- not mentioning this? Find me a grad student who doesn’t like to talk about his research, and I’ll go find el chupacabra.
there is no cure yet but a lot of research is being done. and i think just as much or more can be made if you had a cure for cancer..check out this research group http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta@home
catch http://www.cancerssociety.org for more info…