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No, not really...My Grandfather is the first one in his family to get cancer...But he was also the first male not to die of heart disease before 70. And I will tell you, the only positive thing that can be said about his health is that he didn't smoke. He was somewhat active in that he golfed a lot (but rode a cart,) but was obese at least 40 years of his adult life, ate what he wanted, probably drank more than the experts advise and put salt in his dang beer...He was never able to exercise extensively since getting wounded in WW2 left shrapnel in his leg that would act up after a walk of more than fifteen or twenty minutes.
You cannot convince me that his extended lifespan wasn't a product of modern hypertension and possibly cholesterol medications. You also won't convince me that he would have lived to receive a cancer diagnosis at 89 or 90 to without said medicine. And, after radiation he lived to die of "old age" (basically heart/organ failure) a year or two later. The radiation didn't really damage his QOL. He passed at 91. To be honest, he would have been "happier" passing at 88 or 89...After Grandma died he didn't have as much interest in this world. His shoulders didn't allow him to golf, he couldn't hear, his friends were gone, etc...
Sorry about the loss of your grandparents, JNOV.
You bring up a good point about the loss of social support for the very old who outlive their peers and find their activity restricted as they become frail. As we have more people in that age group (I hope to become one of them, and it will happen sooner rather than later), I see a tremendous niche for someone to fill in providing services to help them. MY MIL will be 95 in January. Fortunately, she has family in close and regular contact.
What a misleading statement! Cancer can be cured? Yes, some types of cancer can be cured, especially if it's early and localized, but you make it sound like you think cancer, in general, is curable. It is not, and everyone knows it is not. Even the bloggers at sciencebasedmedicine know that cancer is not generally curable.
You really sound like a spokesperson for the medical industry.
Grim Reaper this one !!
Sir, I am sure your wholesome education would not have included studies of lymphomas (>60% cured), pediatric leukemia (some of them more than 90% curable) non metastatic breast cancer ( relapse rates dropped by 50% mostly)
so while you spread this propaganda of yours, some of us smarter , more evolved humans (if you believe in evolution that is) Will be working hard to find similar treatments for finding better cures. Lets both hope you don't get a chance "refuse" these treatments ever.
Sir, I am sure your wholesome education would not have included studies of lymphomas (>60% cured), pediatric leukemia (some of them more than 90% curable) non metastatic breast cancer ( relapse rates dropped by 50% mostly)
so while you spread this propaganda of yours, some of us smarter , more evolved humans (if you believe in evolution that is) Will be working hard to find similar treatments for finding better cures. Lets both hope you don't get a chance "refuse" these treatments ever.
MOST cancer is not curable, especially if it is advanced. This is a fact, and it doesn't matter what you prefer to believe.
You can worship modern medicine like it was God, and expect it to save you from all diseases. But it won't.
Patients with advanced cancer are offered treatments, but all they do is extend life by a couple of years or months. And they are very sick the whole time.
That is what the cancer industry is mainly focused on -- developing drugs that cost a fortune and extend life just a bit more than an older drug. And these drugs sell because people are scared to die.
Rates of many cancers are actually decreasing, due to preventive efforts such as doctors getting patients to quit smoking and have colonoscopies. That is directly attributable to medical care.
Telling someone to quit smoking is medical care??? There are people who need a doctor to inform them that smoking is bad for health???
Quote:
Originally Posted by suzy_q2010
If a cancer takes time to develop, it will be more common in older people, and those people had to live long enough for it to happen. That means they did not die of something else when they were younger. Ergo, they were healthier. If you die of pneumonia at the age of 47 you do not live long enough to develop cancers that are more common in people older than that. It really is not a difficult concept to understand. A medical intervention (antibiotics for pneumonia) makes it possible for the person who would have died at age 47 from pneumonia (without antibiotics) to live long enough to develop cancer.
I UNDERSTAND your concept, and I understand it better than you because I know it is BS.
You do not know why cancer is so common now. You WANT to think it's because most people used to die in their 40s and never got old enough to get cancer.
But that is medical industry BS. I already explained that average lifespan was shorter mainly because of higher infant mortality. People who survived childhood had lives almost as long as ours, on average. So they had plenty of time to get cancer. AND YOU KNOW IT, but you don't want to admit it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by suzy_q2010
What do you mean by "societies"? Are you taking into account access to medical care? Certainly some cancers are more common in certain ethnicities, and that probably reflects genetic susceptibility, such as breast (female and male), ovarian, and prostate cancer in Ashkenazi Jews. Burkitt lymphoma is common in children in Africa who are co-infected with Epstein Barr virus (which is the cause of the lymphoma) and malaria (which apparently impairs the immune response to the EB virus). None of that has anything to do with the effect of medical advances in extending lifespan in the US (apart from monitoring high risk groups like Ashkenazi Jews closely).
The absolute numbers of some cancers are increasing because the population at risk (people living to older ages because they did not die younger from something else - due to medical advances) is increasing. When you adjust for that increased population, rates (usually expressed per 100,000) are decreasing for some cancers.
All you are doing is blathering and trying to distract from the fact that industrialized societies have higher rates of cancer and other supposedly age-related diseases.
MOST cancer is not curable, especially if it is advanced. This is a fact, and it doesn't matter what you prefer to believe.
You can worship modern medicine like it was God, and expect it to save you from all diseases. But it won't.
Patients with advanced cancer are offered treatments, but all they do is extend life by a couple of years or months. And they are very sick the whole time.
That is what the cancer industry is mainly focused on -- developing drugs that cost a fortune and extend life just a bit more than an older drug. And these drugs sell because people are scared to die.
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Let's say 80% of all people over 80 suffer from Disease A.
Let's say only 20% of people 50-79 suffer from Disease A.
And let's say only 4% of people 49 or under suffer from Disease A.
You can conclude that there's something people over 80 have in common, that people under 80 don't have in common. What might that one thing be?
I KNOW!
THEY ARE ALL OVER 80!
That is the answer. The fact that they CAN live past 80, makes it MUCH easier for them to develop Disease A.
This also is good news, because it means more people are living past 80 than previously.
Very good. You restated the medical industry's myth, you have been successfully brainwashed.
They are TAKING CREDIT FOR MORE PEOPLE GETTING CANCER! They have convinced you that more people are getting cancer because of the wonderful success of their drugs, which extend life and therefore let people get old enough to get cancer.
Maybe it sounds convincing, if that's what you love to believe, but there is no evidence for it. There are many possible explanations for high rates of cancer. For example, it is WELL KNOWN and established that obesity increases the risk of cancer. And it is well known and established that obesity is more common in industrialized societies like ours.
MOST cancer is not curable, especially if it is advanced. This is a fact, and it doesn't matter what you prefer to believe.
You can worship modern medicine like it was God, and expect it to save you from all diseases. But it won't.
Patients with advanced cancer are offered treatments, but all they do is extend life by a couple of years or months. And they are very sick the whole time.
That is what the cancer industry is mainly focused on -- developing drugs that cost a fortune and extend life just a bit more than an older drug. And these drugs sell because people are scared to die.
A lot of cancer is preventable and cure rates for many are going up. It is modern medicine that determined what causes those cancers, how to prevent them, and how to treat them.
Where did I ever say that medicine can "save you from all diseases"? Please link to a specific post.
Newer treatments are curing advanced cancers. There is a poster here on CD who has been treated for advanced Hodgkin lymphoma, for example. President Jimmy Carter responded well to a new drug for melanoma, despite having metastasis to the brain.
Not all cancer treatments make people "very sick the whole time", not all cost a fortune (though some do), and the reason we now have cures for some cancers is because of newer drugs, often in combination with older ones.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Good4Nothin
Telling someone to quit smoking is medical care??? There are people who need a doctor to inform them that smoking is bad for health???
Some do not even try to quit until a doctor tells them to, and there are medications that can help. Yes, it is medical care.
Quote:
I UNDERSTAND your concept, and I understand it better than you because I know it is BS.
You do not know why cancer is so common now. You WANT to think it's because most people used to die in their 40s and never got old enough to get cancer.
But that is medical industry BS. I already explained that average lifespan was shorter mainly because of higher infant mortality. People who survived childhood had lives almost as long as ours, on average. So they had plenty of time to get cancer. AND YOU KNOW IT, but you don't want to admit it.
What you do not want to admit is that age adjusted lifespan has increased. Infant mortality is irrelevant when you adjust for age. Population has increased, too, so we have larger absolute numbers of people in any given age group. That means more people at risk to get cancer and more people with cancer - even though rates of new cases for many cancers have decreased.
Quote:
All you are doing is blathering and trying to distract from the fact that industrialized societies have higher rates of cancer and other supposedly age-related diseases.
You have provided not a single reference to support your opinion that the number of people with age related conditions is not due to more people in older age groups.
You also apparently do not understand the difference between incidence rates and the absolute number of people with a condition. The incidence rate - number of new cases per 100,000 population - of many cancers, for example, is going down, not up. That is due to modern medicine.
Looks like the OP wasn't sincere at all with his first post. He didn't really want any answers to his questions, unless they agreed with his agenda. And it's clear to me that he has an agenda that he's trying to push. I'm not sure why, I mean - he's obviously taking advantage of the industrialized society which he rails against. Otherwise he wouldn't be on a computer using the internet to post on City-Data (or anywhere else). He is pushing the agenda that industrialized society is to blame for today's ills - and he's (poorly) hiding it under the guise of a seemingly innocuous query on the average lifespan.
So to the OP - if it really bothers you that much, I'm sure there are plenty of forests and caves and backwoods country areas of the US, where there's no electricity, no plumbing, where you have to hunt for your supper, no planned agriculture, no telephones, no internet, no houses or concrete foundations or roads or bicycles, no modern tools, no metal weapons, etc. Find a spot like that and enjoy life in the wilderness.
For the rest of the USA, we kind of like our bathrooms and toilet paper.
Very good. You restated the medical industry's myth, you have been successfully brainwashed.
They are TAKING CREDIT FOR MORE PEOPLE GETTING CANCER! They have convinced you that more people are getting cancer because of the wonderful success of their drugs, which extend life and therefore let people get old enough to get cancer.
So what, gentle poster, are people “supposed” to die from?
How should my obese, hypertensive grandfather have gone out after defying the odds and missing the heart disease boat at 91 years old?
How should someone, having missed out on the joys of polio, avoided farm or industrial accidents, and lived through a treatable infection or condition that would have been a 50-50 proposition years ago, come to expire and depart this life? Steer the Cadillac into Bambi at 70 mph after one too many post golf martinis? Nod off at the helm of his private plane and dig a big smoking hole in a cornfield? Get sideways of the bookie at the rest Home?
Yeah, I guess they are taking credit for more people getting cancer. The problem is that you seem to insist that cancer is exclusively the product of outside/environmental influences. It is not. While these external factors cannot be denied, neither can they wholly explain cancer.
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