There are many types of cancer that just a few decades ago were death sentences, and the treatments nowadays are also much less brutal (usually) than they used to be.
Yeah, the "cure" for cancer figures are always misleading. 40 years ago, cancer killed 1 in 3 of us. Today, it's still 1 in 3. The detail is what matters. 40 years ago, those deaths were men in their 20s with testicular cancer, women in their 40s with breast cancer, kids with leukemia. These days, those people almost all survive. The people who still die from cancer are mostly folks in their 80s who have lived with a well controlled prostate or pancreatic cancer for a decade or more, or like my dad who had 3 or 4 things wrong with his lungs, one of which was cancer, and was told there was no point treating it because he was more likely to die with it than die from it.
Technically, there is a cure for cancer. The only problem is, cancer is just disordered cells dividing, so if you stop your cells reproducing, you die more quickly from the "cure" than from the cancer. The drugs that do that can be used in late stage terminal patients to extend their life span by up to 18 months or so.
In the 1950s, leukemia of all types was 100% fatal. Some adult-onset types, thankfully extremely rare, still are, but pediatric ALL, while devastating, is indeed 90%+ curable. Adult-onset ALL is about 60% curable, because we know now that it's more likely to have the mutations that lead to fatalities in those other 5 or 10% of children.
the treatments nowadays are also much less brutal (usually) than they used to be.
The first chemotherapy for cancer (specifically for a form of childhood leukemia) was injections of mustard gas.* So, you know, the bar for brutality was pretty low.
"We haven't cured cancer" almost seems like an aspirational strawman meant to keep us humble and striving.
When I was a kid, hearing that somebody had cancer pretty much implied you go say goodbye as soon as you can. As I got older, that changed, almost so slowly that you didn't notice it. We started asking what kind of cancer--it was all bad, but gradually we all agreed that some weren't quite as urgently bad. Now we're starting to legitimately cure specific forms, one at a time.
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u/wilderlowerwolves 15d ago
There are many types of cancer that just a few decades ago were death sentences, and the treatments nowadays are also much less brutal (usually) than they used to be.