More Evidence We’re Winning the War on Cancer
This blog has previously presented evidence of America’s remarkable success in the war on cancer. The factors leading to success included lifestyle changes (especially quitting smoking) as well as improved diagnosis and treatment.
New research looks only at diagnosis and treatment, and finds stunning improvements since 1990:
Men and women ages 50 to 64, who were diagnosed in 2005 to 2009 with a variety of cancer types, were 39 to 68 percent more likely to be alive five years later, compared to people of the same age diagnosed in 1990 to 1994, researchers found.
“Pretty much all populations improved their cancer survival over time,” said Dr. Wei Zheng, the study’s senior author from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. (Andrew M. Seaman, Reuters)
Improved diagnosis and treatment result from good research and development in the medical-device and pharmaceutical industries, not government-imposed mandatory health insurance.
I wonder about the extent to which these improved five year survival rates are attributable to finding the cancer earlier in its progression than in the past. It would be more instructive, I think, to see data on the age death occurs and what the quality of life was in the interim.
Suppose, for example, 100 women all die of breast cancer at age 67. If 50 had their cancer discovered at age 62, their five year survival rate was 100%. If the other 50 didn’t have their cancer discovered until age 63, their five year survival rate was zero.
Screening tests like PSA blood tests and mammograms may find cancer earlier than in the past but I haven’t seen any good data about the average age death occurs today vs. 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. We know that cancer now kills more people younger than 65 than heart disease does. What’s happened, though, to the difference in mean survival times with treatment vs. without treatment at various stages for the most common cancer types over the last 20-30 years?
Thank you. That is a legitimate question and we have addressed it elsewhere in the blog, where we have discussed mortality rates.
Using survival statistics is almost always about disinformation rather than the actual truth of things.
The difference in the comparison example of the survival rates is because with the newer screening technology the time of diagnosis gets pushed further and further towards an earlier, much less diseased or healthier state, so that you can expect that more people will have a better survival time slot in 2005 than in 1990, as less and less diseased (or more and more practically healthy) people are diagnosed with “cancer” – just think overdiagnosis. But, again, these misleading statistics say nothing about mortality rates.
The fallacy of these statistics have been known for decades, having no relevant relationship to cancer mortality, but it serves the big business of conventional medicine to inform” (=deceive) the public on just how great their highly profitable screening tests and treatments are so the corrupt medical establishment has been using these utterly deceptive statistics ever since until to this very day (read the afterword of this article on the war on cancer: do a search engine query for “A Mammogram Letter The British Medical Journal Censored” by Rolf Hefti).
The real facts show that, by and large, the war on cancer has been a near total failure (read ‘War on cancer” by Guy Faguet or Samuel Epstein’s work).
So no, this new datat isn’t “more evidence that we’re winning the war on cancer,” it is more evidence of relentless medical propaganda with the intent to hoodwink the unsuspecting public.
I would say that the statistics are limited but not fallacious. Besides, without earlier diagnosis, it woud be impossible to develop precision medicine. Ignorance is not bliss, when it comes to disease.