Connect
← Return to The arbitrary economics of life and death
Discussion
The arbitrary economics of life and death
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: Apr 16 3:21pm | Replies (30)Comment receiving replies
Excellent points, especially when you touch on the point (falsely?) attributed to Stalin: "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic." 😕
That said, I'd counter that there *is* value in those initial short extensions of life for prostate cancer patients — assuming the patient gives genuinely-informed consent — because they're starting points. The reason some of us can live 10+ years of full, active life with stage-4 prostate cancer in 2025 is that people were willing to risk new, experimental treatments that offered only the faint hope of 10 more weeks or months back in 2005 or 2015, and the medical community learned from their experiences and refined the treatments.
Gentlemen of the past: over the span of years, from me to you, thank you for your courage. Your treatment choices weren't meaningless, even if they failed you. 🙇♂️
Replies to "Excellent points, especially when you touch on the point (falsely?) attributed to Stalin: "One death is..."
Excellent point. It's a small thing, but those treated before me with SBRT had to go through the process of making some kind of a body mold to hold them in place. I did not have to go through that because the technology improved. Since my treatment almost a year ago now, they're already finding MRI-guided radiation offers fewer side effects than CT-guided radiation, which is what I had. And it doesn't stop there. Research is underway showing that a supercollider can treat cancer better than current radiation treatments with even fewer side effects and in a single treatment lasting less than half a second (though it currently requires a gigantic building, much like the original IBM computers, the technology will eventually shrink). For those interested: https://en.as.com/latest_news/cancers-worst-nightmare-cerns-particle-accelerator-could-end-cancer-tumors-in-less-than-a-second-n-2/
Connect
You’re absolutely right. We are the beneficiaries of the experiments and sacrifices of those before us. And although it doesn’t please me to be another sacrificial lamb, I hope that our journey makes future journeys less trying, more useful, and ultimately, more effective.