How much of this is due to better detection of cancer? If we discover cancers earlier but still don’t have effective treatment I’d expect the 5-year survival rate to go up even though the actual death day never changed.
its part of the stack. earlier detection and improved treatments is a very important area.
we still are absolutely failing in preventing those same cancers from reoccuring because we don't know the sequence of triggers or how to prevent them. like, we might know the trigger, but we don't know why one body really becomes more susceptible to them aside from sometimes behavioral or genetic probabilities. hence why we still focus on remission instead of cured, since the body still remains in a state of susceptibility to the same thing and is exposed to the same unknown things, and doesn't revert back to a baseline of not being so.
> its part of the stack. earlier detection and improved treatments is a very important area.
Earlier detection is important but mortality is a better metric than 5-year survival. People tend to conflate the two. If earlier detection doesn't decrease mortality then it's just goosing the 5-year numbers.
This is especially true in geriatric cancers, particularly for example prostate cancers, where most of them are slow growing and not particularly dangerous. You'll outlive the cancer, so knowing about it doesn't mean, well, anything, other than exposing you to risky tests with serious side-effects. Prostate biopsy is really not great.
No-treatment is a great choice in these cases, so really, the detection is all downside, no upside for asymptomatic cases. [1]
A simple question with many different details and answers that won't all fit into a single comment. The two easiest, though:
Which is a better use of 50k? To give one adult one extra year, or the same money to reduce child mortality for a hundred strangers in a different country?
Does the treatment actually reduce mortality, or is it just an expensive placebo?
> Which is a better use of 50k? To give one adult one extra year, or the same money to reduce child mortality for a hundred strangers in a different country?
The answer to that one is very clear: the G7 have more than enough money to fix both extreme poverty (it's just 40 billion $ a year to end hunger [1]) and access to quality medical care (which is a purely USA problem, everyone else has sorted that out decades if not - in the case of Germany - centuries ago) at the same time. There is no need to pit these two issues side-to-side at all.
> Does the treatment actually reduce mortality, or is it just an expensive placebo?
At least for stuff that's not on off-label use, proving efficiency is a mandatory criteria for being allowed to be sold. And some quackery aside, most of the off-label stuff at least has some scientific backing proving that it can actually help.
> Which is a better use of 50k? To give one adult one extra year, or the same money to reduce child mortality for a hundred strangers in a different country?
Better for whom? Morals are always subjective to your point of view. While points of view of different people sometimes, and even quite often, align with each other enough so that we can talk about shared morals between them, they don't necessary do this all the time. Especially in a scenario of allocation of limited resources.
In the end the only thing that really matters, though, is the point of view of the person who owns these 50k, and nobody else's.
"Which is better" would be a great question if those were the only two things we spent our money on. In reality, both are better than many other ways we spend our money.
