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by retroafroman 3687 days ago
This is the best way to describe just about any diet or exercise ideas floated on HN.
1 comments

People also tend to very much forget that cancer is not a disease, but a class of diseases. Not all cancers will respond equally to the same treatments.
Can you give an example of a disease that responds equally to the same treatment in all people?
I'm not talking about across different people; I'm talking about different types of cancer.

The causes and treatments for lymphatic cancers are different from lung cancers are different from breast cancers are different from prostate cancers are different from brain cancers are different from liver cancers, ad infinitum.

Just as one example of a commonality, aneuploidy is reported for nearly all cancers: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917070/

That is clearly something that can be targeted in principle (and not the only thing). Whether the "causes" are different is irrelevant. Whether the treatments are different is a choice made by people, and also irrelevant.

Well there must be some things they all have in common. Anaerobic environment I thought, is that still the case? No transport of oxygen via iron possible, in my layman's memory?
Like saying suffocating in vacuum and suffocating from oxygen substitution in an enclosed space (like by inert gasses) is equal. The causes are different enough that different solutions are necessary.
I don't see how this analogy works at all? In either case a space suit works doesn't it?

Anyway, this whole "cancer isn't one disease" meme is best depicted by the bottom right panel of the second section of this comic: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1162

It looks just like the "string theory landscape", next you will be told that we need to stop worrying about comparing predictions to evidence when it comes to cancer research. Just wait a few years/decades.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philo...