[ramraj07]

So what you’re summarizing is that cancer is definitely a single disease with multiple types but there are commonalities. Which makes sense. Which is why I never bought this “we can’t cure it because it’s not one disease”. We can’t cure it because we aren’t smart enough.

[thaumasiotes]

> Which is why I never bought this “we can’t cure it because it’s not one disease”.

Really, in an important sense, cancer isn't one disease because cancer isn't a disease at all. It's a mechanical malfunction, kind of like having a cleft palate.

On the other hand, it is more disease-like than most mechanical malfunctions.

[projektfu]

Perhaps you have an overly narrow definition of the word disease? Cleft palate is, in my opinion, a congenital disease. A fractured bone is also a disease.

I have a cancer, a basal cell carcinoma. Like other cancers, it's a transformed cell type with dysregulated growth. But, it's likely to be completely excised surgically, unlike pancreatic adenocarcinoma, which would likely kill me in a few months.

[thaumasiotes]

> Perhaps you have an overly narrow definition of the word disease?

I'm intentionally highlighting here a definition of 'disease' that is much narrower than the norm, yes.

> A fractured bone is also a disease.

On the other hand, you're trying way too hard to correct that. Nobody considers a broken bone to be a disease. A broken bone in your leg is not fundamentally different from a broken rock outside your leg, and -- more importantly -- this lack of difference is easily understood by everyone.

But while e.g. diabetes is not caused by external agents, it looks from the outside just like other types of problems that are. This leads to both types of problems being called "disease", even though the radical difference in how the problem occurs means that the treatments and ways of thinking that apply to one type are not appropriate for the other type.

Diabetes is purely mechanical, and if you take measures against it, you can suppress its effects. It will never fight back or attempt to circumvent your efforts. Malaria is purely external, and if you take measures against it, it will take countermeasures.

Cancer is an intermediate phenomenon. It is not caused by external agents. But it is alive and may respond to measures taken against it -- it consists of part of yourself 'going rogue' and becoming as malicious as an external agent.

This intermediate status suggests that approaches from either end of the "disease" spectrum might be fruitful. One of the biggest problems we have in dealing with cancer is that we want to treat it as a malign external agent to be removed from the body, as would be appropriate if it were really a disease. But while there are many effective tools to do that for diseases, they all fail badly in a couple of different ways when the "disease" is indistinguishable from the rest of your self.

[projektfu]

I think you should maybe come up with a new word. You're heavily overloading terms that have medical definitions with your own meanings, and expounding an alternative philosophy of medicine, which is fine but shouldn't depend on semantics, perhaps.

[thaumasiotes]

> and expounding an alternative philosophy of medicine

What?

[hervature]

No, they wrote:

> Cancer is indeed not 1 disease but many countless ones.

[ramraj07]

No, they do what most cancer researchers do, which is wrap the truth around so much bullshit that you can read it however you please. I’m also not an amateur, I spent most of my PhD studying cancer drugs.