[dghughes]

Or better yet find out how to prevent cancers since it's better to not be sick than to treat you once you are sick.

Things like the HPV vaccine which in my province saw a 90% drop in just a few years. I think everyone should get it no questions asked which maybe they don't anymore?

The Hepatitis B vaccine too since having the disease is a cause of liver cancer.

But if all else fails it's also good to have a tools to try to get rid of cancers.

[kulahan]

Preventing cancer seems like a fool's based on my understanding of the disease. You have cancerous cells in your body every single day. Your immune system kills them all off. It's like saying you want to prevent all bacteria from entering your body. It's just not realistic (at least, not right now).

[tyingq]

He gave a couple of examples. Another one is aggressively treating GERD so that it doesn't devolve into various conditions that lead to stomach or esophageal cancer. It's possible something like this could treat pre-cancerous things too, like Barrett’s esophagus.

[foobiekr]

Replying to a post noting a 90% reduction in cancer thanks to the HPV vaccine with "preventing cancer seems like a fool's errand" is pretty amazing. Would you care to expand on that?

[kulahan]

HPV is a carrier disease for one strain of cancer. Cancer is a type of disease - as said elsewhere, it's like saying "I found a cure for virus".

[inglor_cz]

Maybe the OP meant "prevention" in the sense of "improving your immune system so much that cancer never manifests as a disease".

[foobiekr]

HPV causes cancer. The prevention here is literal - by preventing infection from the oncogenic HPV variants there is no cancer.

[inglor_cz]

Whales are fairly resistant to cancers (and so are other mammals, such as bats or naked mole rats), at least compared to humans.

Possibly, we may one day run DNA modifications on ourselves to copy whale/bat/naked mole rat genes into our cells in order to acquire similar protection.

Sounds wild, but it once sounded wild to infect yourself with a cowpox pus in order to prevent human smallpox.

[thehappypm]

HPV is a unique one because it's essentially a contagious cancer, and you're not vaccinating against cancer, you're vaccinating against the carrier (HPV). A really interesting cancer treatment that's very promising is customized vaccines that specifically target cancer cells for each individual's cancer!