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by rurban 602 days ago
I find it very interesting, because just recently I argued with the director of a clinic who said genetics control everything. And I vehemently disagreed. He was the expert, but still complete wrong. And also politically disturbing.
2 comments

I'm a computational biologist working for a health prediction biotech. Genetics only explains about 20% of disease variance (on average across many disease, additional caveats apply :-).
It’s true that although there’s long been ample evidence that cancer is a preventable disease (most cancers anyway), the medical community upholds the ‘randomness’ myth.

I believe this is because 1. Doctors don’t want to blame their patients for becoming sick. 2. Many of the lifestyle factors are societally systemic and feel too big to try change. 3. The money is in treatment, not prevention.

Edit: (See: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2515569/#:~:text=Th....)