Is cancer so “uncurable” we only hope to extend the patient’s life and not cure it completely?
In: Biology
Because 120 year survival rate of being born is zero and cancer patients are more often than not elderly to begin with. People die of reasons other than cancer and it’s not always obvious how large of a component the “cured” cancer played in the eventual death.
Really, what you need is a solid metric to compare different treatments by and taking longer to do the statistics and get the comparison is not a good thing. You could do a 20 year survival rate, but you would have to wait for 20 years to get the final result. That is suboptimal. So you got to take a timeframe by which the cancer would have killed the patient almost for certain, if not for the treatment, and the timeframe also has to be long enough for the treatment to fully work. But you don’t want a too long timeframe, or you will be comparing things that have nothing to do with cancer.
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