That’s a rather sad statement, but apparently true. Cancer is the big boogyman in the US and a lot of money is spent, both from Health Insurance and in research, trying to conquer it.
However when it comes to actual treatment, despite the US spending thousands of dollar more per patient than in the UK, those patients didn’t live any longer.
Part of this is due to the spectacular financial inefficiency of the US healthcare system. And part is actually due to an obsession with cancer screening… which is generating incredible numbers of false positives.
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Higher US expenditures on cancer patients do not result in improved mortality. : denialism blog
But you’d never know that reading AEI’s highly dubious contribution to the literature in this week’s Health Affairs (lay Reuters…
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+Sally Hodges might know something about this.
If I was a cancer patient I don’t think I would want to live longer. I would want to be cured so that I am not a cancer patient and then live longer. My recent experience with far milder illnesses as well as some opinions I have heard from doctors who have cancer patients have convinced me that in the event of having cancer happen to you living longer would be a horrible curse to befall you. The only good thing about cancer that I have seen is that it tends to be very quick at killing you off. Maybe there are some slower acting varieties that aren’t so horrible but generally if it is not curable then a quick death is preferable.
On top of that a lot of the money spent is on cancer “awareness” which actually doesn’t go into research or treatment.
I like to donate to research organisations myself. I will have to plug my computers into the world community grid http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ I used to use my computer in college for similar projects but I haven’t installed it in any of my new machines. Anything that will give me a better chance of thousands of years of good health.