When you're dying you'll trust Big Pharma.
Medicines to Deter Some Cancers Are Not Taken (NY Times)
This long, long, long article documents two related topics.
1) There are drugs that are proven by big, elaborate studies to dramatically reduce the risk of certain cancers. People don't effing care.
2) The usual stuff that is believed to prevent cancer does not work, or causes more cancer. People still believe in it.
It is a dismal picture indeed. This article confirms that a lot of correlations turns out not to be causations. Eating fruit or losing weight won't prevent cancer, at least if you do it the last 20 years or so before the cancer breaks out. Eating various supplements that are supposed to prevent cancer will give you more cancer. But most importantly, people don't care until they actually are diagnosed with cancer. Then most of them decide to give medicine a try anyway. So pharmaceutical companies have taken the hint. They have stopped developing drugs that prevent cancer, and are investing in treatments instead. That's where the money is.
This long, long, long article documents two related topics.
1) There are drugs that are proven by big, elaborate studies to dramatically reduce the risk of certain cancers. People don't effing care.
2) The usual stuff that is believed to prevent cancer does not work, or causes more cancer. People still believe in it.
It is a dismal picture indeed. This article confirms that a lot of correlations turns out not to be causations. Eating fruit or losing weight won't prevent cancer, at least if you do it the last 20 years or so before the cancer breaks out. Eating various supplements that are supposed to prevent cancer will give you more cancer. But most importantly, people don't care until they actually are diagnosed with cancer. Then most of them decide to give medicine a try anyway. So pharmaceutical companies have taken the hint. They have stopped developing drugs that prevent cancer, and are investing in treatments instead. That's where the money is.