Survive and advance
On basketball, Oura rings, and well-deserved standing ovations for progress against cancer
It’s not a cure, per se, but the announcement that a drug can double survival times for people with advanced pancreatic cancer is phenomenal news. It’s the cancer that probably terrifies the most, because it usually goes undetected until it is far advanced. The more time we can buy for people with pancreatic cancer, the greater the chances survivors will live long enough to benefit from the next advancement.
■ The phrase “survive and advance” is usually tied to sports, but it’s the right term here, as well. Strategically, we want to attack most serious illnesses (including cancer) in the same way: Prevention wherever possible, detection as early as practical, cures wherever we can find them, and therapies to slow the spread of disease for as long as possible.
■ Cures obviously remain the trophies we seek the most. But we ought to get really excited -- standing-ovation excited -- over discoveries that stretch out the time over which people with dreadful diagnoses can have a chance to benefit from the discovery of new cures.
■ It really is an amazing time to be alive, with terrifically effective vaccines coming into being and new therapies being proven all the time. We can’t let up on any frontier, though; detection still seems to lag in many more ways than it should, but we might be getting some early inklings of what could be possible with the help of data as tools like AFib detection on the Apple Watch and biometric detection via jewelry achieve mass-market acceptance.
■ Baumol’s cost disease paints a semi-gloomy picture of health-care costs that rise forever (in both absolute and relative terms), and that has long been a model backed by the hard data of real experience. If there is to be any hope of diminishing that, it will come from sustained research and progress on all fronts in the fight against the big serious diseases.