[polyfractal]

I don't think this is fair for several reasons. First, cancer treatment drugs are tested heavily in-vitro first, where the only significant metric is reduction of tumor mass. Clinical trials for cancer treatments are different from other drugs, as you don't generally do double-blind trials (would you want to get a placebo if you had a terminal cancer? No, probably not).

So many cancer treatments go into clinical trials with only the evidence that it shrinks tumors, and tends to kill tumors faster than it kills the rest of your body. Side effects are expected to be severe since most cancer treatments are quite literally killing any cells that divide... tumors just divide faster and thus get hit harder. The end result is cancer treatment often has very poor quality of life.

Clinical researchers _do_ perform analysis to see if survival increases relative to other treatments. But often you don't know until you've already tried it on a cohort of patients (with their consent, obviously).

There is push-back in the medical field in areas for what you suggest. For example, colonoscopies are becoming widely recognized as causing more problems than they solve. The complications they can induce tend to lead to a poorer patient outcome than missing colon cancer because you didn't screen (e.g. survivability is not affected by finding/treating colon cancer early).

I just don't think it's fair to paint cancer treatments with the same brush strokes, since dealing with terminal diseases is a totally different ball game.

Edit: I should say, there are some parts of cancer treatment which is moving towards the dont-treat opton. For example, there is growing evidence that treating prostate cancer is not necessary, since you'll probably die of something else long before prostate cancer kills you (it is very slow growing on average)

[cannonedhamster]

The other problem with cancer is that there are different types of cancer cells. There's the fast dividing and there's also the cancer stem cells which can lay dormant for years without dividing. This is the reason for most cancer returning. There's a promising new tech that hopefully pans out that activates these cells so standard chemo can attack them. Regarding clinical trials, they are very selective. You have to for a very specific criteria and your cancer needs to be measurable by a CT scanner typically to prove efficacy. Add to that the typical cancer patient is either a child or an older person and you're bound to have poorer results.