Posted: Jun 02, 2012 6:51 pm
epepke wrote: There are some disturbing factors in cancer reporting and research. Lots of professionals seem to think that early detection is important for effective treatment. It certainly seems plausible that catching something quickly should require less severe intervention which is more likely to work. Is this true, however? There's a confounding purely numerical problem, though. Cancer survival rates are counters and reported for statistics by the amount of time after detection. So, if someone gets a cancer detected two years earlier, that person will be reported to have lived two years longer with the cancer, completely regardless of the effectiveness of the actual treatment. I've seen two meta-studies on this. One concluded that all of the supposed more life with cancer was because of this, and the other concluded that most of it was.
That's correct, but of no relevance to the issue of survival times with chemo vs. no treatment in people who have already been diagnosed with cancer. Right?