Lug, Sorry to hear about your condition. Thanks for sharing.

While I believe there is a a large industry behind healing cancer, I think preventative education would have a better pay off over time for those known disease causes. Sure, you can't prevent what you don't understand and many diseases fall into that category. We just don't know enough about most cancers to both cure or prevent them. I also think some illnesses will never be prevented or cured. We live in fantastic times where medicine is widely available for most life shortening ailments. I am 45 and would never have lived past 5 with the fevers I had as a child if it weren't for modern medicine. Just 25 years earlier, my uncle died as a child of fever. No meds available then.

Medical cures take time and lots of money (of course) and only a few companies have the resources to pursue drug technology. Doctors must risk their careers to experiment with new treatments and medical techniques. We need to support forward thinking processes to fund, and remove legal impediments to get new meds and products to market. I don't think government development programs are the answer because government never does anything efficiently. Corporations have to be efficient to succeed and survive in a competitive enviornment. A shift in liability laws and a push to change taxation issues would be on the right track. IMHO.

 

Cancer is all around us. It affects us all. I'm actively involved in the fight against cancer, to the degree I can be. That was my point. I already donated my calendar money, if you will.

The government needs to be involved in research. Not in the actual hands on research, but by providing money to get it done. That's how the system works. The government can bring promising research to a standstill simply by not funding it. Look at stem cell research as a well-known example.

Another point I tried to make is everyone, doctors and lay people alike, agree that smoking cigarettes (and other bad habits and chemicals) causes cancer. But if you smoke and get lung cancer and ask an oncologist why you got it, he'll tell he doesn't know--no one knows. There are far more people who smoke and never get cancer than those who do. There people who got lung cancer who don't smoke.

As I like to say, "Eat right, exercise, die anyway."

 

My statement "A shift in liability laws and a push to change taxation issues " includes shifting taxes collected to the right interests of the people, including medical research. It also addresses allowing private companies to spend more of those resources with less regulation. So, I agree with you.

 

I would say that the gov't does need to fund more but when i got thyroid cancer I went to NIH in Bethesda, MD and the gov't completely picked up the tab because they are doing reseach on why thyroid cancer in children is far less deadly than it is in adults. The only time that my parents insurance paid for anything was the first surgery cause at that time i was not going to NIH because it was not know that it was cancerous until the tumor was removed because both bioposies i had were inconculsive.

 

Never said I agreed with it and actually agree with you. I think the idea passed, which came from the radio, is complete BS.

-Matt-

 

Actually, the site that they MADE the calendar on (LuLu.com) is the one making a slight profit of the total sales. The forum that the calendar originated from is not making 1 cent off of it. All the proceeds (besides what Lulu takes out) are going to cancer research. It doesn't hurt to donate money to a good cause.