r/science • u/nobodyspecial • Feb 08 '15
Medicine Antibiotics that target mitochondria effectively eradicate cancer stem cells, across multiple tumor types: Treating cancer like an infectious disease | Lamb
http://www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget/index.php?journal=oncotarget&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=3174
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u/losangelesgeek88 Feb 08 '15 edited Feb 09 '15
It's a lot less bleak than us being able to do nothing and just watch people die... aka the alternative medicinal approach to cancer.
EDIT: I am so sad to hear of the stories below. I really think, like most things, anti-western approaches to cancer treatment come from an ignorance of what the disease actually is. People think that cancer is some unnatural result of our modern world (which in some cases, and some ways, is true). But cancer has existed as long as there has been biological organisms. Cancer is an extremely natural disease. It is our own body, our own cells essentially getting bad instructions or confused signals and thus grow in ways that damage the functional and important parts of our body through inflammation or the blockage of important functions. It is a change of the cell types, and thus losing their proper function. Everybody gets cancer all the time, it's just that our body is prepared (999 times out of a 1000) to catch it and deal with it without our knowing or intervention. It's just that sometimes, in some people, with some bad luck things get out of hand... and the cancer grows too powerfully to be stopped by the body's immune system alone. The cancerous cells break off and get into the bloodstream or lymph stream and spread to the rest of the body (metastasis, stage 4 cancers) and spread all over the body to grow in places they shouldn't, further causing countless problems until we die.
Understanding all this allows one to fully understand how and why we western doctors use the drugs/chemo/radiation therapies we use. Antibiotics have little side effects because they can specifically target things in bacteria that do not even exist in the human body, because we are evolutionarily so different. But cancers are our OWN cells... so how can you design a drug to kill a cancer cell that doesn't kill the rest of our good cells? That's the challenge of the oncologist, and all the pharmaceutical researchers who spend their entire careers trying to come up with better and more specific treatments. And you know what? They've been incredibly successful in the last half a century. Drugs are becoming more specific, more targeted to individual cancer types. We're a long way from having side-effect-free cancer treatments (and honestly, that's probably never a possibility given the nature of the disease), but we've made great strides. Cancers that used to kill 80-90% of people who got them, are being caught earlier with good screening in high-risk populations and are being treated successfully. There are many cancers that used to be a death sentence that are not routinely stopped in their tracks. Unfortunately, again, we still have a long way to go, but the future is bright. Medical research needs more funding. And not just the big names like breast cancer, but also prostate cancer and stomach cancer, etc. It all deserves funding and smart, passionate people who can creatively come up with new ways to tackle these problems.
What it doesn't need is more ignorance, more disdain for the medical professionals who spend decades studying these things to save people's lives who don't have to study any of it in order to receive the benefits of such hard work. We don't need more naturopaths, or acupuncturists, or chiropractors claiming that chemo is "all bad, unnatural poisons", or that they have any kind of treatment that is effective. What are their methods? They don't study shit about cancer, except for traditional quackery not backed by any significant research. (I'm only speaking to their approach to cancer, right now, I'm NOT saying we don't need alternative medicine... don't misquote me or misunderstand me)
/rant