Jake Seliger, a writer and former English instructor, documented his cancer treatment and wrote on medicine, culture and writing.
Commenters point to it for its detailed account of cancer treatment and clinical trials, calling the fight for treatment eye-opening.
> Every proven idea started as a random bullshit idea.
No, actually, almost no proven ideas start this way. Ideas which ultimately solve problems in a complex field, generally require a great deal of expertise to discover. Penicillin was discovered by doctors, insulin was discovered by doctors.
We all love the myth of an outsider who revolutionizes a field they were excluded from, but the reality is that someone like Florence Nightingale was excluded from medicine because of her gender, not because of her lack of subject expertise. The people who make groundbreaking discoveries in a field are almost universally experts in that field.
Sure, maybe in some new field that's in its infancy, a random person has a chance of discovering something useful, but oncology isn't that--we've got centuries of study of cancers.
Really? Let's look:
> No one in this thread is presenting their ideas as definitive solutions as far as I see, everyone is being pretty good about providing their confidence levels and sources.
Really? Let's take a look:
1. "Meanwhile, it is proven that the Zika virus does kill GBM cells in humans. This is what causes microcephaly in newborns. Inoculating the Zika virus in a controlled environment yields zero risk, and has no side effects." Poster gives sources, but the sources don't say what he claims they say, because you know, randos of the internet aren't actually capable of reading medical studies.
2. "To give you the short version of the story about how…
In an August 2023 post about regrets, https://jakeseliger.com/2023/08/12/regrets/, his last regret is:
* Not looking into that thing on my tongue in July 2022, when I first noticed it, but that is very specific to me and probably not generalizable. In https://jakeseliger.com/2024/05/16/the-financial-costs-of-healthcare-costs-or-is-keeping-me-alive-worth-it/, he mentions
"...I got a partial glossectomy in Oct. 2022. Mine had some high-risk features, but I was assured that, with radiation therapy, it wouldn’t recur (Bess recalls the exact words being, “Don’t worry, this won’t be what kills you”). ... In retrospect, however, I obviously should’ve been given chemo with the radiation, but at the time I was pleased to not need chemo, and I foolishly didn’t look deeper into the data on recurrence—which is common for HNSCC—and I didn’t seek second opinions. Some of those second opinions might’ve said: “Get the chemotherapy." Followed by radiation treatments, mentioned in https://jakeseliger.com/2023/11/14/the-more-things-go-wrong-the-more-things-going-wrong/
He posted about his followup investigation and the treatment of his tongue one year after the treatment - https://jakeseliger.com/2024/05/25/the-one-year-anniversary-of-my-total-glossectomy/
"By July 21, less than two months later, another six to eight tumors had grown. If I’d known how things would shake out, I likely would’ve pivoted to chemo and clinical trials the moment the surgical biopsy came back. But…
That's just the personal term I use to describe it, but I'd say it's a mix of lack of life experience, lack of expectations from the school, personal attitudes, lack of seriousness, lecture-hall style teaching and too many students, and low standards.
Examples:
- vandalizing all signs with the letter 't' around the school because the school has a reputation for "stealing a giant T" from a building, but all the students are too busy with career stuff to do anything like that
- saying "I want a job that pays me the most money"
- walking out in the middle of class after an attendance quiz
- administrative staff sending out emails with numerous typos
- lack of serious thought into important topics
I think American college students tend to be less mature than European ones due to being stuck in a suburb for 18 years as well.
I liked this article about universities: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/09/26/how-universities-work-or-what-i-wish-id-known-freshman-year-a-guide-to-american-university-life-for-the-uninitiated/
> It's a big mystery for me how the things went down since seventies.
There is a insightful (if a bit messy, and occasionally wrong) book that purports to answer that question:
Where is my flying car?: A memoir of future past, by J. Storrs Hall. [1]
In that author's view, it boils down to
* a levelling off of energy consumption per capita, that previously had doubled every 10 years. (In particular, the author laments the dearth of advanced nuclear power, which would be good for the economy and the climate.)
* increasing regulation and risk aversion.
* as well as “centralized funding streams”, “bureaucratic inertia,” “cultural malaise and indifference”.
[1] Reviews:
https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/09/where-is-my-flying-car-a-memoir-of-future-past-by-j-storrs-hall.html
https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/28/where-is-my-flying-car-a-memoir-of-future-past-j-storrs-hall/
Jake posted as jseliger on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jseliger
He blogged at <https://jakeseliger.com/>, and numerous of his blog articles were submitted to HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jakeseliger.com>. That includes numerous topics, over the past year or so his experience with cancer, often concerning frustrations with the process and mechanism.
His essay on agenticness especially strikes me as hugely insightful and underappreciated. It was submitted several times to HN but saw little discussion:
<https://jakeseliger.com/2024/07/29/more-isnt-always-better-death-and-over-treatment-as-a-downside-of-agenticness/>
Jake's wife, now widow, Bess, blogs at Everything is an Emergency: <https://bessstillman.substack.com>. That also details the cancer / caregiving experience, from the point of view of a wife, caregiver, expectant mother, and emergency-room doctor.
So? People really, really want the prestige that goes with being a doctor. If they could pay for it they would. Physician compensation is heavily weighted towards middle and late career as it is and that hasn’t stopped people beating down the doors to get into medical school. Half the people who currently apply to medical school could look at how crap it is and decide not to and there would still be intense competition.
The below article on how awful medicine and medical school are was written a decade ago and nothing has gotten better. People really like social status.
https://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-nurse-or-physicians-assistant-instead-of-a-doctor-the-underrated-perils-of-medical-school/