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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

No. Everything about that article is infuriating. We are fighting an enemy. Again and again we lose. The patient loses, the care team loses, the doctors lose, the family loses, the whole of humanity loses.

You have to believe you can win to continue to fight and you do have to fight quite literally with family, with friends, with yourself. But more generally we as a society have to be able to recognize an enemy and a battle when we see one. To remove, hide, obscure, or soften this language would be an insult to all those who have fought and lost in any capacity against this monster.

We fight, we lose, we die, repeat ... until we don't.

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I think, holistically, you are correct. Technology and science should advance. Individually, though, the fight can quite literally be all but over. This is not pessimistic or fatalistic, but very real.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. We as individuals get to choose what that means, though :)

Even in death, a patient that exhausts every option can provide medical data for future treatments. Their struggle is not futile just because they died.

And I don't believe we can ever be sure that the odds of death are 100%. Where there's life, there's always hope.

I'm not sure winning/losing and 'enemy' are the right terms to use. I fully agree that all resources should be mobilized towards making terminal illnesses like cancer a thing of the past, but a term like 'enemy' can give a misleading impression of what cancer is. It is not the presence of a consciously malevant force. It is the inability of the body to maintain proper function amidst the chaos of change. Having the correct conceptual framework is important for solving the problem.

Fighting implies you died because you didn't fight hard enough.

No, it doesn't. There are fights (both literal and metaphorical, hence this is not a problem with the metaphor) you cannot win no matter how hard you fight because you are outmatched by too much for more effort to overcome.

Indeed. I wrote an elaborate reply before seeing your comment. I think you made a good job of summarizing by beef with that article.

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