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Comment by chrisamiller | Hacker News Reader

Maybe your car hasn't changed, but your cancer care sure as hell has. The medical and biological sciences are where a lot of innovation has taken place, and the pace of technological advancement in things like DNA sequencing (as one example) is breathtaking.

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> Maybe your car hasn't changed, but your cancer care sure as hell has.

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics

> 1.8% per year among men from 2001 to 2017

Is that the rate you expect?

People are living longer and age is a dominant risk factor for cancer. In a world where cancer care wasn't improving, we'd expect to see massive increases in deaths due to cancer. What's also not captured by that number are the years of life after cancer diagnosis, which for many cancers has gone up dramatically. It's a tough problem, but the curves are bending in the right direction.

If you want a more punctuated example, how about gene therapy, which is doing things like restoring (partial) vision to the blind. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-gene-therapy-p... Early days still, but we've laid the foundation for a really exciting next decade or so in genomic medicine.

By the miracle of compounding that's a 33% improvement in 16 years.

Nope.

Same disease that would've killed my friend 30 years ago would kill him today, with the same treatments being used as had been available another 30 years before that, based on WWI chemical warfare.

Healthcare's shining decade was the teens.

The 1910s.

Largely based on public health measures. Much as today.

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