All these arguments are just arm chair discussions by people who have literally zero knowledge or involvement in cancer treatments. The overall 5 year survival rate has increased significantly and for some types it has increased multiple-fold thanks to new drugs. And regardless, even in types with lower success rates the side effects are generally way more manageable than traditional chemotherapy.
If we diagnose earlier, it's expected that the 5Y survival rate improves even if the patient dies at the same age as she would have in the counterfactual.
Sure, that can show up in aggregated statistics. But it used to be that there was no treatment for all sorts of metastatic diseases. Now there are. That's not a function of earlier detection. This isn't made up; we have real RCTs demonstrating this stuff....
The people who don't know what they are talking about (or are maliciously feigning ignorance) are those who look at 5 yr survival without considering the effect of increased surveillance/screening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_time_bias
You have to distinguish between screening detected cancer and symptomatic cancer. 5yr srvl rates say little in the former case but they are relevant for the latter. You'd really prefer having skin cancer today than ten years ago.
Your short exchange of arguments is a good example of what goes wrong in the public discussion.
I don't understand what you mean by "detected cancer" and "symptomatic cancer". Eg if a cancer is already detected then by definition it is impossible to screen for it.
I see, it should have been written "screening-detected" to be as clear as possible.
Yes, the latter is more likely to be comparable over time but it will still have issues with changes in how likely someone is to report it to their doctor, etc.
Look, just because a bias exists doesn't mean that it explains every single bit of improvement. We have randomized controlled trials showing that these drugs work.
