A New view of Cancer Epidemiology

A fundamental flaw of medical statistics spreads confusion in medicine. Medical statistics  apply machine statistics to describe medical phenomena. Medical statistics interprets cancer survival as a machine survival.  A random process with a constant hazard rate. Yet cancer hazard rate is neither constant nor random. Nevertheless medical statistics ignore it and apply methods of reliability theory of machines to describe breast cancer. What does it mean?  When a machine ages it disintegrates  randomly and this process is described by these survival  curves. This is how medical statistics describe  cancer. A random decay with a constant hazard rate.

Medical statistics are supported by the current dogma according to which cancer is an ongoing breakdown of the human machine. Tumor starts when a gene fails (mutates).  It then encroaches on a helpless and indolent host. Its Darwinian progression as well as and the human decay are random. The non random hazard rate known also a Bi-Modal Hazard (BMH) undermines the validity of the dogma. Tumor does not encroach on a helpless host. All along tumor progression host resists the tumor which is manifested by BMH. In other presentations I show the relationship between BMH and tumor growth rate.

While current dogma regards cancer and tumor as synonyms, they are not. Cancer is an interaction between host and tumor. It takes two to tango. Stated mathematically, while cancer is a two dimensional phenomenon. Current epidemiology ignores the second dimension (host), and applies one dimensional machine statistics to explain cancer. 

This missing dimension is explained in  several presentations of this site. This introduction provides an overview of the main ideas:
1. Derivation of survival from tumor growth
2. Epidemiological manifestation of tumor dormancy.