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Two graphs, one more encouraging than the other


The first one is from The End of Illness by David Agus. The second is from Anticancer, by David Servan-Schreiber, and it shows the graph that Stephen Jay Gould was looking at when he was diagnosed with mesothelioma. From Anticancer:
In nature, the median is an abstraction, a “law” that the human mind tries to impose on the diverse profusion of individual cases. To the individual Gould, distinct from all other individuals, the question was where he was located in the range of variations surrounding the median. […] Even if the median was only eight months, at the end of the tail a small number of people survived for years with this disease. Gould didn’t see any reason why he too could not be found at the end of that long tail, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
-Niko