Cancer is perhaps the most frightening of all diseases we face. And the thing is, it's very often entirely preventable. If we simply made some different decisions, earlier, many cancers would never happen.
That sounds like an audacious statement. Cancer after all, comes "out of the blue" -- we report that it happened "suddenly," that it came "without warning." It is the proverbial bolt of lightning that changes our lives all in one strike. How could we prevent lightning?
But in fact, a newly emerging consensus holds that 90 percent of cancers are rooted in environmental or behavioral causes. That means we have a much larger window for rooting out cancer early -- and what's more, a much wider opportunity to head it off before it ever comes close. The lever for opportunity, though, is us -- we need to act.
When you think about it, that makes absolute sense. Consider smoking, which remains the leading cause of cancer in the US. If every smoker quit right now, today, it'd reduce the number of deaths by 440,000, and the number of cancer cases by about 200,000.
Presto! You've just prevented cancer in 25 to 30 percent of the cases in this country. (Of course that's just a pipe dream, so to speak, but you get the idea.)
And there are more examples. Look at the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths: colon cancer. Simple screening strategies such as colonoscopies and fecal blood tests already turn up nearly 150,000 cases of colon cancers early. Greater diligence could turn up tens of thousands more cases (The US Preventive Service Task Force has specific recommendations for colon cancer screening here). This is preventive medicine in action, saving thousands of lives. Same thing with cervical cancer, where another easy test -- the Pap smear -- has saved thousands of lives.
Of course, screening tests aren't a panacea. Recent news on PSA tests for prostate cancer and mammography for breast cancer demonstrates that screening is only effective when it's deployed judiciously and selectively.
But preventing cancer doesn't always mean taking a test. It can mean much simpler things: like changing our diet. In fact, a brilliant 2008 paper from researchers at the esteemed M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston simply and clearly explains how 30 to 35 percent of all cancer-related deaths are linked to diet (even more than are related to smoking). This includes alcohol consumption, which has been linked to many forms of cancer. And the researchers explain, preventing cancer can mean other seemingly simple actions, like getting less sun. That alone would dramatically cut down on non-melanoma skin cancers, the most common form of cancer, with nearly a million cases a year. As many as 50 percent of Americans who live to age 65 will develop a skin cancer, nearly all of whom could have avoided it had they stayed out of the sun more frequently.
And yes, other environmental factors play a role as well -- exposures to chemicals and radiation are estimated to cause as many as 15 cases of cancer deaths. Reducing the amount of chemicals we're exposed to, and reducing the frequency of radiation we're dosed with via CT scans and other radiography, could significantly decrease many cancers.
But what about genetics? What about the cancers that are directly attributable to our DNA? Well, that's less than 10 percent of cases. That's not to say our genes don't increase our risks for many forms of cancer, but cancers that are essentially caused by genetic factors are few and far between. In most cases, it's the interplay between genes and environment and behavior -- leaving us all sorts of room for evasive action.
As the M.D. Anderson researchers put it: "Cancer is a preventable disease that requires major lifestyle changes....Genes are absolutely not our fate."
So what to make of this? On the one hand, practically speaking, few of us are going to upend our lives and make major lifestyle changes. Are we really going to radically change our diets (no meat, no wine)? Are we really going to swath on sunscreen every time we step outside? Probably not. But on the other hand, this evidence shows that we have all sorts of opportunities in our lives to act -- that we are agents in our lives, not passive actors. We have some control. Our actions have consequences -- and conversely, that means we can also take action.
The truth about cancer is that it's something we have some influence over. But in order to take advantage of that fact, we'll need to act far earlier than we do today. We need to be thinking of the long-term ramifications of our actions.
In many respects, this news should be a source of empowerment. It should gird us for action. It should steel us to take on cancer like we've taken on heart disease -- the number one killer in the US (cancer is the steady number two). After all, we already talk about heart disease in terms of risk, and reducing risk. We take huge amounts of baby aspirin and statins in order to reduce that risk. And it's worked: deaths from heart disease have dropped steeply over the last few decades.
But for some reason, when faced with the same options for cancer, we don't really do much of anything. We don't treat cancer like a preventable disease. And as a result, cancer deaths have stayed pretty much flat. Screening rates are typically low, and effective treatments for prevention are underused. A recent study looked at the drug tamoxofin -- a drug that's proven to cut the risk of breast cancer in half for women at high risk. Alarmingly, though, the study found that an "exceptionally low" number of eligible women actually took the drug. For whatever reason, they weren't compelled to make the smart choice, a choice that could save their lives.
We need to change the way we think about cancer, and we need to change the way we talk about cancer. For too long the conversation -- among scientists, politicians, and the media -- has focused on the idea of a "war" on the disease, spending billions of dollars to find a cure (which, in case you haven't heard, we still don't have). It's been all about end-stage treatments and too little about preventive action.
We need to talk about cancer like we do heart disease. Dr. David Casserett wrote on HuffPost Living recently about how we talk about cancer in the wrong way. We need to change the dialogue. We need to make a few things clear about this disease. We all have a risk. But we can all, likewise, take actions that reduce our risk.
The war on cancer begins at home -- your home and mine.
Thomas Goetz is the executive editor at Wired Magazine and author of the new book The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Our Health In the New Era of Personalized Medicine.
Follow Thomas Goetz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tgoetz
Thomas Goetz: Is Your DNA Dangerous to Your Health?
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Cancer prevention: 7 steps to reduce your risk - MayoClinic.com
The USA public has been so indoctrinated, they are technically, scientifically and intellectually ignorant. Hence why our literacy rates continue to plummet while the EU, Japan and China continue to soar. The rule here, USA: teach them how to buy and mystify as much as possible so the public can only turn to "experts."
If we spent 1/4 of what we spend on medicine on making our foods healthy and nutritious cancer would disappear. Yes, disappear. And we would know: we are the cancer clinical trials people.
One last point: those nutritional labels you think tell you what is in the foods you purchase were made 20-30 years ago and never updated. Software programs calculate the nutrition based on fictitious values analyzed in the 1960s and 1970s: no one checks today, except us. And we are telling you that it is not a surprise to us that cancer, ADD/autism/immune diseases are proliferating. And they will as long as money means more than your life to your politicians, business-people and all those who contribute to all of the above.
Good Luck.
people can read "The Secret History of the War on Cancer" for a good hard look at the duplicity of corporations
my dream: truly healthy fast foods made with no industrial products; til then I'll keep cooking
One other point raised in the discussion bears addressing: new research shows that in breast cancer at least "detected early" does not necessarily equal "more easily cured." Some cancers are simply more aggressive than others and the variance is quite extreme.
Don't get me wrong: I'd LIKE to have lots of control over my life and health and that of my family. I want to encourage people to take greater responsibility. But with HONEST discussion. Certainly not by blaming the victims. I blogged about this over a year ago at eveharris dot net.
When she was first diagnosed 6 months ago, the doctors told her that kidney cancer with metastases was "typically a disease of 50 year old men who smoke".
She has never smoked, no one in her entourage has ever smoked. She doesn't drink. She is an intellectual who always devoted her free time to reading. Oh yeah, she likes chocolate. Could reading and chocolate cause cancer? Otherwise, it's sort of hard to figure out the environmental factors - she's only 25.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15927426?dopt=Abstract
The gene called MTDH (short for metadherin) but also known as 3D3, AEG-1, AEG1, LYRIC affects cells susceptibility to glutamate excitotoxicity. This gene is involved in the mestastasis of breast cancer, malignant gliomas, and melanomas. Currently, excessive glutamate neurotoxicity due to MTDH, is believed to cause HIV dementia.
Your friend may want to avoid foods with MSG and HVP in them - like vegan -soy products and many of the ones recalled lately that have HVP in them, instead of chocolate.
Simple ibuprofen (Advil) is a glutamate blocker and that may be a reason it was found helpful in preventing breast cancer.
http://www.thelantern.com/2.1345/osu-researcher-ibuprofen-prevents-cancer-1.88228
Now, if folks would only put two and two together and stop EATING free glutamate instead of just trying to block it.
Using detoxifying herbs on a regular schedule can help though.
We have brought this on ourselves.
How can you this not be mentioned?
Vitamin D deficiency has a higher all cause mortality than smoking ever did.
Vitamin D is THE cancer issue rigth now.
Want to reduce your chances of all cancers by at least 50%?
Take your vitamin D!
Only a Naturopathic Doctor will do this.
http://www.naturalnews.com/heavy_metals.html
Also you can test your own PH by putting saliva on litmus paper the very first thing in the morning upon awakening.
You are aware that allopathic medicine only treats the symptoms of cancer. It is symptomatic supression therapy. If you press them on this they will have to admit it but they won't want to.
They may even get agitated.
Best of fortune
There is actually a school of thought now that we've over sunscreened ourselves to the point where we are putting ourselves at risks for other cancers. So while we may have reduced our risk of melanoma, we may actually be increasing our risk for other, more deadly cancers (not to say melanoma is not also fatal at times - I lost a young friend to it years ago).
The point of my post is simply that it's not quite as simply as outlined above. My family had 6 cancers between 4 of us, and yet, all 6 cancers were completely different, and not related to one another. There is clearly something not quite working at a cellular level that might require more armor than healthy living and early screening.
These chemicals, along with the increasing number of other 'environmental' exposures (think about how many foods or food products are sold in PLASTIC containers, as opposed to the glass that was used 50 years ago), may indeed explain a huge percentage of the increase in cancers and other diseases.
But I agree, people rely way too much on sunscreen. I always wear long sleeves and pants, those super-thin bought in sport stores that are perfect for hot conditions. I remember an article on Yahoo that talked about reapplying sunscreen everytime you wipe yourself with a towel. There are many factors, but people usually mention the rise of the use of plastics. Either it could be wiping off the sunscreen with your towel and then people still believe they're protected, chemicals leeching into the food from the plastics (but apparently it takes a long time for this to happen) and there's also another reason people rarely think about: increase in protein consumption since the world got richer. Protein causes toxicity that can lead to cancer. So while everyone is blaming chemicals, protein could be the cause. It even makes blood acidic and then body will defend by taking calcium to neutralize it, so not even milk can prevent osteoporosis.
Our bodies generate cancer dells every day of our lives. A healthy immune system prevents these mutant cells from proliferating. When the body falls out of homeostasis the immune system is compromised and can no longer function at full effeciency. Restoring that balance is crucial to survival.
Toxins are a big one. Blood and tissue cleansing can be a life saver. Keeping the body's PH slightly alkaline is important as cancer cells do very poorly in an alkaline environmant. A diet with lots of raw organic vegetables and very little meat (organic) is one of the best ways to maintain PH.
I had a skin cancer that I cured primarily with diet and cleansing. The cancer fell off and the skin underneath was perfectly healthy. There is no mark left. My wife had 'terminal brain cancer' stage 4, they gave her 7 years to live if they used radiation, that was 20 years ago and we used only herbs and homeopathy. Doctors,neurosuegeons told us were were crazy to use holistic methods.
BTW, there is a recent study out that shows statistically that any amount of alcohol increases a womans chances of getting cancer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/24/alcohol-cancer-risk-drinking
Sunscreen chemicals can have strong estrogenic actions and increase free radical production.Getting sun in moderation seems a much more balanced approach.
http://www.skinbiology.com/toxicsunscreens.html
Most people I know who have gotten cancer are lean, fit, healthy and have no family history of cancer. The disease was rare in previous generations; it certainly did not strike young people at the rates it does today. My grandparents and great grandparents all smoked -- and they all lived into their 80s and 90s.
The obvious missing link is the environment (everyday toxins in our air, water, homes). It is sad that the medical community still fails to make the connection. I would bet 75% of cancers today can be attributed to environmental pollutants.
Heck, I like asparagus anyway, and what harm can it do? Worth a try!
We should all be eating more raw fruits, vegetables and whole grains too.