Myths and Facts Surrounding Cancer

In my previous columns, I listed some of the key questions I believe you owe it to yourself to ask before even contemplating, let alone pursuing, the use of alternative treatments. These are tough questions, but whereas many alternative practitioners rely on anecdote to back up their claims, any successful medical specialists would be willing to provide you with evidence and, if need be, with documentation to support their opinion. When your life is on the line, you need the odds to be stacked in your favor, not against you.
Because cancer affects so many more people than some of the other serious illnesses, it might be useful to consider some of the myths and facts surrounding this still much-feared illness.

The Myths

1. If you don't get cancer, you'll live to a ripe old age.
2. Cancer is always fatal.
3. Cancer is always exhausting.
4. No one ever fully recovers from cancer.
5. Cancer is catching.
6. If a tumor is exposed to air it will spread.
7. Death from cancer is always painful.
8. Cancer always destroys your quality of life.
9. People with cancer look different.
10. You are to blame for your disease.

The Facts

1. Medical treatments often cause significant side effects and varying degrees of discomfort, but these are relatively minor when compared to the often uncontrollable, unpleasant, painful and life-threatening effects of alternative or no treatment.
2. Most cancers detected at an early stage are potentially curable. Medical testing procedures have enabled doctors to detect many cancers early enough for them to be successfully treated.
3. There is no type of cancer from which no one has recovered.
4. Many more cancers are treatable today than they were even ten years ago.
5. Cancer is the most curable of all chronic diseases. Over half the people treated with conventional medicine will still be alive five years after their diagnosis.
6. Nearly half the people treated for cancer never requires any further treatment; some cancers are easy to cure, some are not.
7. Many people live with cancer in the same way others live with diabetes. In my own case, I injected myself with interferon three times a week for almost four years before I found the drug that wiped out the last traces of my leukemia in one blow.
8. The side effects of most treatments can be controlled or treated.
9. Your doctor can offer you proven and documented evidence from around the world about the successes and failures of conventional medical treatments. If statistics exist for alternative treatments, they are unpublished, unverified and unproven.

Medicine has made some spectacular gains over the past 70 years, yet in the world's richer countries one person in three will develop cancer and about one in four will die of it; in the USA one in three people will be diagnosed with cancer, and one in five will die from it. According to the World Health Organisation, about one-half of all cancers occur in the most industrialised one-fifth of the world's population. The incidence of most diseases is on the decline, yet cancer is still on the increase and is, after coronary artery diseases, the second most common cause of death in most First World countries. On present trends, cancer will surpass heart disease as the number one cause of death in the twenty-first century. It some countries, it already has.

These facts need to be viewed in the light of the World Health Organisation Report, 1997, "Conquering Suffering, Enriching Humanity," which states that "dramatic increases in life expectancy, combined with profound changes in lifestyles, will lead to global epidemics of cancer and other chronic diseases in the next two decades." The report confirms that the incidence of cancer will increase in direct proportion to the increased life expectancy of the population. The older you get, the more likely you are to get cancer or some other degenerative disease. We cannot avoid the ageing process. However, with the help of modern medicine we can improve our quality of life while we are still alive.

If you have any health or illness related questions you would like me to answer, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below. My answers to your questions will be posted on our blog and it is my sincere hope these will be helpful to you.

In light and peace

Joel