Cancer is a process

The cancer process can be a lengthy one. It can last for many years until the final point, the discovery of a tumor, is reached.

Since no one is in absolutely perfect and total health right down to the cellular level, everyone can be considered to be in Phase 1 - or, to put it another way, in the precancerous phase. It may seem strange to imply that if you do not have cancer, you are in a precancerous stage. Current figures as to the risk of developing cancer vary, depending on the source, from one in two men and one in three women, or approximately 40 percent, and up to as high as 70 percent for people born now. Taking the average, you have a fifty-fifty chance of developing cancer. These are not great odds. When deaths are aggregated by age, cancer has surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death for those younger than age eighty-five since 1999. This being so, it behooves you to do as much as you possibly can to avoid cancer and to stop yourself from becoming one of the side of overcaution than to put your head in the sand and simply hope that cancer will never happen to you.

           

You may be in reasonable health; you may even think of yourself as being totally healthy. Or you may have a variety of health problems, many or all of which may be predisposing you to developing cancer healthy cells into cancerous ones.

The evolution of health care - Part 1

It is interesting to consider a very brief and simplified overview of the way health care has evolved through the millennia. In ancient times it was the wise men of the tribe, the witch doctors, who provided the ancient wisdoms and had the most dramatic effects on the health of the tribe. They healed the body and the spirit, often in dramatic ways. However, it was the women, working away quietly in the background, who came to understand the benefits of different foods, herbs, and other plant and animal substances, as well as remedies in the treatment of day-to-day health problems. Over the centuries the witch doctors evolved and subdivided into the church leaders on the one hand and the medical or drug doctors on the other, the latter being deemed, rightly or wrongly, to involve technical, scientific, and appropriate activities for men and to be worthy of respect. The women's role with nutrition and herbs evolved into nutrition and domestic science on the one hand, and health care using natural remedies on the other; both were considered 'soft' subjects, suitable, in a politically incorrect age of macho superiority, for women. This in part explains the placing of drug medicine in the universities and the CAM therapies on the outer edge in collages that are only gradually becoming recognized within the educational system.

The evolution of health care - Part 2

What is MDS approach?

In the MDS approach, cancer is identified by the presence of a tumor, as in the case of blood cancers or early cervical cancer, by the presence of transformed, altered, or faulty cells. It is a localized problem, residing in the tissue in which the tumor or altered cells are found. In this approach the treatment is aimed almost totally at eradicating these cells or destroying the tumor. Once the tumor has been removed, or if it is thought that all the cells have been destroyed, or if the surgeon 'got it all' the problem is deemed largely to have been solved. Little thought is given to the reasons why it started and, therefore, to how a recurrence can be prevented.