Cancer Treatment, Limiting Factor In Rising Survival
8922
Disease & Illness > Cancer
Mar 1, 2007
Trenton Martkes
Cancer Treatment, Limiting Factor In Rising Survival
The average length of life now is somewhere around 75 years right? Which is crazy when you consider the dramatic increase that this number represents in the amount of knowledge and technology that medicine has experienced in the last 30 years. The problem is that we get people to live longer and we find out the next major factor that is limiting the length of our life. At this moment that limiting factor is cancer and our lack of definitive cancer treatment.
It isn't that we don't understand cancer very well--because we do. We know that it goes back to errors that occur in our DNA in one cell most of the time that enable that cell to break out of the normal and healthy limitations of growth and connectivity to other cells. This rogue cell than goes and reeks havoc by invading areas critical to life and destroying them by disrupting the form and therefore the function of whatever organ they have invaded. It also isn't that we don't have any knowledge of cancer treatment -- because we do. We have drugs that will go in and (as selectively as possible) take out the cells that can't otherwise be controlled. We also use physics to our best ability with radiological oncology and gamma knife surgeries. We now can find cancer much sooner and treat it more definitively.
The problem is that cancer is bigger than we can handle right now and is able to evade human's abilities to control it. We can't cure the most aggressive forms, we can't detect the most subtle cases, and our cancer treatment is much much too crude. The treatments are necessarily toxic to the cancer but we haven't gotten good at making it selective so that the body doesn't take a serious hit. Maybe the largest part of cancer treatment that we fail on is prevention.
We as American?s and as humans more generally have a lot of bad habits and have set up our world to rely on too many things that are extremely hazardous to the environment and to our health. We smoke too much while knowing full well that it is assaulting our lungs, we eat too much fat knowing that it gives us cancer of the colon and the breast, we work and live in air that we have made toxic to breathe, etc. Yes we are really our own limiting factor, not cancer, not our lack of good cancer treatment. I wonder if we will ever wake up and stop blaming doctors for not being good enough and start to take responsibility for our actions.
It isn't that we don't understand cancer very well--because we do. We know that it goes back to errors that occur in our DNA in one cell most of the time that enable that cell to break out of the normal and healthy limitations of growth and connectivity to other cells. This rogue cell than goes and reeks havoc by invading areas critical to life and destroying them by disrupting the form and therefore the function of whatever organ they have invaded. It also isn't that we don't have any knowledge of cancer treatment -- because we do. We have drugs that will go in and (as selectively as possible) take out the cells that can't otherwise be controlled. We also use physics to our best ability with radiological oncology and gamma knife surgeries. We now can find cancer much sooner and treat it more definitively.
The problem is that cancer is bigger than we can handle right now and is able to evade human's abilities to control it. We can't cure the most aggressive forms, we can't detect the most subtle cases, and our cancer treatment is much much too crude. The treatments are necessarily toxic to the cancer but we haven't gotten good at making it selective so that the body doesn't take a serious hit. Maybe the largest part of cancer treatment that we fail on is prevention.
We as American?s and as humans more generally have a lot of bad habits and have set up our world to rely on too many things that are extremely hazardous to the environment and to our health. We smoke too much while knowing full well that it is assaulting our lungs, we eat too much fat knowing that it gives us cancer of the colon and the breast, we work and live in air that we have made toxic to breathe, etc. Yes we are really our own limiting factor, not cancer, not our lack of good cancer treatment. I wonder if we will ever wake up and stop blaming doctors for not being good enough and start to take responsibility for our actions.
Content Provider: http://www.traffichelp4u.com
Trained in public health and a cancer survivor himself, Trenton Martkes is committed to do everything that he can to educate the public about cancer treatment options. To learn more take a look at www.cancertreatmenthelp.info
Write a Review
Add to My Favorite
Refer it to Friend
Report Article
Other links owned by this user
The average length of life now is somewhere around 75 years right? Which is crazy when you consider the dramatic increase that this number represents in the amount of knowledge and technology that medicine has experienced in the last 30 years. The
Category:
Have you heard of the saying "you get what you pay for"? Have you also heard about all of the ruckus that went on over the sites that allowed people to share files for free? Well if so, or even if not, I don't blame you for being incredulous when you
Category:
Other links at Disease & Illness > Cancer
But aside from surgery, there are also many other choices of breast cancer treatment including, chemotherapy - a frequent course of intravenous drugs used to stop the growth of the cancer; radiation - using pinpoint radiation therapy to kill cancer cells;
Category:
Now more than ever women and men are taking part in the Avon Breast Cancer Walk fundraising campaign. This walk has been specifically set up to raise money to help in the fight against breast cancer.
Category:
The main function of our lung is to exchange the gases between the air we breathe and our blood. It is not widely known that the two sides of our lung are not identical to each other. The right lung has three lobes, whereas the left lung has two lobes, an
Category:
Site Sponsor
Directory Statistics
Articles: 68285
Categories: 501
Yahoo Entertainment
