Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Is the rising incidence of cancer a sign that our society is toxic?

The following exchange took place on the peakoil.com forum... while I participated in the discussion, a post by a participant called MarkR was so good that I had to include it here. The quoted text is from an environmentalist. The text in italics is MarkR.

Quote:

In the US today a third of the population will get cancer and die of it or its complications. Heart attack and stroke will get most of the rest. Diabetes and other degenerative diseases will clean up the survivors. This was unhead of one hundred years ago. Cancer was very rare, as were all these complaints. These are lifestyle diseases in pandemic proportions. There are many today who believe that these are essentially a deficency disease exacerbated by the toxic chemical environment that people live in these days.


This reasoning is utter nonsense.

Cancer (and to some extent cardiovascular disesases like heart attack and stroke) are primarily diseases of old age.

There are multiple reasons why cancer was not as commonly diagnosed in the 19th century.
The primary reason is that the population nowadays is much older than it was then. Life expectancy these days is approx 75 years, compared with 38 years in 1850. The vast majority of cancers occur in the over 60s - if people don't live into their 60s there aren't going to be many cases of cancer.
The second is that there was less access to medical care, and many people died without seeing a doctor - death certificates were often completed by the relatives, who would write whatever they thought was the cause of death.
The third is that standards of diagnosis were much less good, and many diseases that we now recognise today were not individually recognised, or were thought to be something different.

For similar reasons heart disease and stroke were less common, because they too are diseases of old age. Again, heart attack is uncommon in the under 50s, and stroke in the under 60s.

Quote:

Nor has there ever been a study that has conclusively proved that any of the treatments for cancer actually cured anyone. It may well be that the higher survival rate for cancer sufferers, if that is indeed the case, has been caused by alternative medicine of which improved diet is a pillar.


This is also complete nonsense.

There are many cancers which are completely curable and there are hundreds of high quality studies which demonstrate, beyond doubt, the modern treatments that achieve these cures.

Some do not need drugs - e.g. early Breast cancer (called DCIS stage) is 100% curable with a mastectomy operation (or, if prefered minor surgery and chemotherapy).

Some type of blood cancers, e.g. Hodgkin's disease are curable in about 90% of cases with chemotherapy. Childhood leukaemias are curable in about 90% of cases. Some types of testicular cancers, are curable in about 90%. Choriocarcinoma, a type of cancer of the womb is curable by chemotherapy in about 95% of cases. 50 years ago, before these drugs were developed - all these diseases were invariably fatal.

For other cancers cure rates aren't as good, but they have improved dramatically over the last 50 years, with improved chemotherapy and surgery regimes.

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