cancer awareness.......forever

although the month of october may be over the awareness should never be, therefore, my avatar will remain even though october has come and gone. it remains for those that have passed in my life with cancer, for those that have beaten it and for those still in my life that live with it, with the last group being the most important group to me because they still deal with it on a daily basis, they put on a smile every morning and go meet the world, they put up with us honking at them at a light and say its ok because i have bigger fish to fry, they take classes at college and in speech class tell us of their ordeal, and yes they even advertise here and put up with us guys. they put up the GOOD FIGHT.

and so, to those that put up the good fight i know you dont want extra special treatment, but i do say to you, thank you for giving us your smiles, your warm attention, your everything. keep fighting the good fight.


God Bless &
peace to all

Recent study results examining mummies and very old corpses concluded cancer in the past was exceedingly rare. Now everyone seem to got it. What's up wit dat?

Thank you ATXREFMAN...I agree 100%. Awareness should be all the time, not just one month a year!

Recent study results examining mummies and very old corpses.


emphasis on very old. you know it doesnt take a genious to figure out that back in those very old days, we didnt have preservatives and additives, artificial sugars, fats, and on and on that help conribute to why people get cancer.

also recent studies show that not long ago people spoke proper english, now everyone wants to abuse it. whats wit dat.

ivy chick your very welcome

Amen to that refman......I'm a 28 year cancer survivor myself....EVERY DAY is a gift.

"Medical authorities" in the U.S. know very little about cancer...what causes it or how to reliably treat it.

When I discovered I had cancer five years ago I found that out the hard way, and had to search and travel a lot before I could find anyone who would treat me the way I wished. Now I'm cancer free.

"Authorities" here have no explaination for why tobacco smokers in Korea, Japan [highest smoking rate in the world] and China almost never get lung cancer.

There may be a fundamental link to vitamin D, or the deficiency thereof, as the these countries have a vitamin D rich diet.

Other facts support this, such as the absence of cancer in rural areas in places like India and Italy where people get regular sun exposure compared to their urban relatives who get cancer all the time...

A Harvard Medical School study released last summer concluded that vitamin D deficiency is key in the development of melanoma [skin cancer of the worst kind], and that regular sun exposure to obtain vitamin D may prevent it...the OPPOSITE of what clinicians and Dermatologists have been claiming for decades.

Then there's the possible link to thyroid disease. Hypo-thyroid appears to be endemic in the U.S., and most if not all cancer patients are hypo-thyroid.

There may be a link between flouridated water and chlorinated pool water and thyroid destruction explaining the high cancer rates in places where these are found.

Researchers are just now discovering the myriad of immune defenses which normally kill off cancer cells when they appear. The appearance of cancer cells appears to be one cause, but another cause is the weakening of the immune system which allows the cancers cells to survive and then spread. This might explain why cancer spreads so easily in older people.

Cancer cells love to reproduce, and need a lot of nutrition and energy to do so. They soak up so much glycogen that when CAT scans are given to look for them a glass of sugar water is often given just before the test because it will increase the metabolic rate and temperature of the cancer cells as they feed on the sugar and start reproducing.

Ask your MD clinician or oncologist any of this and he will probably not be aware of much of it. Guys like themselves have their hands full just keeping up with what the other Doctors are doing, and this has mostly do with what the Pharma companies are doing. They spend a great deal of time basically doing variations of the same things and trying to maximize the effectiveness of existing forms of treatment. They just don't have time to investigate what other diciplines in other places are discovering.

"Chemotherapy" can sometimes work [depending on conditions] and is usually based on killing any cells in the body that grow quickly....hence the loss of hair and digestive lining cells....

In the end the best cure might be to identify the root causes...lifestyle changes in the last hundred years, and to boost the body's normal defenses.

Once the malignancy has spread there are few options, depending on what kind of cancer it happens to be. There are dramatic cases though in which stage 4, highly metastacized cancers, have been completely reversed. Dr. Lorraine Day, an MD who had stage four cancer with large tumors all over her body, is an example of someone who was "cured." Her case is all over the internet, and you will have to judge for yourself if her recommendations are wise, although there's no doubt that her case is real.

When I had cancer I went to seven different Doctors and got seven different recommendations, although each Doctor claimed that "his" was "the way we all do things."

That's when I knew I was really in trouble...

Do your own research and don't trust automatically in what any one clinician claims to know. Remember that they don't have as much to lose as you do. Get a lot of different opinions.

THANKYOU atxrefman

+1

Cancer cells love to reproduce, and need a lot of nutrition and energy to do so. They soak up so much glycogen that when CAT scans are given to look for them a glass of sugar water is often given just before the test because it will increase the metabolic rate and temperature of the cancer cells as they feed on the sugar and start reproducing.
Originally Posted by theaustinescorts

*SIGH*

#1, CT/CAT scans do not image based on metabolic activity nor thermal heat signatures. They are based on X-rays.

#2 For cancer, PET scans detect metabolic activity but need a radioactively labeled marker to detect it, typically using 2-deoxyglucose, an isomer of glucose which resists breakdown (glycolysis) and accumulates in cells, usually labeled with radioactive tritium in humans. Alternatively, fluordeoxyglucose can also be used; deoxyglucose labeled with the fluorine-18 isotope.

#3 Glycogen is a polymer starch of glucose. Cells do not burn glycogen directly, it must be converted to glucose first.

#4 CT/CAT scans or MRIs (with the appropriate contrast dyes to improve resolution) given to image or detect metastatic cancer are basically detecting inflammation, i.e., an accumulation of fluid in the afflicted area, though they can detect tumors if the tumors are large enough. However, sometimes the inflammation can be caused by other processes such as injury or infection.

#5 While cancer cells do love to reproduce, and are metabolically more active because of their high rate of division, they are also under constant oxidative stress because their blood supply is poorer than healthy tissues, due to the angiogenesis (growth of new blood vessels) that tumors stimulate being more chaotic and tortured and inefficient. This oxidative stress is part of the reason that they are more susceptible to the effects of chemotherapy than healthy tissue. But ironically, the poorer blood supply also limits their exposure to the chemotherapuetic agents.

Oh, and one more thing, is anybody else struck by the possibility that the reason most people in ancient times didn't die of cancer may have been due to the fact that up till the last two hundred years (thanks to improved public health and sanitation practices combined with advances in biology), most of humanity had a shorter life expectancy overall and died younger of other factors such as infectious diseases like plague, cholera, smallpox, parasites, etc., and that the only people who survived that onslaught had exceptionally robust immune systems that, in turn, also dealt with nascent cancer?

Thanks for your corrections because you are right about the CAT scans and glucose.

I disagree though that cancer isn't a modern phenomenon. Even a few decades ago cancers were considered rare. Among the affluent who often lived well into their 70s and 80s they usually died of an infectious disease, almost never cancer. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and their ilk lived into old age and never had a cancer.

Today most people who live into their 70s have, or have had, cancer.

I don't know why, but as I've said there appears to be two causes. One is the reason why cancerous cells appear so often in the first place. Apparently the body is designed to attack cancer cells when they appear so it's logical to conclude that their appearance has always been normal, but perhaps not as aggressively as today. The second reason is the failure of the myriad of immune systems which would ordinarily kill them off in due course. When cancers spread and large tumors are formed is because something has suppressed these systems.

"Today most people who live into their 70s have, or have had, cancer."

Really!?!? Just where did you pick up that nugget of info? DAPOS!

By now it should be well known to any informed clinician that most people past the age of seventy are highly likely to have an undetected carcinoma of some kind, and that odds of such increase dramatically with age beyond the '70s.

There were several well-publicized studies in the '90s examining bodies of patients who had died of non-cancer causes. In most cases the bodies of those over 70 contained carcinomas which were undetected while the patient was alive but large enough to be observed in post-mortum examination.

As the age of the subjects increased the likelihood of an otherwise undetected carcinoma increased dramatically until by the 85th year over 90 percent of the bodies contained an observable cancer somewhere.

The fact is that all of us have cancer cells occurring rather regularly which are killed off by different immune responses.

Many times cancers live in small amounts in the body for years or decades without being detected or spreading. A friend of mine had a cancer in his chest for fifteen years that was observed but untreated because it never spread, then after his 84th birthday it started spreading quickly and it killed him in seven weeks. He was wealthy and spent $30,000 a month on chemotherapy that was of no use at all.

It is a source of controversy why cancers in recent times appear to be so much more aggressive, and I have stated I find the current theory about vitamin D deficancy to have a lot of circumstantial weight.

Anyone claiming otherwise has a lot to explaining to do given the record of history available to anyone.

Many, many notable figures from history led long-lived lives and few IF ANY are recorded to have died from cancer. Just read any book on say, the lives of the Emperors of Imperial Rome and you will see that many of them lived into their 70s and they are never said to have died from anything looking like cancer. The same is true of the founders of the American republic, or any other group of elderly people from history whose deaths are recorded.

In the nineteenth century cancer was so rare that when a case was seen in teaching hospitals everyone available would run off to see the case presented because such cases were so rare.

Some people have hypothesized that the polio vaccine administered in the early 1960s may be a cause, as many lots were contaminated with viruses that are now believed to be cancer-causing.

Thanks for your corrections because you are right about the CAT scans and glucose.

I disagree though that cancer isn't a modern phenomenon. Even a few decades ago cancers were considered rare. Among the affluent who often lived well into their 70s and 80s they usually died of an infectious disease, almost never cancer. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and their ilk lived into old age and never had a cancer.

Today most people who live into their 70s have, or have had, cancer.

I don't know why, but as I've said there appears to be two causes. One is the reason why cancerous cells appear so often in the first place. Apparently the body is designed to attack cancer cells when they appear so it's logical to conclude that their appearance has always been normal, but perhaps not as aggressively as today. The second reason is the failure of the myriad of immune systems which would ordinarily kill them off in due course. When cancers spread and large tumors are formed is because something has suppressed these systems. Originally Posted by theaustinescorts

Actually, the immune system has greater difficulty in fighting cancer cells than it has in fighting infectious diseases caused by foreign organisms because of the Major Histocompatibility Complex. The Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) is a protein structure on the outer surface of cells as well as immune system cells. If the immune system cells recognize the MHC as being "non-self" then they begin their attack. If they recognize the MHC structure as being "self" they stand down. Cancer cells often still produce valid "self" MHC structures for quite some time and avoid attack by the immune system.

You make the point I made again yourself. That until fairly recently people, including the old, died of infectious disease. For a person to survive until old age their immune system would have necessarily been very efficient in order to survive. Therefore, those with ineffective immune systems would have died younger from infectious diseases, presumably before cancer got to them. Those with more potent immune systems survived infectious diseases and would also be able to control or destroy cancers. As their immune systems grew weak in old age, it was the quicker-acting and more omnipresent infectious disease-causing organisms that killed them before cancer could.

So, I'd say that there's no mystery. What you have is a self-selection bias based on immune system strength and public health improvements that have reduced mortality from infectious diseases (despite all your worries about vaccines) in the people you're thinking about.

Ummm I'm still not convinced.

First, I'm using the term "immune system" very loosely. I mean it to include not only the mechanisms which destroy foreign pathogens which pertain to your commentary, but also all mechanisms which are designed to destroy one's own cells when they are malignant. I think there are several mechanisms which are dedicated to destroying one's own cells when identified as malignant, and the strength of those systems are what I think is believed to be important factors normally suppressing carcinoma where it appears. The host of better-known mechanism which destroy viruses and bacteria are, I believe, very useless in destroying cancerous cells.

I cannot attribute the strength of our ancestors' immunity from foreign pathogens as being co-incident with their abilities to destroy carcenomas. I think it's largely two different systems, although both can be suppressed simultaneously by stressors. My observation remains that although immunity from foreign pathogens may have been stronger among long-lived persons in the past, their suppressive abilities versus cancers were extraordinarily higher versus people today. What interests me is why? Why have systems which normally suppress cancer been weakened? Is it partly because the KINDS of cancers which appear more today are more robust?
I don't know.

Second, what is your explanation as to why such things as lung cancer are rare in places like Japan which have smoking rates higher than the U.S.? I've heard the "genetics" argument before, and it's a nice hypothesis, but it has no empirical evidence to back it up that I'm aware of.