Cancer Treatment Centers Commercial
The Cancer Treatment Centers of America sound like a wonderful place to go when you have cancer. I’m sure that everything they claim in their commercials is true and bless them for being there when people who have cancer have lost hope and confidence in their prognosis. The commercials have me convinced that if I ever get cancer that is the place I want to go for treatment. So why this post?
This post has to do with one commercial in particular that just strikes me the wrong way. It’s just a small thing but every time they run it, it makes me feel like there’s an itch I just can’t stratch. The commercial stars a woman called Peggy who describes how she found out she had cancer from her doctor. He told her nothing could be done and that she had two months to live. In the commercial, Peggy starts to choke up and cry. A perfectly natural and understandable reaction to being told you would be dead in two months time.
Then while Peggy is at home dying, her sister calls the Cancer Treatment Centers of America and they test, and treat her and offer her hope for a long life. Peggy decribes how the doctors here tell her that she has no expiration date stamped on the bottom of her foot, and how the tumors are gone and she’s in remission. After this miraculous new lease of life, Peggy says “I thought, oh”. Oh? They just told her the cancer that was killing her is gone and all she can say is oh?
Like I said it’s just a little thing but if I were Peggy I’d be yelling ” WOO HOO! YEAH, I’M GOING TO LIVE, WOOO!!!
” I thought oh” Oh, well.
Why We Shouldn’t Detect Cancer Early
I am reading this article from the New York Times and I am blown away by what I’m seeing. I always was told and believed that detecting cancer early was a good thing so that treatment could be given before the cancer becomes so advanced as to metastasize and kill its victim.
Unless I am not understanding correctly, this article seems to be saying that some doctors and a government committee feel that some cancers can live and grow in the body, but if you are older you will probably die of something else before the cancer really becomes a health concern for you.
It further seems to say that by detecting it early you would undergo treatments that would prove to be unnecessary because you’re going to die soon anyway. WHAT?
I don’t know about anyone else but I do not want cancerous tumors anywhere in my body whether they are causing me pain or not. These doctors seem to be saying that they are affecting the quality of life by treating and testing the cancer, rather than the cancer affecting the quality of life.
Of course I have to ask once again where do the insurance companies and money fit in to all this. After all look at how much can be saved if we just all forget about testing high risk groups of people for cancer, and even more money can be saved by ignoring it and not offering treatment.
Honestly, sometimes I feel like I woke up on the wrong planet. See the whole article here and throw me a comment, I’d love to know what you think about all this.
Survival of Cancer Depends On Where You Live
A new study has revealed that your surviving cancer has a lot to do with where you live and what color you are. This is all about how accessible health care is and how effective your health services are where you live.
The Concord Studied viewed data on over 1.9 million patients with cancer in 31 different countries. They compared survival rates over a five year period of people with prostate, breast, rectal, and colon cancers.
It turns out if you have breast or prostate cancer, the United States is where you want to be, but men with rectal and colon cancers do way better in Japan. Woman with the same cancers may want to move to France.
Australia and Canada have high survival rates for all, and the lowest belongs to Algeria.
Within the United States, New York City had the lowest survival for all cancers, except for Wyoming where a woman with rectal cancer does worse than all. If you’re in the United States and you have cancer Hawaii is the best place to be. The highest rate for survival of prostate cancer is Seattle, and Idaho is no couch potato having a very high survival rate for rectal cancer.
White people in the United States survive at a rate of 7% higher for prostate cancer and 14% higher for breast cancer. Researchers believe this results from early vs. latter stage diagnosis.
The countries with the worst cancer survival rates were Poland and Slovakia. France ranked highest for colon and rectal cancer survival, while Sweden had the highest for breast cancer. Austria had the highest survival rate for prostate cancer.
Overall the United States had a 10% higher survival rating with breast cancer then did Europe, and a 34% higher rate of prostate cancer.
It’s hoped that this information will help countries and areas to find where they are lacking and fill in those gaps.
New Study Reveals That…
Mark Purdue from the National Cancer Institute discovered from government data on white men and woman from the ages of 15 to 39 that between the years of 1980 and 2004, yearly cases of melanoma increased in the young woman only, by about 50%. The numbers went from 9.4 cases to 13.9 cases per 100,000.
They also determined that the melanomas themselves were thicker and tended to be metastic which means it easily spreads to other parts of the body. Once a cancer does that it’s extremely difficult to treat or cure.
Young men did not show an increase in the skin cancer. The researchers right now don’t have an answer for why this occurred other than the suspicion that young woman do more sunbathing to get summer tans and also frequent tanning booths which are both risks for the deadly cancer.
Gardasil, Safe Or Not?
The makers of Gardasil have been pushing this product heavily since it hit the market a couple years ago. Gardasil is the vaccine that we are supposed to be giving our daughters as young as age 9, to prevent the virus that causes one type of cervix cancer. We’ve all seen the commercials drumming the term “one less” into our heads. Now, reports are coming out that say over 8000 girls have developed serious side effects. These include warts, rashes, seizures, and paralysis, some of which are permanent.
I have had serious misgivings about this vaccine since it came out. It only prevents one type of cancer as I understand it and I wondered why the heavy push to give it to young girls and not older women. I did not encourage my daughter to get it as I felt a new drug needs some time in use before we can know fully whether it’s safe or not.
The drug company Merck of course, says it’s safe and effective and that the side effects are minimal. You have to understand that the few thousand who are really hurt by the product, to the drug company, are so small a number that they are almost considered just to be acceptable damage. The thing is that even if it only harms one in a billion, who wants to be that one?
Protect Your Skin From The Sun
We’ve all been told for the past thirty years or so that the sun can be very damaging to our skin. Most of us have heeded those warnings and have stopped laying in the sun to get our tans. We use sunblocks when we go outside and believe what ever the label on the bottle says, but how do we know we are really being protected from those harmful rays?
A non-profit organization called the Environmental Working Group investigated almost one thousand sunscreens and has concluded that four out of five do not protect as they claim and even may contain some unsafe chemicals.
Go to the Skin Deep site to see a list of the sunscreens and how they were rated for protection and safety. Your skin will be glad you did!
I have noticed for the last ten or so years that sunlight feels different to me than I remember from my youth. It could be because I’m getting older, or maybe I’m just noticing it more. Whatever the reason it seems that when the sunlight is hitting me it burns. It’s not a nice warm feeling and it’s not just hot. It burns and when I’m driving a few miles in the car and the sun is shining in on half my body I can feel it burning through my shirt to a point that it becomes painful. I don’t remember it causing pain so I’m wondering if there isn’t another reason it hurts so much these days. Anyone else experience this, or is it just me?
Mom Charged With Withholding Sons Chemotherapy
So once again we have a case where a parent plays Russian roulette with her child’s life. A little boy has non hodgkins lymphoma which the doctor say is highly curable. He get treated and goes into remission, however he must still continue chemo for up to a year after that to make sure the cancer won’t return and is completely gone.
This poor child’s parents are not together and the boy was in moms custody. After the doctor found out that mom had not been picking up the chemo from the pharmacy, he called the father to tell him the boy was sick again and in the hospital. The father had no idea what was going on and the mom was arrested and charged.
Dad has the boy now and says he is very ill and only has a 10% chance of making it.
I don’t even know where to begin with this story. Why would a mother do that to her own child? I realize that chemo is very difficult especially for a child, but if it’s a choice between her child dying and feeling ill for a while, I’ll take the ill child. What a shame.
Masturbation and Prostate Cancer
I know this sounds weird but once I explain it really will make sense.
They have just completed a study in Canada and have found that men who masturbate at least five times a week or more are 30% less likely to develop prostate cancer.
What they believe happens is that the carcinogens build up as fluid in the prostate, and that ejaculation flushes them out. So it stands to reason that the less it’s done the more cancer risk and the more it’s done the less risk.
You may ask why in particular masturbation is mentioned and not intercourse. The reason for that is that intercourse also raises risks of sexual diseases which could lead to cancer.
What I find interesting is the fact that it seems this story is getting a lot more attention from the gay community. It’s almost like they see this as some sort of victory for their lifestyle. I don’t understand it but I could also be reading it wrong.
If you’re masturbating does it really matter if you’re gay or straight?
The Uninsured and Cancer
Studies show that people who are not insured and those on Medicaid don’t go to the doctor until their cancers are advanced.
Obviously this is not good because everyone knows or should know by now that there is a better chance of survival when tumors are caught early. Putting aside the fact that these people have a much higher incidence of death, treatment is also more expensive.
The problem is, that sometimes tumors are benign and the folks that have personal insurance will often have early caught tumors treated when they are not cancerous. Bad news for the insurance companies. Too bad!