On the topic of cancer prevention

You are aware that a lot of cancer is down to your genetics? I don’t mean those ones that are 100% proven like BRCA, but the fact that your genes make you much more succeptible to carciongens, like people who smoke their whole lives, but get nothing, and others who had nowhere near the exposure to those carcinogens and do end up with lung cancer?

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That’s simply not true. Pharma companies sponsor clinical trials (not without perverse incentives, granted) but the studies themselves are performed by clinicians and hospital-based researchers. More and more, the pharma company has zero visibility to the data, which is managed by a third-party CRO, until it’s all collected and analyzed. Hospitals that are involved in the study monitor the data as well for adverse events with pre-defined threaholds for pausing or stopping the study.

There’s enough wrong with how big Pharma does business that we don’t need to completely invent things they aren’t actually doing while slandering the actial researchers doing the real work.

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What Conservatives say about the poor and ill-fed being poor and ill-fed.

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Which again goes back to the Victorians, who’d have thought that a couple generations of assholes could have fucked society up for so long :frowning:

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Excited I Do GIF by Kathryn Dean

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Yeah but hindsight is 20/20 :smiley:

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Though killing your natural skin biome is dangerous. Those good bacteria outcompete the nasty ones that fill the vacuum when you kill the native ones, and can cause some very nasty infections.

Don’t do this, and don’t advise others to, please.

ETA: note that I’m referring to chronic use. If you ran out of deodorant and really need to get rid of BO, it’s OK in a pinch. Chronic use is going to cause dry skin, which will crack and get irritated and open you up to MRSA and worse skin infections.

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I’m a historian, so that’s my job! :wink: But part of why we study history is to do things better… The fact that we are not is a choice (at least by some of us, not all of us).

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https://www.who.int/activities/preventing-cancer#:~:text=Between%2030-50%25%20of%20all,for%20the%20control%20of%20cancer.

Between 30-50% of all cancer cases are preventable. Prevention offers the most cost-effective long-term strategy for the control of cancer.

Almost half of cancer deaths are preventable (nature.com)

Nearly 50% of cancer deaths worldwide are caused by preventable risk factors, such as smoking and drinking alcohol, according to the largest study of the link between cancer burden and risk factors1.

Please don’t make sweeping statements based on a single paper. That is way oversimplifying a very complex issue. Are some cancers preventable? Hell yes. Can we make statements like “it’s a lifestyle issue?” No. Definitively, we cannot. 95%? Not even close. That is victim blaming.

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It’s completely your responsibility as to which parents you chose.

If you don’t exercise due diligence- it’s your own fault.

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You forgot one of the biggest ones, as proven by thousands of research studies including millions of test subjects: don’t eat animals.

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Still, shouldn’t we be lobbying for things like cleaner water or air with fewer carcinogenic substances in it? I just looked up the EWG report for the water in my city and I’m appalled. Presumably, getting that water cleaned up will prevent at least a few cancer cases, no? Or do we just throw all our money at cancer medication and assume that dirty water and dirty air are just “one of those things”, and that those too poor to afford water filters should just pay for cancer medication instead?

Those are good things to lobby for. Another would be no one having to directly pay for their cancer medication
(Or, you know, any medication)

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There’s nothing wrong with taking measures to reduce exposure to carcinogens.

The reason this discussion got off to a nasty start is because someone responded to a thread about a promising new cancer treatment with a comment that many people interpreted as “forget all this corporate nonsense about trying to treat cancer, y’all ought to just make better lifestyle choices so you don’t get cancer in the first place.”

Which felt kind of victim-blamey considering that a majority of cancer cases are not caused by personal lifestyle choices.

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It’s not a zero-sum game. We can do both.

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Prevention from environmental sources cannot be our only effort, because 1. There are non-environmental sources as @docosc pointed out; and 2. Not all environmental carcinogen exposures are voluntary or even understood at the time of exposure.

The original poster in this spun-off tooic should propose his premise to a group of 911 first responders. I’m sure that would go well.

Kenan Thompson Eating GIF by Saturday Night Live

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And many environmental carcinogens are completely natural. They’re not being released into the environment. They’re part of it.

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Radon has entered the chat.

Also, aside from @docosc’s warning not to act like one study is the whole truth, it’s super shitty to spin that one study out and basically say, “95% of the people you know who’ve struggled with and/or died of cancer? They brought it on themselves with their poor life choices.”

If you’re lucky enough to not realize how hurtful and crummy that is, well, you’re pretty dang lucky.

In closing:

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And who here argued against that? Not a single one of us.

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