Cancer
There is absolutely no question that along with the heart one of the most important factor for our early demise is Cancer. There is also no question about the very fact that the most important medical advances have been in the field of Cancer research. As I personally became more and more aware of most
recent advances in Cancer research, my fear of having Cancer personally and even more important, dying from it, is going away. Recent advances and treatment give me such a hope.
Some of the achievements have been mind boggling. I have never even thought some of the treatments were even possible or when cancer spreads to different part of the body, we can’t do much about it, but it is not true anymore. Now, doctors and research institutes have come up with the dramatic treatment where they take our cells (some immune cells always fight cancer cells) from the body, find them and modify them. Not only that, we use to give chemotherapy which can be very toxic to our body before we recover. There were some side effects which were very difficult to tolerate like suffering from nausea, hair fall,
and there will still be very high risk of developing infection. More recently, there has been a major study funded by National Cancer Institute in the breast cancer treatment where, in early stages of breast cancer patient do not even need chemotherapy.
Merck company has also developed a drug called Keytruda which is immunotherapy and it works better than chemotherapy as initial treatment for most people with most common type of lung cancer and with far fewer side effects. ADD 15 YEARS TO OUR LIFE CAN WE? OF COURSE, WE CAN!
There was a research treatment tried at National Institute of Health which is the top research body of US which fund every other university with research money. When we have cancer which spreads all over the body, there are some cells in the body which are able to fight those cancer cells because they recognize them as different from their own body and so the research team at National Institute of Health collected those immune cells which were already in the body. They grew those few immune cells into crores of immune cells, then injected them back into the patient’s blood and these patient’s own cells started attacking the cancer cells.
Now, the patient (real patient on national US news) who received this treatment has been free from Cancer for 2-1/2 years and the research team believed that the army of the immune cells is still at work. This is, at present, a research treatment and is very costly. It takes tons of money to grow those few cells to turn into crores of cells, but this is the future of cancer treatment and it will get cheaper as the years go by. Another fact I want to mention is that we have our three close family members who have had breast cancer– we all cried, we were all very sad and scared that we are going to lose them. Bless the recent advance, they all did well and it has been several years now they are cancer free and leading a normal life. We family people are all very happy. I will write a separate book on cancer, of course, the diagnosis and what the options are. But, we have to understand that medical bodies have defined a statistical age and younger than that age, cancer is rare but after that age-risk of getting cancer is high. So, we need to screen everybody for certain cancers at certain age and we need to be aware of that and we need to take that screening testing seriously. Most of women will start breast cancer
screening at age 40, but if anyone’s mom has breast cancer at age 45, then she needs to start screening at age 35, 10 years less than her own mother. Same applies to colon cancer too. We have to start screening after at age 50, but if our father developed colon cancer at
ADD 15 YEARS TO OUR LIFE CAN WE? OF COURSE, WE CAN!
age 50, then we have to start screening at age 40. Genetically, we are at a high risk for developing colon cancer or the breast cancer at earlier age than our own parents. The screening guidelines are very well documented and most important fact is that in US every insurance company will pay for it. It may cost thousands of dollars, but insurances has obligation to pay for the screening. Look at from their point of view, if you develop a cancer then instead of paying $1000, they will have to pay $100,000 for the treatment, so it works for both and it’s a win-win situation. Then, in the same way, we would like
you to have a screening for the cancer at the right age or even sooner if the risk is high. ‘Every cancer diagnosed at stage 1 is 100% treatable’. We classify all the cancers into four stages 1, 2, 3, 4 and whenever cancer is diagnosed at stage IV then most of us believe person has 6 months to a year to live. Although, that is changing with most recent research treatments but still risk remains high. On the other hand, we have to understand that the early stage cancers may be very difficult to diagnose. Again, they may not have any symptoms. In the advanced stage we start developing fever, weight loss, any bleeding with cough or passing blood in our stools or passing blood with our morning activity when we go to bathroom. If someone develops a breast cancer at age 40 or even at age 50 and diagnosed early, treatment can easily add 20 to 30 years to their life, it is so true today. At least in today’s time with long education years and small families and more resources, we are starting our family in late 20’s or early 30’s (we still have companionship today through dating etc.
which takes pressure off early marriage and huge commitments of marriage). So, now ADD 15 YEARS TO OUR LIFE CAN WE? OF COURSE, WE CAN! when we are in our 40’s and 50’s, our children are still young, and they still need their parents and, I personally believe we parents have a very important role to play (to help our children through any major crisis) till our children turn into their 30’s and get married. Then they will be very independent and ready to face any kind of crisis.
All the top medical bodies say that we must have gold standard blood test every year that costs about Rs. 3000 each year. It’s worth every rupee; but worthless, if you throw away the report or do not get it or save it in cloud (very easy today). In other words, we must maintain record of those blood tests as any slightest deviation from those numbers should make us jump up and figure out why those numbers are different from last few years. Believe it or not, our blood test numbers are like fingerprints and they remain very constant over years. If our liver enzymes start going up, then we should suspect pancreatic cancer that drains liver enzymes. If our overall blood count/blood amounts are falling, then we need to look for it (depending of our age). We should have a suspicion of colon cancer if we lose blood through our gut. ‘Most common symptoms of any cancer are losing weight and running mild fever’.
If we are not trying to lose weight and we are losing weight, then we should definitely worry about cancer anywhere in the body or at least we should make sure that it is not the reason for losing weight. Every young and youngish woman should feel their breasts (you can consult a lady doctor to show you how it’s done) every time they take shower and if the breasts feel any different or you feel a lump in the breast then you should see your doctor right away.
ADD 15 YEARS TO OUR LIFE CAN WE? OF COURSE, WE CAN!
If our GI tract or as we call it gut is involved, then we may have loose motions or we may have constipation or we may have both. Any persistent change from our daily habits should make us run to our doctor. It is time to be proactive. Time to move from crisis medicine to proactive medicine. Benefits are dramatic. If we are having a cough and we start to spit of little bit of blood, then we have to worry about lung cancer. My aim/our aim is to diagnose early cancer before we are having any of the above symptoms and we can do it today. You bet, we can (Answers in separate book).
