Prevention and early detection are 2 completely different things. While prevention seeks healthy habits prior to disease, early detection is geared to detect disease. So, when I saw this recent article, I wasn’t surprised: http://online.wsj.com/articles/some-cancer-experts-see-overdiagnosis-and-question-emphasis-on-early-detection-1410724838
However, the content of the article did surprise me. What conventional medicine continues to miss is that fighting disease is the wrong paradigm to begin with:
“We’re not finding enough of the really lethal cancers, and we’re finding too many of the slow-moving ones that probably don’t need to be found,” says Laura Esserman, a breast-cancer surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco.
What Ms Esserman, and many other in her profession, fail to grasp is this: We do not need to “find more cancer” to destroy. What would be more beneficial to all involved would be to prevent the cancer in the first place.
Another point of this article that did not surprise me:
Small, localized prostate cancers are so ubiquitous in older men that the risk is roughly equal to a man’s age: a 70-year-old has a 70% chance of harboring the disease. Yet the average lifetime risk of dying of prostate cancer is less than 3% according to the American Cancer Society.
Just because you have cancer does not mean it will negatively impact your health. Your immune system is constantly taking care of cancerous cells throughout your body. Those with a healthy immune system (which means you practice preventative measures more often), have a much better chance of a healthy life, even with a cancer diagnosis!