Prevent Cancer Quotes

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As the ACE study has shown, child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
With no serious downsides, a one-in-three potential benefit for end-stage cancer seems like it would spark further research, right? But who’s going to pay for a study of something that can’t be patented?
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
Hunger (or episodic energy deficit) strengthens the body and the immune system and helps rejuvenate brain cells, weaken cancer cells , and prevent diabetes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
As for the story itself, it was entitled "The Dancing Fool." Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.
Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
Much like the removal of moles and skin lesions is done to prevent them from growing into more serious skin abnormalities, removing minor discord before it becomes a calamity is an important use of our time. Most people don’t like to make waves and they swallow frustration and bury true feelings, not wanting to compromise temporary tranquility, never realizing that massive turmoil doesn’t start out massive—it grows beneath the skin like a cancer that could have been avoided with early detection.
T.D. Jakes (Let It Go: Forgive So You Can Be Forgiven)
We live in truly unbelievable times. Autism is an epidemic in most western countries, western governments are nothing more than corrupt corporations, and corporations are routinely suppressing information regarding the toxicity of many common household items. The result is that many people are unnecessarily suffering from easily preventable developmental problems, sickness and cancer.
Steven Magee
A landmark 2010 study from the Massachusetts General Hospital had even more startling findings. The researchers randomly assigned 151 patients with stage IV lung cancer, like Sara’s, to one of two possible approaches to treatment. Half received usual oncology care. The other half received usual oncology care plus parallel visits with a palliative care specialist. These are specialists in preventing and relieving the suffering of patients, and to see one, no determination of whether they are dying or not is required. If a person has serious, complex illness, palliative specialists are happy to help. The ones in the study discussed with the patients their goals and priorities for if and when their condition worsened. The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality.
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
Those who deny guilt and sin are like the Pharisees of old who thought our Saviour had a “guilt complex” because He accused them of being whited sepulchers—outside clean, inside full of dead men’s bones. Those who admit that they are guilty are like the public sinners and the publicans of whom Our Lord said, “Amen, I say to you, that the publicans and the harlots shall go into the Kingdom of God before you” (Matt. 21:31). Those who think they are healthy but have a hidden moral cancer are incurable; the sick who want to be healed have a chance. All denial of guilt keeps people out of the area of love and, by inducing self-righteousness, prevents a cure. The two facts of healing in the physical order are these: A physician cannot heal us unless we put ourselves into his hands, and we will not put ourselves into his hands unless we know that we are sick. In like manner, a sinner’s awareness of sin is one requisite for his recovery; the other is his longing for God. When we long for God, we do so not as sinners, but as lovers.
Fulton J. Sheen (Peace of Soul: Timeless Wisdom on Finding Serenity and Joy by the Century's Most Acclaimed Catholic Bishop)
As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards—independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds—to ensure that they met the NIH’s ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent. Scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.
Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
With certainty, I can predict that there will never be a cure to cancer. The only hope for any of us is to concentrate on cause and prevent the misery.
Richard Diaz
An ounce of cancer prevention is worth a ton of cancer cure.
Robert A. Wascher (A Cancer Prevention Guide for the Human Race)
I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer’s disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas – these seem to me to be immense blessings.
Matt Ridley (Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters)
Though the majority of lung cancer is attributed to smoking, approximately a quarter of all cases occur in people who’ve never smoked.21 Although some of these cases are due to secondhand smoke, another contributing cause may be another potentially carcinogenic plume: fumes from frying.
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
Intermittent fasting is incredibly useful in aiding fat loss, preventing cancer, building muscle, and increasing resilience. Done correctly, it’s one of the most painless high-impact ways to live longer.
Dave Asprey (Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever)
But for most of the leading causes of death, the science shows that our genes often account for only 10–20 percent of risk at most.15 For instance, as you’ll see in this book, the rates of killers like heart disease and major cancers differ up to a hundredfold among various populations around the globe. But when people move from low- to high-risk countries, their disease rates almost always change to those of the new environment.
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
And people who eat beans merely twice a week were found to have about a 50 percent reduction of colon cancer.8 Imagine the protection we would achieve if we ate beans almost every day in conjunction with other well-investigated cancer-fighting foods.
Joel Fuhrman (The End of Diabetes: The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Diabetes (Eat for Life))
Cancer, we have discovered, is stitched into our genome. Oncogenes [cancer causing cells] arise from mutations in essential genes that regulate the growth of cells. Mutations accumulate in these genes when DNA is damaged by carcinogens, but also by seemingly random errors in copying genes when cells divide. The former might be preventable, but the latter is endogenous [originating from within]. Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. We can rid ourselves of cancer, then, only as much as we can rid ourselves of the processes in our physiology that depend on growth — aging, regeneration, healing, reproduction.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
serves as prevention. Gives physical healing in the body. No matter what name is given to any problem; it will be solved, when the Blood of Jesus is brought in. If you keep pleading the Blood of Jesus, no matter how terrible an infirmity is, it will disappear by the power in the Blood of Jesus. If your life is pure and you lay your hands on any sickness, pleading the Blood of Jesus, it will vanish. You might wonder if it is really as simple as that but that is the Power in the Blood of Jesus. The Power in pleading the Blood of Jesus is yet to be understood by Man. Some people criticise those pleading the Blood of Jesus. It is because they have not passed through the valley, so they cannot know what it means. Someone who has never been tortured by a terminal disease cannot know what it means to be threatened by death, so he or she cannot understand why a cancer patient is praying fervently for healing, or why the person is jubilating after he or she has been miraculously healed. The preachers, who discourage people from praying fire prayers or pleading the Blood of Jesus, do so, because they have not experienced such things. The Blood of Jesus cannot dry up; neither can it lose its power. Therefore you can plead it a million times, if you want to. The more you plead the Blood of Jesus, the more the chance of totally submerging the disease, in the pool of the Blood
D.K. Olukoya (Praying by the Blood of Jesus)
Even just living next to a restaurant may pose a health hazard. Scientists estimated the lifetime cancer risk among those residing near the exhaust outlets at Chinese restaurants, American restaurants, and barbecue joints. While exposure to fumes from all three types of restaurants resulted in exposure to unsafe levels of PAHs, the Chinese restaurants proved to be the worst. This is thought to be due to the amount of fish being cooked,28 as the fumes from pan-fried fish have been found to contain high levels of PAHs capable of damaging the DNA of human lung cells.29 Given the excess cancer risk, the researchers concluded that it wouldn’t be safe to live near the exhaust of a Chinese restaurant for more than a day or two a month.
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
According to the American Lung Association, smoking tobacco contributes to up to 90 percent of all lung cancer deaths. Men who smoke are twenty-three times more likely and women thirteen times more likely to develop lung cancer than nonsmokers. And smokers aren’t just harming themselves; thousands of deaths each year have been attributed to secondhand smoke. Nonsmokers have a 20–30 percent higher risk of developing lung cancer if they’re regularly exposed to cigarette smoke.3
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
Cardiovascular disease remains the #1 killer of people in the United States today—accounting for more deaths than all forms of cancer combined.
Steven Masley (The 30-Day Heart Tune-Up: A Breakthrough Medical Plan to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease)
there was no detectable association between gliomas and cell phone use overall. Prevention experts, and phone-addicted teenagers, may have rejoiced—but only briefly.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
What is clear is that diets naturally high in fiber and low in animal-based foods can prevent colorectal cancer.
T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
The prime cause of cancer is the replacement of normal oxygen respiration of body cells by an anaerobic cell respiration.”1
Ty M. Bollinger (The Truth about Cancer: What You Need to Know about Cancer's History, Treatment, and Prevention)
I have every expectation that cancer will become known as the disease of human evolution trying and failing to adapt to a significantly changed environment.
Steven Magee
Far more potently than any miracle medicine, relatively uncelebrated shifts in civic arrangements--better nutrition, housing, and sanitation, improved sewage systems and ventilation--had driven TB mortality down in Europe and America. Polio and smallpox had also dwindles as a result of vaccinations. Cains wrote, "The death rates from malaria, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy, pellagra, and other scourges of the past have dwindled in the US because humankind has learned how to prevent these diseases.... To put most of the effort into treatment is to deny all precedent.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards—independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds—to ensure that they met the NIH’s ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent. Scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.” Later that year, a Harvard anesthesiologist named Henry Beecher published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that Southam’s research was only one of hundreds of similarly unethical studies. Beecher published a detailed list of the twenty-two worst offenders, including researchers who’d injected children with hepatitis and others who’d poisoned patients under anesthesia using carbon dioxide. Southam’s study was included as example number 17. Despite scientists’ fears, the ethical crackdown didn’t slow scientific progress. In fact, research flourished. And much of it involved HeLa. 18
Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
They understand the importance of diet in the prevention and treatment of many disease conditions such as diabetes, cancer, hypertension, and heart disease, and their advice can enhance your quality of life.
Maye Musk (A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success)
The default to studying men at times veered into absurdity: in the early sixties, observing that women tended to have lower rates of heart disease until their estrogen levels dropped after menopause, researchers conducted the first trial to look at whether supplementation with the hormone was an effective preventive treatment. The study enrolled 8,341 men and no women. (Although doctors began prescribing estrogens to postmenopausal women in droves - by the midseventies, a third would be taking them - it wasn't until 1991 that the first clinical study of hormone therapy was conducted in women.) An NIH-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn't enroll a single woman. While men can develop breast cancer - and a small number of them do each year - as Rep. Snowe noted drily at the congressional hearings, 'Somehow I find it hard to believe that the male-dominated medical community would tolerate a study of prostate cancer that used only women as research subjects.
Maya Dusenbery (Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick)
But we can't do anything about getting older. If we live long enough, is forgetting due to Alzheimer's our brain's destiny? For most of us, it is not. Alzheimer's is not a part of normal aging. Only 2% of people with Alzheimer's have the purely inherited early-onset form of the disease. 98% of the time, Alzheimer's is caused by a combination of the genes we inherited and how we live. While we can't do anything about our DNA, science clearly shows that the way we live can dramatically affect the accumulation of amyloid plaques. This in turn means that, like cancer and heart disease, there are things we can do to prevent Alzheimer's.
Lisa Genova (Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting)
The World Cancer Research Fund/American Institute of Cancer Research (WCRF/AICR) has spent three decades analyzing all the data on cancer prevention. They release a massive report each decade, and their most recent one stated that “cancer is a multifactorial disease that is fueled by a deranged metabolism.” Which is why they concluded that being at a healthy weight was the number-one thing a person could do to prevent cancer.
Michael Easter (The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self)
Chemopreventive agents can be classified into different subgroups based on which stage of cancer development they help to fight: Carcinogen blockers and antioxidants help prevent the initial triggering DNA mutation, and antiproliferatives work by keeping tumors from growing and spreading. Curcumin is special in that it appears to belong to all three groups, meaning it may potentially help prevent and/or arrest cancer cell growth.13
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
I have come to see that the benefits produced by eating a plant-based diet are far more diverse and impressive than any drug or surgery used in medical practice. Heart diseases, cancers, diabetes, stroke and hypertension, arthritis, cataracts, Alzheimer’s disease, impotence and all sorts of other chronic diseases can be largely prevented. These diseases, which generally occur with aging and tissue degeneration, kill the majority of us before our time.
T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
In the glass-paneled sanatorium where patients walked for leisure, Alsop recalled, the windows were covered in heavy wire mesh to prevent the men and women confined in the wards from jumping off the banisters and committing suicide.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
The secret to battling cancer, then, is to find means to prevent these mutations from occurring in susceptible cells, or to find means to eliminate the mutated cells without compromising normal growth. The conciseness of that statement belies the enormity of the task. Malignant growth and normal growth are so genetically intertwined that unbraiding the two might be one of the most significant scientific challenges faced by our species. Cancer is built into our genomes: the genes that unmoor normal cell division are not foreign to our bodies, but rather mutated, distorted versions of the very genes that perform vital cellular functions. And cancer is imprinted in our society: as we extend our life span as a species, we inevitably unleash malignant growth (mutations in cancer genes accumulate with aging; cancer is thus intrinsically related to age). If we seek immortality, then so, too, in a rather perverse sense, does the cancer cell.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place. Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side. He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work. Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
It turns out that alpha-MSH is a broad-spectrum anti-inflammatory hormone, and people with autoimmune conditions and those who have been exposed to toxic mold (like me!) tend to have lower than normal levels.23 After my lab tests confirmed I was low in alpha-MSH, I bought myself some and injected a little once or twice a week. This is not without risk. There is some evidence that very high doses may increase the likelihood of melanoma, but there is also evidence that it can help prevent cancer.
Dave Asprey (Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever)
This can involve juicing, fermenting, and sprouting nutrient-dense foods, as well as making sure that you’re getting plenty of antioxidants, whole-foods based vitamins and minerals, complex carbohydrates, protein, healthy fats, and of course, clean water.
Ty M. Bollinger (The Truth about Cancer: What You Need to Know about Cancer's History, Treatment, and Prevention)
Food has become a cause of disease rather than a guardian of health in the modern world. Once regarded as the central pillar of life and the most effective of all medicines, food is now a major contributing factor in cancer, heart disease, arthritis , mental illness, and many other pathological conditions. Virtually monopolized by agricultural and industrial cartels, public food supplies, are processed and packaged to produce profits and prolong shelf life, not to promote health and prolong human life. It seems incredible that public health authorities permit the unrestricted use of hydrogenated vegetable oils, refined sugar, chemical preservatives, toxic pesticides, and over 5,000 other artificial food additives that have repeatedly been proven to cause cancer, impair immunity, and otherwise erode human health, while restricting the medical use of nutrients, herbs, acupuncture, fasting, and other traditional therapies that have been shown to prevent and cure the very diseases caused by chemical contaminants in food and water.
Daniel Reid (The Complete Book of Chinese Health and Healing: Guarding the Three Treasures)
So why are vegetable nitrates and nitrites okay but the same compounds from meat are linked to cancer?110 Because nitrites themselves are not carcinogenic; they turn into carcinogens. Nitrites only become harmful when they turn into nitrosamines and nitrosamides.
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
Increasing dietary consumption of the brassica vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, and Brussels sprouts, as well as allium vegetables such as onions, leeks, and garlic can all increase glutathione activity and offset the risk caused by this mutation.
Daniella Chace (Turning Off Breast Cancer: A Personalized Approach to Nutrition and Detoxification in Prevention and Healing)
I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. That there is a butterfly effect and everything that happens influences what will happen next. Even my mom dying. I mean, what if she hadn’t been on the road at that very minute in that very spot? Instead, what if it were a young family, or a pregnant woman in labor being rushed to the hospital? Maybe that drunk driver running into her saved other lives. And maybe one of those lives that was saved is someone who will go on to discover how to prevent cancer. Or global warming. Or nuclear war.
Samantha Christy (The Stone Brothers #1-3)
Cancer, we have discovered, is stitched into our genome. Oncogenes arise from mutations in essential genes that regulate the growth of cells. Mutations accumulate in these genes when DNA is damaged by carcinogens, but also by seemingly random errors in copying genes when cells divide. The former might be preventable, but the latter is endogenous. Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. We can rid ourselves of cancer, then, only as much as we can rid ourselves of the processes in our physiology that depend on growth—aging, regeneration, healing, reproduction.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies)
In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in others, being optimistic, being frank with everyone about everything. And then, as one comes to understand things and people better, to develop a sense of irony. The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony. But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer. Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony – perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped – might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes. What
Julian Barnes (The Noise of Time)
If prayer works, why can’t God cure cancer or grow back a severed limb? Why so much avoidable suffering that God could so readily prevent? Why does God have to be prayed to at all? Doesn’t He already know what cures need to be performed? Dossey also begins with a quote from Stanley Krippner, M.D. (described as “one of the most authoritative investigators of the variety of unorthodox healing methods used around the world”): [T]he research data on distant, prayer-based healing are promising, but too sparse to allow any firm conclusion to be drawn. This after many trillions of prayers over the millennia.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
Calorie restriction extends the life span of every organism so far tested, including yeast, worms, flies, rodents, and monkeys. It also slows or even prevents age-related diseases, including dementia, diabetes, cardiovascular and coronary disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and several types of cancer.
James DiNicolantonio (The Longevity Solution: Rediscovering Centuries-Old Secrets to a Healthy, Long Life)
Physiological stress, then, is the link between personality traits and disease. Certain traits — otherwise known as coping styles — magnify the risk for illness by increasing the likelihood of chronic stress. Common to them all is a diminished capacity for emotional communication. Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biological events when human beings are prevented from learning how to express their feelings effectively. That learning occurs — or fails to occur — during childhood. The way people grow up shapes their relationship with their own bodies and psyches. The emotional contexts of childhood interact with inborn temperament to give rise to personality traits. Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood. There is an important distinction between an inherent characteristic, rooted in an individual without regard to his environment, and a response to the environment, a pattern of behaviours developed to ensure survival. What we see as indelible traits may be no more than habitual defensive techniques, unconsciously adopted. People often identify with these habituated patterns, believing them to be an indispensable part of the self. They may even harbour self-loathing for certain traits — for example, when a person describes herself as “a control freak.” In reality, there is no innate human inclination to be controlling. What there is in a “controlling” personality is deep anxiety. The infant and child who perceives that his needs are unmet may develop an obsessive coping style, anxious about each detail. When such a person fears that he is unable to control events, he experiences great stress. Unconsciously he believes that only by controlling every aspect of his life and environment will he be able to ensure the satisfaction of his needs. As he grows older, others will resent him and he will come to dislike himself for what was originally a desperate response to emotional deprivation. The drive to control is not an innate trait but a coping style. Emotional repression is also a coping style rather than a personality trait set in stone. Not one of the many adults interviewed for this book could answer in the affirmative when asked the following: When, as a child, you felt sad, upset or angry, was there anyone you could talk to — even when he or she was the one who had triggered your negative emotions? In a quarter century of clinical practice, including a decade of palliative work, I have never heard anyone with cancer or with any chronic illness or condition say yes to that question. Many children are conditioned in this manner not because of any intended harm or abuse, but because the parents themselves are too threatened by the anxiety, anger or sadness they sense in their child — or are simply too busy or too harassed themselves to pay attention. “My mother or father needed me to be happy” is the simple formula that trained many a child — later a stressed and depressed or physically ill adult — into lifelong patterns of repression.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE TYPE 2 DIABETES is currently the leading cause of blindness, kidney failure, amputations, heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. But it doesn’t have to be our future. The pages of The Obesity Code and The Diabetes Code contain the knowledge to reverse type 2 diabetes. This is not the end, but only the beginning. A new hope arises. A new dawn breaks.
Jason Fung (The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally)
To prevent the growth and spread of cancerous cells in your body, consume more of these foods and drinks: apples, artichokes, blueberries, bok choy, broccoli, green tea, kale, lemons, mushrooms, raspberries, red grapes, red wine, salmon, strawberries, and tomatoes. Also consider eating ingredients commonly used for flavor that have cancer-fighting potential: cinnamon, garlic, nutmeg, parsley, and turmeric.
Tom Rath (Eat Move Sleep: How Small Choices Lead to Big Changes)
The secret to battling cancer, then, is to find means to prevent these mutations from occurring in susceptible cells, or to find means to eliminate the mutated cells without compromising normal growth. The conciseness of that statement belies the enormity of the task. Malignant growth and normal growth are so genetically intertwined that unbraiding the two might be one of the most significant scientific challenges faced by our species.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
Do you know what kind of a world we live in? We live in a world where, if a man came up with a sure cure for cancer, and if that man were found to be married to his sister, his neighbors would righteously burn down his house and all his notes. If a man built the most beautiful tower in the country, and that man later begins to believe that Satan should be worshipped, they’ll blow up his tower. I know a great and moving book written by a woman who later went quite crazy and wrote crazy books, and nobody will read her great one any more. I can name three kinds of mental therapy that could have changed the face of the earth, and in each case the men who found it went on to insane Institutes and so-called religions and made fools of themselves—dangerous fools at that—and now no one will look at their really great early discoveries. Great politicians have been prevented from being great statesmen because they were divorced. And I wasn’t going to have the Mensch machine stolen or buried or laughed at and forgotten just because I had long hair and played the lute. You know, it’s easy to have long hair and play the lute and be kind to people when everyone else around you is doing it. It’s a much harder thing to be the one who does it first, because then you have to pay a price, you get jeered at and they throw stones and shut you out.
Theodore Sturgeon (The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume XI: The Nail and the Oracle)
is turning all life into a unified flow experience. If a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow, and if he or she invests all energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony, and the separate parts of life will fit together—and each activity will “make sense” in the present, as well as in view of the past and of the future. In such a way, it is possible to give meaning to one’s entire life. But isn’t it incredibly naive to expect life to have a coherent overall meaning? After all, at least since Nietzsche concluded that God was dead, philosophers and social scientists have been busy demonstrating that existence has no purpose, that chance and impersonal forces rule our fate, and that all values are relative and hence arbitrary. It is true that life has no meaning, if by that we mean a supreme goal built into the fabric of nature and human experience, a goal that is valid for every individual. But it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning. Much of what we call culture and civilization consists in efforts people have made, generally against overwhelming odds, to create a sense of purpose for themselves and their descendants. It is one thing to recognize that life is, by itself, meaningless. It is another thing entirely to accept this with resignation. The first fact does not entail the second any more than the fact that we lack wings prevents us from flying. From the point of view of an individual, it does not matter what the ultimate goal is—provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime’s worth of psychic energy. The challenge might involve the desire to have the best beer-bottle collection in the neighborhood, the resolution to find a cure for cancer, or simply the biological imperative to have children who will survive and prosper. As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life. In the past few years I have come to be quite well acquainted with several Muslim professionals—electronics engineers, pilots, businessmen, and teachers, mostly from Saudi Arabia and from the other Gulf states. In talking to them, I was struck with how relaxed most of them seemed to be even under strong pressure. “There is nothing to it,” those I asked about it told me, in different words, but with the same message: “We don’t get upset because we believe that our life is in God’s hands, and whatever He decides will be fine with us.” Such implicit faith used to be widespread in our culture as well, but it is not easy to find it now. Many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
doubled your odds of getting pancreatic cancer.89 What about people who eat chicken? The largest study to ever address that question is the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study, which followed 477,000 people for about a decade. The researchers found a 72 percent increased risk of pancreatic cancer for every fifty grams of chicken consumed daily.90 And that’s not much meat, under two ounces—just about a quarter of a chicken breast.
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
It was easier to ignore the consideration of paternal genes then than it would be now. We did not then consider ourselves held in the genetic trap. We thought each infant was born pure and new and holy: a gold baby, a luminous lamb. We did not know that certain forms of breast cancer were programmed and almost ineluctable, and we would not have believed you if you had told us that in our lifetime young women would be subjecting themselves to preventative mastectomies.
Margaret Drabble (The Pure Gold Baby)
When we focus on thoughts about bitter past memories or imagined dreadful futures to the exclusion of everything else, we prevent the body from regaining homeostasis. In truth, we’re capable of turning on the stress response by thought alone. If we turn it on and then can’t turn it off, we’re surely headed for some type of illness or disease—be it a cold or cancer—as more and more genes get downregulated in a domino effect, until we eventually arrive at our genetic destiny.
Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
When we focus on thoughts about bitter past memories or imagined dreadful futures to the exclusion of everything else, we prevent the body from regaining homeostasis. In truth, we’re capable of turning on the stress response by thought alone. If we turn it on and then can’t turn it off, we’re surely headed for some type of illness or disease—be it a cold or cancer—as more and more genes get downregulated in a domino effect, until we eventually arrive at our genetic destiny. For
Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
If you work and do pure research in this industry as long as I have – and you actually pay attention and do your homework, then this naked and raw truth stands out -> The supplement world of cancer-fighters, CAD-preventers, health-promoters, magic-water – AND/OR - muscle-builders, fat-burners and weight-loss agents – all of them – already have an over-crowded mass grave-yard of previous magic bullets that would supposedly make your life and/or body better – Yes, so promising and heavily promoted “this” era – but so dead and gone the next – leaving in their wake a trail of mass-consumer confusion – but also leaving their actual intention -> a new generation of passive consumers – those who can’t differentiate the sizzle from the steak. Or as W.C. Fields put it so long ago – “There’s a sucker born every minute.” -> There isn’t a supplement on the planet that marks the difference between ‘health or ill-health’ – or between ‘fit or fat.’ - or between ‘results and stagnation.
Scott Abel
Things changed after that between me and Mark. I stopped being mortified that people might mistake me for one of his acolytes. I was his Boswell, don’t you know. I interviewed him about his childhood—his father was a psychiarist in Beverly Hills. I cataloged the contents of his van. I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology—in finding a cure—but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. “The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,” Mark told me. “I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and suvivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.” Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.
William Finnegan (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life)
At the same time, medical experts of every persuasion agree that African Americans share the most deplorable health profile in the nation by far, one that resembles that of Third World countries. When Dr. Harold Freedman observed that the health status of Harlem men resembles that of Bangladeshis more closely than that of their Manhattan neighbors, he did not exaggerate. Twice as many African American babies as babies of other ethnic groups die before their first birthday. One and half times as many African American adults as white adults die every year. Blacks have dramatically higher rates of nearly every cancer, of AIDS, of heart disease, of diabetes, of liver disease, of infectious diseases, and they even suffer from higher rates of accidental death, homicide, and mental illness. Before they die young in droves from eminently preventable diseases, African Americans also suffer far more devastating but equally preventable disease complications, such as blindness, confinement to wheelchairs, and limb loss.
Harriet A. Washington (Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present)
Health outcomes for black people are worse across the board during non-pandemic times. Black women are 22% more likely to die from heart disease than white women and 71% more likely to die from cervical cancer. Blacks are diagnosed with diabetes at a 71% higher rate than whites. Minorities receive lower quality care for their diabetes, resulting in more complications, such as chronic kidney disease and amputations. The list of conditions which Blacks suffer more extend to mental health, cancer, and heart disease.
Andy Slavitt (Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response)
It would have been a disaster if Laszlo’s Asperger’s had prevented him from contributing to a cancer cure; if Rosie’s status as a mother had resulted in her removal from the bipolar-disorder project; and if Hudson’s autistic traits had blocked his journey to high school, human-rights advocate, and possibly—as suggested by the anonymous voice at the cross-country race—prime minister, where he would have the power to change the system. And if Laura and I had been prevented from changing the world by our failure to resolve a personal issue.
Graeme Simsion (The Rosie Result (Don Tillman, #3))
If you could put the benefits of exercise in a pill, it would be an astonishing pill,” says Simon Melov, a researcher at the Buck Institute who has studied exercise extensively. “The data is now coming out on the effects of chronic exercise, and it is astonishing in terms of its ability to prevent all sorts of age-related disease, everything from cancer through to neurodegenerative disease to heart disease, even arthritis. All of these things have vastly lowered risk in people who exercise regularly—and if that was in a pill, it would be insane.
Bill Gifford (Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever [or Die Trying])
In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in others, being optimistic, being frank with everyone about everything. The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony. But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer.
Julian Barnes (The Noise of Time)
Your cells are preprogrammed to die naturally to make way for fresh cells through a process known as apoptosis (from the Greek ptosis, falling, and apo, away from). In a sense, your body is rebuilding itself every few months16 with the building materials you provide it through your diet. Some cells, however, overstay their welcome—namely, cancer cells. By somehow disabling their own suicide mechanism, they don’t die when they’re supposed to. Because they continue to thrive and divide, cancer cells can eventually form tumors and potentially spread throughout the body.
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
Few chemicals confer maleness, but many take it away. Which, if any, are responsible for our own troubles is hard to say. The Pill changed men's lives in more ways than one. It caused reproductive hormones to leak into tap water and has been blamed both for the sex changes in freshwater fish and for the drop in our own sperm count. The jury is still out on the issue, but other hormones have had a disastrous effect. A drug called diethylstilbestrol was once thought - in error - to prevent miscarriage. Five million mothers took it and for a time it was even used as a chicken food supplement. A third of the boys exposed to the drug in the womb suffer from small testes or a reduced penis. In rats, the chemical causes prostate and testicular cancer (although there is as yet no sign of those problems in ourselves). To give a powerful steroid to pregnant women was at best unwise, but the effects of other chemicals were harder to foresee. The 1950s saw a wonderful new chemical treatment for banana pests. Soon the substance was much used. Twenty years later the workers noticed something odd: they had almost no children. Their sperm count had dropped by five hundred times.
Steve Jones (Y: The Descent of Men)
The Dancing Fool.” Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
Harm reduction is often perceived as being inimical to the ultimate purpose of “curing” addiction—that is, of helping addicts transcend their habits and to heal. People regard it as “coddling” addicts, as enabling them to continue their destructive ways. It’s also considered to be the opposite of abstinence, which many regard as the only legitimate goal of addiction treatment. Such a distinction is artificial. The issue in medical practice is always how best to help a patient. If a cure is possible and probable without doing greater harm, then cure is the objective. When it isn’t — and in most chronic medical conditions cure is not the expected outcome — the physician’s role is to help the patient with the symptoms and to reduce the harm done by the disease process. In rheumatoid arthritis, for example, one aims to prevent joint inflammation and bone destruction and, in all events, to reduce pain. In incurable cancers we aim to prolong life, if that can be achieved without a loss of life quality, and also to control symptoms. In other words, harm reduction means making the lives of afflicted human beings more bearable, more worth living. That is also the goal of harm reduction in the context of addiction. Although hardcore drug addiction is much more than a disease, the harm reduction model is essential to its treatment. Given our lack of a systematic, evidencebased approach to addiction, in many cases it’s futile to dream of a cure. So long as society ostracizes the addict and the legal system does everything it can to heighten the drug problem, the welfare and medical systems can aim only to mitigate some of its effects. Sad to say, in our context harm reduction means reducing not only the harm caused by the disease of addiction, but also the harm caused by the social assault on drug addicts.
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
So should patients born under Libra and Gemini be deprived of treatment? You would say no, of course, and that would make you wiser than many in the medical profession: the CCSG trial found that aspirin was effective at preventing stroke and death in men, but not in women;30 as a result, women were undertreated for a decade, until further trials and overviews showed a benefit. That is just one of many subgroup analyses that have misled us in medicine, often incorrectly identifying subgroups of people who wouldn’t benefit from a treatment that was usually effective. So, for example, we thought the hormone-blocking drug tamoxifen was no good for treating breast cancer in women if they were younger than fifty (we were wrong). We thought clotbusting drugs were ineffective, or even harmful, when treating heart attacks in people who’d already had a heart attack (we were wrong). We thought drugs called ‘ACE inhibitors’ stopped reducing the death rate in heart failure patients if they were also on aspirin (we were wrong). Unusually, none of these findings was driven by financial avarice: they were driven by ambition, perhaps; excitement at new findings, certainly; ignorance of the risks of subgroup analysis; and, of course, chance.
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
Two decades ago the federal government invited 150,000 men and women to participate in an experiment of screening for cancer in four organs: prostate, lung, colon, and ovary. The volunteers were less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, had higher socioeconomic status, and fewer medical problems than members of the general population. Those are the kinds of people who seek preventive intervention. Of course, they are going to do better. Had the study not been randomized, the investigators might have concluded that screening was the best thing since sliced bread. Regardless of which group they were randomly assigned to, the participants had substantially lower death rates than the general population—for all cancers (even those other than prostate, lung, colon, and ovary), for heart disease, and for injury. In other words, the volunteers were healthier than average. With randomization, the study showed that only one of the four screenings (for colon cancer) was beneficial. Without it, the study might have concluded that prostate cancer screening not only lowered the risk of death from prostate cancer but also deaths from leukemia, heart attack, and car accidents (although you would hope someone would raise the biological plausibility criterion here).
H. Gilbert Welch (Less Medicine, More Health: 7 Assumptions That Drive Too Much Medical Care)
study of thirty thousand elderly people in fifty-two countries found that switching to an overall healthy lifestyle—eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, not smoking, exercising moderately, and not drinking too much alcohol—lowered heart disease rates by approximately 50 percent.14 Reducing exposure to carcinogens, such as tobacco and sodium nitrite, have been shown to decrease the incidence of lung and stomach cancers, and it is likely (more evidence is needed) that lowering exposures to other known carcinogens, such as benzene and formaldehyde, will reduce the incidence of other cancers. Prevention really is the most powerful medicine, but we as a species consistently lack the political or psychological will to act preventively in our own best interests. It is worthwhile to ask to what extent efforts to treat the symptoms of common mismatch diseases have the effect of promoting dysevolution by taking attention and resources away from prevention. On an individual level, am I more likely to eat unhealthy foods and exercise insufficiently if I know I’ll have access to medical care to treat the symptoms of the diseases these choices cause many years later? More broadly within our society, is the money we allocate to treating diseases coming at the expense of money to prevent them?
Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
And that evening too, as I looked at her arm, into which was flowing a life that was no longer anything but sickness and torment, I asked myself why? At the nursing home I did not have time to go into it... But when I reached home, all the sadness and horror of these last days dropped upon me with all its weight. And I too had a cancer eating into me—remorse. “Don’t let them operate on her.” And I had not prevented anything. Often, hearing of sick people undergoing a long martyrdom, I had felt indignant at the apathy of their relatives. “For my part, I should kill him.” At the first trial I had given in: beaten by the ethics of society, I had abjured my own. “No,” Sartre said to me. “You were beaten by technique: and that was fatal.” Indeed it was. One is caught up in the wheels and dragged along, powerless in the face of specialists’ diagnoses, their forecasts, their decisions. The patient becomes their property: get him away from them if you can! There were only two things to choose between on that Wednesday—operating or euthanasia. Maman, vigorously resuscitated, and having a strong heart, would have stood out against intestinal stoppage for a long while and she would have lived through hell, for the doctors would have refused euthanasia… A race had begun between death and torture. I asked myself how one manages to go on living when someone you love has called out to you “Have pity on me” in vain.
Simone de Beauvoir (A Very Easy Death)
The salicylic acid content in plants may help explain why traditional, plant-based diets were so protective. For instance, before their diets were Westernized, animal products made up only about 5 percent of the average Japanese diet.72 During this period in the 1950s, age-adjusted death rates from colon, prostate, breast, and ovarian cancers were five to ten times lower in Japan than in the United States, while incidences of pancreatic cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma were three to four times lower. This phenomenon was not unique to the Japanese. As we’ve seen throughout this book, Western rates of cancers and heart disease have been found to be dramatically lower among populations whose diets are centered around plant foods.73
Michael Greger (How Not To Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
Some studies have shown that hypertension occurs less frequently among vegetarians than among nonvegetarians, regardless of body weight or sodium intake. Intake of red meat has been linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer. Vegetarians, including lacto-ovo and vegan, have reduced incidences of diabetes and lower rates of cancer than nonvegetarians, particularly for gastrointestinal cancer.47,48 Vegetarian-style diet patterns are associated with lower all-cause mortality.49 Vegetarian-style eating patterns are being used for the prevention and therapeutic dietary treatment of numerous chronic conditions, including overweight and obesity, cardiovascular disease (hyperlipidemia, ischemic heart disease, and hypertension), diabetes, cancer, and osteoporosis.50
Melissa Bernstein
When fat is heated to frying temperatures, whether it be animal fat, such as lard, or plant fat, such as vegetable oil, toxic volatile chemicals with mutagenic properties (those able to cause genetic mutations) are released into the air.22 This happens even before the “smoke point” temperature is reached.23 If you do fry at home, good ventilation in the kitchen may reduce lung cancer risk.24 Cancer risk may also depend on what’s being fried. A study of women in China found that smokers who stir-fried meat every day had nearly three times the odds of lung cancer compared to smokers who stir-fried foods other than meat on a daily basis.25 This is thought to be because of a group of carcinogens called heterocyclic amines that are formed when muscle tissue is subjected to high temperatures.
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
But what of the lives that I had taken? Was I not equally culpable, and was that not why there now so many names, of both good men and bad, carved upon that palimpsest I bore, and for each of which I might justifiably be called to account? I could argue that by committing a smaller evil, I had prevented a greater one from occurring, but I would still bear the mark of that sin upon me, and perhaps be dammed for it. Yet, in the end, I could not stand by. There were sins that I had committed out of anger, touched by wrath, and for those I had no doubt that I would at last be charged and found wanting. But, the others? I chose to act as I did, believing that the greater evil lay in doing nothing. I have tried to make reparation, in my way. The problem is that, like cancer, a little corruption of the soul will eventually spread throughout the whole. The problem is that there are no small evils.
John Connolly (The Black Angel (Charlie Parker, #5))
It is time the world began to understand and see beyond the mythology of “free markets,” realizing that no matter how idealized theoretical assumptions may be, the structural bigotry and systemic oppression will forever harm the lower-class majority. Please note that I do not see the rise of modern capitalism and neoliberalism as some evil that could have been prevented. Rather, we are dealing with a natural progression of social evolution and at a certain point in time market capitalism was indeed the best method we had. Yet, as can occur with any socially perpetuated phenomenon, we are now stuck in a feedback loop that perversely restricts our ability to take the next evolutionary step as an intelligent species. It is in this stage, a stage philosopher John McMurtry calls “the cancer stage of capitalism,” that a great deal of energy is now needed to deliberately shift the course of civilization.
Peter Joseph (The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression)
In 2013 a study published in the Journal of Patient Safety8 put the number of premature deaths associated with preventable harm at more than 400,000 per year. (Categories of avoidable harm include misdiagnosis, dispensing the wrong drugs, injuring the patient during surgery, operating on the wrong part of the body, improper transfusions, falls, burns, pressure ulcers, and postoperative complications.) Testifying to a Senate hearing in the summer of 2014, Peter J. Pronovost, MD, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and one of the most respected clinicians in the world, pointed out that this is the equivalent of two jumbo jets falling out of the sky every twenty-four hours. “What these numbers say is that every day, a 747, two of them are crashing. Every two months, 9/11 is occurring,” he said. “We would not tolerate that degree of preventable harm in any other forum.”9 These figures place preventable medical error in hospitals as the third biggest killer in the United States—behind only heart disease and cancer.
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
The word ‘emotion’ comes from the Latin e for exit and motio for movement. So emotion is a natural energy, a dynamic experience that needs to move through and out of the body. As children, however, we are often taught not to express our emotions; for example, we might have been told, ‘boys don’t cry’, or ‘don’t be a baby’. Or when we are angry we are taught that it’s not appropriate to express it: ‘Don’t you dare raise your voice to me!’ At some level most of us are taught that emotions are not OK. As healthy adults, we need to let go of the emotional patterns from the past that mess up our lives and no longer serve us. As Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, often said, ‘The only way out is through.’ It’s not easy, and the vast majority of people deny the symptoms or anaesthetise themselves through work, TV, food, alcohol or some kind of drug. By discharging negative emotions attached to past memories we become more able to respond spontaneously in any given moment, allowing us to be more present in our relationships and to the gifts of the world around us.
Patrick Holford (Say No To Cancer: The drug-free guide to preventing and helping fight cancer)
Depletion of Vitamin D Sunscreens prevent the absorption of vitamin D. But all the compounds discussed above, whether in sunscreens or other products, also lower your liver’s ability to convert this critical vitamin to its active form. This prevents the regeneration of new cells in your protective intestinal wall barrier, allowing more lectins and LPSs through, along with other foreign bodies. Men with prostate cancer have very low levels of vitamin D. Despite the fact that my practice is in Southern California, I have found that almost 80 percent of my patients have low levels of vitamin D in their blood. In fact, anyone in my practice with leaky gut or autoimmune diseases has low levels. Lacking sufficient vitamin D, and in the face of repeated assaults on the walls of the intestine and the lack of ongoing repair to keep out lectins and LPSs, the body constantly senses that it is at war. It’s not surprising, then, that most of my overweight and obese patients are also very deficient in vitamin D.20 Such a deficiency also impedes the generation of new bone, setting the stage for the development of osteoporosis. My thin female patients with osteopenia and osteoporosis also have low levels of this critical vitamin when they first come to see me.
Steven R. Gundry (The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain)
Work democracy cannot be imposed on people as a political system. It depends on the consciousness on the part of the working people in all professions of their responsibility for the social process. This consciousness may be present or it may grow in an organic manner, like a tree or an animal organism. The growth of this consciousness of social responsibility is the most important prerequisite for the prevention of the cancer-like growth of political systems in the social organism. If they are allowed to grow, they will sooner or later bring about social chaos. Furthermore, such consciousness of responsibility alone will, in the course of time, bring the institutions of human society into harmony with the natural functions of work democracy. Political systems come and go without stopping or fundamentally changing the social process. But the pulse of human society would stop and not return should the natural life functions of love, work and knowledge cease for only one day. Natural love, vitally necessary work and scientific search are rational life functions. They can inherently be nothing but rational. Consequently, they are diametrically opposed to any kind of irrationalism. Political irrationalism which infests, deforms and destroys our lives, is — in the strictly psychiatric sense—a perversion of social life, caused by the ostracizing of the natural life functions and by their exclusion from the determination of social life.
Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
Explaining the rise of MSNBC, the Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said: “I think there are a lot of people out there who are dramatically troubled by the direction of the country, and they would like to be reminded that: (A) they’re not alone, and (B) there’s an alternative”. But loneliness isn’t the problem; the direction of the country is. And being alone together is not an alternative direction, just as a cancer support group does not shrink a tumour. It’s probably true that viewers of MSNBC are sometimes inspired to give money to progressive candidates, and perhaps there’s someone out there whose politics were changed, rather that their loneliness assuaged, by Rachel Maddow. It’s certainly true that a hybrid car gets better mileage than a traditional gas car. But primarily, these things make us feel better. And it can be dangerous to feel better when things are not getting better. […] Too often, the feeling of making a difference doesn’t correspond to the difference being made – worse, an inflated sense of accomplishment can relieve the burden of doing what actually needs to be done. Do the children getting vaccines paid for by Bill Gates really care if he feels annoyed when he gives 46 percent of his vast wealth to charity? Do the children dying of preventable diseases really care if Jeff Bezos feels altruistic when he donates only 1.2 percent of his even vaster wealth? If you found yourself in the back of an ambulance, would you rather have a driver who loathes his job put performs it expertly or one who is passionate about his job but takes twice as long to get you to the hospital?
Jonathan Safran Foer (We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast)
In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in others, being optimistic, being frank with everyone about everything. And then, as one comes to understand things and people better, to develop a sense of irony. The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony. But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer. — Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony—perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped—might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out windowpanes. What did he value? Music, his family, love. Love, his family, music. The order of importance was liable to change. Could irony protect his music? In so far as music remained a secret language which allowed you to smuggle things past the wrong ears. But it could not exist only as a code: sometimes you ached to say things straightforwardly. Could irony protect his children? Maxim, at school, aged ten, had been obliged publicly to vilify his father in the course of a music exam. In such circumstances, what use was irony to Galya and Maxim? As for love—not his own awkward, stumbling, blurting, annoying expressions of it, but love in general: he had always believed that love, as a force of nature, was indestructible; and that, when threatened, it could be protected, blanketed, swaddled in irony. Now he was less convinced. Tyranny had become so expert at destroying that why should it not destroy love as well, intentionally or not? Tyranny demanded that you love the Party, the State, the Great Leader and Helmsman, the People. But individual love—bourgeois and particularist—distracted from such grand, noble, meaningless, unthinking “loves.” And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love’s last days had come.
Julian Barnes (The Noise of Time)
And what’s the solution of preventing this debacle? Plenty of ‘em! The Communists have a patent Solution they know will work. So have the Fascists, and the rigid American Constitutionalists—who call themselves advocates of Democracy, without any notion what the word ought to mean; and the Monarchists—who are certain that if we could just resurrect the Kaiser and the Czar and King Alfonso, everybody would be loyal and happy again, and the banks would simply force credit on small business men at 2 per cent. And all the preachers—they tell you that they alone have the inspired Solution. “Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! “There never will be a time when there won’t be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.” Doremus suspected that, with the most scientific state, it would be impossible for iron deposits always to find themselves at exactly the rate decided upon two years before by the National Technocratic Minerals Commission, no matter how elevated and fraternal and Utopian the principles of the commissioners. His Solution, Doremus pointed out, was the only one that did not flee before the thought that a thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs. It presumed that mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue and senility. It seemed to him unidealistically probable, for all the “contemporary furniture” of the 1930’s, that most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books—no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930, in 1630.
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
Here are just two stand-out facts from a major study in the Annals of Epidemiology entitled ‘Vitamin D for Cancer Prevention.’[3] “Women with higher solar UVB exposure had only half the incidence of breast cancer as those with lower solar exposure.” “Men with higher residential solar exposure had only half the incidence rate of fatal prostate cancer.” To put that in simple English, if you spend longer in the sun, you may be far less likely to die of breast and prostate cancer (and lots of other cancers as well, but more on cancer later). But what about the increased risk of dying of skin cancer! I hear you cry. Well, what of it? Around 2,000 people a year die of malignant melanoma in the UK each year. If increased sun exposure were to double this figure, we would have 2,000 more cases. On the other hand, breast cancer kills around 20,000 a year, as does prostate cancer. If we managed to halve the rate of breast and prostate cancer, we would reduce cancer deaths by 20,000 a year. Which is ten times as great any potential increase in deaths from malignant melanoma.
Malcolm Kendrick (Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense)
the array of conditions for which probiotic therapy has been found to have some documented and quantifiable measure of success is quite staggering. Probiotics have been most definitively linked to treating and preventing diseases of the digestive tract, such as diarrhea (including that caused by antibiotics, rotavirus, and HIV34), inflammatory bowel disease35, irritable bowel syndrome36, constipation37, and even colon cancer.38 They have shown efficacy in treating vaginal infections.39 Probiotics have been found to reduce incidence and duration of common colds40 and upper respiratory symptoms41 and to reduce absences from work.42 They have been shown to improve outcomes and prevent infections
Sandor Ellix Katz (The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World)
Three hours after eating a cup of broccoli sprouts, the enzyme that cancers use to help silence our defenses is suppressed in your bloodstream110 to an extent equal to or greater than the chemotherapy agent specifically designed for that purpose,111 without the toxic side effects.
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
In addition to its well-known effects on bowel health, high fiber intake appears to reduce the risk of cancers of the colon5 and breast,6 diabetes,7 heart disease,8 obesity,9 and premature death in general.10 A number of studies now show that high fiber intake may also help ward off stroke.11 Unfortunately, less than 3 percent of Americans meet the minimum daily recommendation for fiber.12 This means about 97 percent of Americans eat fiber-deficient diets.
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
1. GROWTH HORMONES IN MEAT When you eat conventional meat, you’re probably eating hormones, antibiotics, steroids, and chemicals created by the fear and stress suffered by the animal during slaughter and in its inhumane living conditions. In 2009, two Japanese researchers published a startling study in Annals of Oncology. They pointed out that there has been a surge in hormone-dependent cancers that roughly parallels the surge of beef consumption in Japan. Over the last twenty-five years, hormone-dependent cancers such as breast, ovarian, endometrial, and prostate cancer rose fivefold in that country. More than 25 percent of the beef imported to Japan comes from the United States, where livestock growers regularly use the growth hormonal steroid estradiol. The researchers found that US beef had much higher levels of estrogen than Japanese beef because of the added hormones. This finding led them to conclude that eating a lot of estrogen-rich beef could be the reason for the rising incidence of these life-threatening cancers. Injected hormones like estrogen mimic the activity of our natural hormones and prevent those hormones from doing their jobs. This situation creates chaos. Growth hormones may alter the way in which natural hormones are produced, eliminated, or metabolized. And guess what? Hormone impersonators can trigger unnatural cell growth that may develop into cancer. The United States is one of the only industrialized countries that still allows their animals to be injected with growth hormone. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and the entire European Union have banned rBGH and rBST because of their dangerous impact on human and bovine health. US farmers fatten up their livestock by injecting them with estrogen-based hormones, which can migrate from the meat we eat to our bodies—and possibly stimulate the growth of human breast cancer, according to the Breast Cancer Fund, an organization committed to preventing breast cancer by
Vani Hari (The Food Babe Way: Break Free from the Hidden Toxins in Your Food and Lose Weight, Look Years Younger, and Get Healthy in Just 21 Days!)
Shifting Blame An article by Benoit and Suchard in Consultant in 2006 brought up an interesting point about why brown recluse spider bites and generic spider bites are so widely believed in by the general public: people have difficulty accepting that the root of an affliction of theirs is an internal cause that might be considered a weakness. This is even more difficult when it might be some lifestyle choice of the patient that possibly contributes to the problem. Sometimes skin wounds appear as a result of an intrinsic condition such as a virus or venereal disease. Perhaps a lifestyle choice is involved, such as a lip cancer lesion due to chewing tobacco. In such cases, it is comforting to consider that the affliction is not the fault of the sufferers. A spider “attacked” them while they were sleeping. Nothing they could have done would have prevented this accident.
Richard S. Vetter (The Brown Recluse Spider)
Harm reduction is often perceived as being inimical to the ultimate purpose of “curing” addiction—that is, of helping addicts transcend their habits and heal. People regard it as coddling addicts, as enabling them to continue their destructive ways. It’s also considered to be the opposite of abstinence, which many regard as the only legitimate goal of addiction treatment. Such a distinction is artificial. The issue in medical practice is always how best to help a patient. If a cure is possible and probable without doing greater harm, then cure is the objective. When it isn’t—and in most chronic medical conditions cure is not the expected outcome—the physician’s role is to help the patient with the symptoms and to reduce the harm done by the disease process. In rheumatoid arthritis, for example, one aims to prevent joint inflammation and bone destruction and, in all events, to reduce pain. In incurable cancers we aim to prolong life, if that can be achieved without a loss of life quality, and also to control symptoms. In other words, harm reduction means making the lives of afflicted human beings more bearable, more worth living. That is also the goal of harm reduction in the context of addiction.
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
Cornelius Rhoades in San Juan (funded by the Rockefeller Institute), the children’s experiments at Brooklyn Doctors Hospital, the 1963 study at University of California’s Department of Pediatrics, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center study performed in conjunction with Genetic Systems Corporation, and countless others. It was clear that the healthcare industry was profit-oriented, and the entire structure was built around treating, not preventing.
Hunt Kingsbury (Book of Cures (A Thomas McAlister Adventure 2))
Abstract: We have found that when patients with cancer are pushed off a high cliff this reduces mortality from cancer deaths by 100%. This represents an unprecedented reduction in cancer mortality, and we suggest this technique might be used to reduce cancer deaths around the world. I would follow this with my seminal study on ‘Removing the human brain to prevent strokes.
Malcolm Kendrick (Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense)
When we react to problems, as opposed to create with them, we get hooked into stress. When we are under constant low-grade stress—and it’s estimated that over 80 percent of us are all the time—this begins to hurt us.1 When we are stressed, our nervous system tightens up and we lose our creativity. Stress stops us learning, and if we aren’t learning, we aren’t growing.2 Stress, AKA fear, corrodes the curiosity and courage we need to experiment with the new. It is almost impossible to play big in life, if we are scared of looking like idiots, going bankrupt, or being rejected. Stress kills creativity and kills us too. Whereas small amounts of stress help us focus, engage, and learn, chronic or elevated stress burns us out, literally as well as metaphorically. People who live near airports and deal with the stress of giant airplanes roaring above them have higher rates of cardiac arrest than those who don’t.3 People who deal with a controlling or uncommunicative boss have a 60 percent higher chance of developing coronary heart disease than those who don’t.4 Stress leads to tangible changes inside all the cells of the body. Specific genes start to express proteins, which leads to inflammation; and chronic inflammation is associated with killers such as heart disease and cancer. Over time, stress reduces our ability to prevent aging, heal wounds, fight infections, and even be successfully immunized.5 Unmanaged stress, simply from having a sense of disempowerment at work, can be more dangerous than smoking or high cholesterol.
Nick Seneca Jankel (Switch On: Unleash Your Creativity and Thrive with the New Science & Spirit of Breakthrough)
If more people die from other causes, then there are fewer people left to die of heart disease. As with throwing people off cliffs to prevent deaths from cancer. If you give people a drug that increases deaths from cancer you cannot then die of heart disease. The reason why the rate of deaths from heart disease went down in the pre-statin cholesterol lowering trials is precisely because the rate of death from other causes went up. This is simple logic. Page one, sentence one.
Malcolm Kendrick (Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense)
Activation of the androgen receptor (AR) is crucial for tumor cell progression and survival of prostate cancer, and androgen deprivation therapy remains the main clinical approach in men with locally advanced tumors ■ Current therapies incompletely suppress the androgen–AR axis, but a multiple therapeutic approach, targeting androgens and their receptor, has potential to improve clinical outcomes ■ Treatment of prostate cancer cells with 5α-reductase inhibitors (5ARIs) inhibits cellular pathways regulating metabolism, cell growth and proliferation, triggering apoptosis and decreasing prostate size ■ Although 5ARI treatment reduces the risk of developing prostate cancer, patients treated with these drugs have tumors with higher Gleason scores than those who receive placebo ■ Use of 5ARIs to prevent and treat prostate cancer remains controversial, and further investigation is necessary to understand the presence of more-aggressive tumors in patients receiving these drugs
Anonymous
Chlorophyll: builds a high red blood cell count helps prevent cancer provides iron to organs makes the body more alkaline counteracts toxins eaten improves anemic conditions cleans and deodorizes bowel tissues helps purify the liver aids hepatitis improvement regulates menstruation aids hemophilia condition improves milk production helps sores heal faster eliminates body odors resists bacteria in wounds cleans tooth and gum structure in pyorrhea eliminates bad breath relieves sore throat makes an excellent oral surgery gargle benefits inflamed tonsils soothes ulcer tissues soothes painful hemorrhoids and piles aids catarrhal discharges revitalizes vascular system in the legs improves varicose veins reduces pain caused by inflammation improves vision
Victoria Boutenko (Green for Life: The Updated Classic on Green Smoothie Nutrition)
You see, team,” Dan said passionately, “our problem is negativity, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. I believe where there is a void, negativity will fill it. And, unfortunately, within every organization you get voids in communication between leaders and their employees and between different teams and team members. It happens everywhere: with sports teams, work teams, family teams. Within these voids, negativity starts to breed and grow and, eventually, like a cancer it will spread if you don’t address it. As an executive team it’s up to us to do everything we can to prevent these voids from occurring and when they do occur, we must quickly fill them with positive communication and positive energy. People don’t just want to be seen and heard. They want to hear and see, and if they don’t feel like they are part of the company then they will assume the worst and act accordingly.
Jon Gordon (The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity at Work (Jon Gordon))
A Pap smear would give a woman a chance to receive preventive care [and] greatly decrease the likelihood of her ever developing cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)