Is the breast cancer awareness effort overdone?

My contribution to this discussion:
Why isn't it called Breast Cancer Prevention Month?
Group warns shoppers to avoid 'pinkwashed' products
Mammograms cause breast cancer (and other cancer facts you probably never knew)

Not the most popular views, by far, but someone has to make a stand.

 

I think some of the claims in those links are overstated. For example, it's true that a diet of natural, unprocessed foods, is healthier and will reduce the incidences of many illnesses. But to say that a diet of "natural" foods will PREVENT cancer is extremist and unfounded.

And I really wonder about a source that highlights the word "lead" in a sentence where it is a verb "to lead to" and the link is to an article about the 82nd element in the periodic table.

 

I recently attended a seminar for medical professionals put on by the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine on the topic of vitamin D. It was absolutely mind blowing how many medical problems are caused and/or made worse by low vitamin D status. According to the research presented at the seminar, at least 50% (and potentially 99%) of breast cancer could be prevented and/or muted by the simple treatment of optimizing vitamin D status. Here's a link to one of the better presentations at that seminar: Vitamin D: Role in Preventing Cancer - UCSD-TV - University of California Television

More presentations from that seminar, and earlier similar ones, are available at GrassrootsHealth | Vitamin D Action - GrassrootsHealth | Vitamin D Action .

 

While I believe this article seriously overstates its case, there is still much more truth to it than most people are willing to admit. Many of the problems are not unique to breast cancer, but are common throughout U.S. big-industry medicine. Breast cancer just happens to be one of the more successful medical marketing campaigns.

For more examples, here is a link from an earlier post: How to brand a disease -- and sell a cure

Health care is viewed as a cost-is-no-object entitlement by most of the demand side (consumers), and a capitalist profit-maximizing opportunity by much of the U.S. supply side (big pharma, big industry medicine). This is a recipe for an economic train wreck.

 

The implication in the articles was that testing for cancer would be unnecessary. That suggests the claim that a "healthy diet" would eliminate all cancer. That's why I said I consider the claims overstated. Clearly, our modern industrial/chemical diet is causing many illnesses. My point is simply that it is not the cause of all illnesses.

"Cancer" is a condition, not a single illness. It has many causes, some environmental and some genetic. It happens when the genes go berserk. Gene reproduction is not perfect, and even under ideal conditions there will be some number of copying errors, some of which will lead to cancer. This is why it is preposterous to tout any one thing (e.g. vitamin D) as a cure-all for cancer.

We know many factors that greatly increase the risk of cancer. Some food additives and some pollutants are among them. Anyone who wants to reduce their chances of getting sick should strive to eat a balanced diet and avoid processed foods and chemical additives. But not even the most ideal dietary regimen can prevent all cancers or all illnesses. Again, this is why I said that the claims in the articles are overstated, when they claim that if people ate right they could forgo all testing. Modern medicine has its failings, but aside from obesity and diabetes, which result basically from overeating, people are healthier now, and live longer, than ever before in human history.

 

it's because it's an affectation of the boobs, nerfer. for one, women are still made to feel ashamed of our bodies through all kinds of psychosocial conditioning. for the other, facing the concept of having a significant part of our feminine identity be a source of disease is frightening. it's taking a very private thing and subjecting it to a lot of scrutiny.

men are all subjected to their own conditioning- why else the huge denialism among men of their susceptibility to breast cancer? that's a disease for women! breast cancer in a man is a huge threat to manliness. and i don't mean that in a sarcastic way, but in context of how society works...

this holier-than-thou, implication based, "you should have done xyz and you wouldn't have cancer" movement is a shameful and pathetic shift of blame to the victim. i absolutely abhor it, and i no longer have any tolerance for the shameless pandering of the likes of mike adams. the only thing i can remotely agree with is the objection to the marketing pinkwashing. genetics provide a massive source of pathology in cancers, something that no particular lifestyle or daily pill can make up for.

there is at best equivocal evidence for hypersupplementation of anything being beneficial, particularly when discussing fat-soluble vitamins.

this conspiracy theory-based argument of the "cancer industry" is truly sad and baseless, and i say that as a research scientist (an evidence based primary data-gathering scientist, not a "natural health researcher") who is not in the cancer research field, and never has/never will receive a single penny from any cancer funding agency or interest group.

 

I regularly have to deal with people, with good intentions, trying to get me to try all sorts of wacky diets and treatments because of BS they read in the interweb. Like you stated, Cancer is not one of those conditions that is cured by diet when you are already obtaining everything your body needs to be healthy. It's kind of like the "immune system boosters" that supposedly kills and cures cancer. Have these people really taken biology courses to understand how the immune system works and what cancer really is? lol

 

I'll answer with a question: Is it easier or harder to take biology courses, or to watch YouTube vids?

 

Ohhh you almost got me on that one but then I realized you forgot to stipulate whether or not one had to read the comments section of the YouTube video.

 

The studies are saying that a deficiency of vitamin D is causing disease.
Not that vitamin D is a cure all.
At one time they didnt know that a deficiency of vitamin C caused scurvy.
Vitamin C isnt a cure all ,but it will definitely prevent scurvy.

 

I think Daniel is referring to the people claiming vitamin D is a cure without deferring to scientific literature and/or clinical trials. There are people claiming that mega doses of vitamin D will cure cancer and there are no statements or inquiries to the patient's current vitamin D intake or system levels. To put it simply, there are people claiming that vitamin D will cure cancer, period. The problem with vitamin D mega-dosing is that it is another fad for conspiracy theorists and health food homeopathic nuts to jump on regardless of it's validity.

To be fair, the jury is still out on Vitamin D supplementation on otherwise healthy cancer patients and some studies show it could help in some cases. Thus far the American Cancer Society and most oncologists do not support mega-dosing with vitamin D but they do support ensuring you eat a healthy diet and supplementing your diet with vitamin D if you are at risk for low levels.

Info from Cancer.org

 

I agree its not a treatment,but not having a deficiency could very well be preventative.

 

Totally agree.

 

If you watch the UCSD video that I linked above, you'll see that most of the data compares vitamin D blood levels to cancer incidence. To say that megadosing cures cancer does not reflect current scientific study. However, it is true that there are individual cases where megadosing has been associated with remission.

What I found particularly telling in the video was the linear relationship between blood levels and cancer incidence. Low vitamin D was associated with the average incidence, and as vitamin D went up, the cancer rate went down. If one were to project the regression line to the zero incidence point, the blood level would be about 110 ng/nl. The problem with the projection is that there aren't any data points there. But another observation (at the seminar - I don't know if it's in any of the videos) is that there are zero reports of vitamin D toxicity at a blood level of 200 ng/ml or below.

One play would be to maintain a blood level of at least 110 ng/ml, but less than 200 ng/ml. That might maximize the cancer control aspect, while remaining within a known safe range. It will be decades before we have good answers to this sort of question, and all we can do is make our best cost/benefit estimates on the current data. The cost is trivial, and the potential benefit is extreme.

Personally, my last blood test showed 209 ng/ml. Many other blood parameters were improved over the values back before I started on high D. There is preliminary data that telomeres are preserved with high D.

 

It may be true that "at one time" people didn't know that scurvy is the result of a lack of vitamin C. At one time people lived in caves and didn't know that sex causes babies. But the ancient Greeks, who invented medicine as a field of study, knew that lemons prevented scurvy. So considering that they had no way of knowing that "vitamins" existed, I'd say your statement is pretty much bogus.

The problem with mega-doses of vitamins, especially fat-soluble ones, is that vitamins and other nutrients interact with each other and with food in complicated ways that insure that for every possible benefit from mega-doses there are half a dozen deleterious effects. Different vitamins affect the absorption and functioning of each other. Just as a medicine that is necessary to keep you alive will kill you in an overdose, so a vitamin that is needed for the proper regulation of metabolism will screw up your metabolism if you take too much of it. It's a matter of balance. If your environment or your lifestyle/dietary choices prevent you from getting an adequate amount of a vitamin, a supplement at the RDA can restore balance. But a mega-dose will throw everything else out of kilter. Do you really want to cut your chances of a one-in-a-hundred-thousand disease at the cost of causing a half a dozen other diseases?

People fixate on one scary possibility, and address that fear in a way that increases other equally-bad outcomes. It's like during the airplane hijackings of several decades ago, when people actually increased tenfold their likelihood of getting killed by canceling their European vacations in favor of long domestic driving trips.

 

Just a note on both of these statistics... while true, I think there are pretty significant differences between these and breast cancer.

First, it's relatively difficult to get proper treatment (pacemaker/defibrilator) in most cases of heart disease. Often you'll be stuck taking pills every day that will help... but not prevent a serious cardiac incident. You either have to have already survived a heart attack, or an irregular rhythm (which very, very often occurs irregularly) needs to be captured. People with heart disease could wear a holter monitor for a week and not have an incident of the irregular rhythm that will one day kill them. Unlike with breast cancer, doctors can't just biopsy a few cells to determine if you have a heart condition.

With lung cancer... lets face it, the reason that statistic is so high is because people smoke. People make a conscious decision to partake in an activity that is known to cause lung cancer - they willingly, even eagerly, drastically increase their chances for lung disease every day. There's no known activity that increases chances for breast cancer that millions of people do each day.



Don't get me wrong - all of these health problems are important. But unlike heart disease and lung cancer, with breast cancer there are some quick, simple steps people can take to discover it early. Breast cancer awareness isn't about visiting your doctor and having tests done - it's about being aware of the risk and performing easy, quick home tests regularly. Show me a way I can test myself - quickly, easily, and for free - for lung cancer or heart disease, and you'll catapult those onto the same level of awareness as breast cancer.