Cancer Is Man Made

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by jmpet, Oct 28, 2010.

  1. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    Cancer Is Man Made

    "Cancers are primarily an environmental disease with 90-95% of cases due to lifestyle and environmental factors and 5-10% due to genetics. Common environmental factors leading to cancer death include: tobacco (25-30%), diet and obesity (30-35%), infections (15-20%), radiation, stress, lack of physical activity, environmental pollutants. These environmental factors cause abnormalities in the genetic material of cells."
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer

    Cancer was virtually unknown 150 years ago before coal and oil. Today, you are statistically likely to get one form of cancer or another within your industrialized lifetime.

    I had thyroid cancer when I was 37- they removed my thyroid and I now take pills for the rest of my life to replace the effects my thyroid served in my body before it went cancerous. You are destined to encounter cancer directly or indirectly in your life.

    I grew up in The Bronx, which is cleaner than any other borough but still full of stale, used air and contaminants everywhere. I say this because I now live with my son in the country with fresh mountain air and fresh streams and forests full of ferns and trees far removed from Bronx air.

    I am pretty sure my son won't get cancer in his lifetime. If nothing else, all his cousins, aunts and uncles here in the mountains- all cancer free- are a testament.

    I point this out because I wonder how many country women get breast cancer- you know- the cancer that gets the most attention- versus how many city women get it.

    But overall, I am amazed that science has come to the clinical realization that cancer is man made.

    What are your thoughts on cancer?
     
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  3. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    I think it's probably correct to say most cancers are environmental (the genetic component is actually a predisposition, or sensitivity) but that still leaves plenty of complication, beyond that list, to unravel.
    People living in the country may not be so much better off, though, because of pesticides, fertilizers and fuels, as well as the same building materials, clothing and home furnishings as the rest of us have. Maybe better diet, but many farmers smoke. So you may not find such a big difference.
     
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  5. Raithere plagued by infinities Valued Senior Member

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    While there are certainly environmental factors you also have to take into account that 150 years ago the average life expectancy was about 45-50 years.

    ~Raithere
     
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  7. The Esotericist Getting the message to Garcia Valued Senior Member

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    Yeah, I said this way back during the health care debate, but everyone ignored me. I said we were debating the wrong thing, and instead we should discuss why the government, schools, society, and market place WANTS us all ill so they can continually treat us rather than cure us. There is no money in cures and keeping us healthy, only treatments.

    I recommend everyone view a documentary called "The Beautiful Truth" or look into Dr. Gerson's Therapy. Individual medical practitioners are kind people that are concerned about our health. However, the system and the paradigm they were educated in is one that has been set up now for well over two hundred years and is more designed for profit, not healing. If you look at it's structure, the way it's designed for licensing, and drug approval, it's FIRST priority is to maximize profits of the entrenched powers, then to ensure safety, and lastly to promote cures, technical advancements, and efficiency.
     
  8. The Esotericist Getting the message to Garcia Valued Senior Member

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    You are correct. In most rural towns at least, they have water treatment facilities, and one of the biggest cancer causing poisons is neural-flourotoxins. Fluoride only prevents tooth decay topically, there is absolutely NO reason to ingest it. In fact, on the back of your toothpaste, it says to contact poison control if ingested. So isn't it the lamest of all excuses to put it in the water to prevent tooth decay?

    Well, on the bright side, it will certainly boost profits in the medical care industry with all the ill health effects, yes? lol

    This is just the tip of the sinister iceberg. You should all do your own research. . . . if you wish to pay low medical bills, have healthy children, and live a long healthy life.
    http://www.scribd.com/doc/15945451/Neurotoxicity-of-sodium-fluoride-in-rats-Phyllis-J-Mullenix-Neurotoxicology-and-Teratology-Vol-17-No-2-pp-169177-1995
     
  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Cancer has been known for about three thousand years. Both the Greeks and the Egyptians studied it and experimented with surgical cures. You must remember that autopsy to determine cause of death is a very recent procedure, and microscopes were not widely used until the 18th century, so most cancers were not detected.
    We don't have enough data to guess how common cancer was in the relatively recent past, much less the Middle Ages or ancient times, so this statistic doesn't tell us anything about the history of the disease.

    Anyway, sure, I might die of cancer. But I'm 67. Two of my grandparents, born in the 1880s, didn't live to be this old. We're all gonna die from something.
    I've lived in the city and I've lived in the country. I'll take my chances with the city, thank you. I love civilization; not being part of it sucks. My parents thought it would be cool to move us out to some godforsaken hick town in the desert (Tucson) in the 1950s, because it was so healthy. I will never stop damning them for that miserable experience, even though they're both dead. In the 1990s, in their 80s, both from strokes. Now that is a horrible way to die, slowly losing who you are!
    More like 30, not even factoring in all the people who died in childhood.

    The life expectancy of an adult who had survived the rigors of childhood was in the low 50s at the end of the Paleolithic Era, when the human diet was primarily meat. The Agricultural Revolution 12KYA slowly converted pasture to farmland, so before long all but the wealthy and powerful people subsisted on a grain-based diet. Nobody knew anything about vitamins and minerals, and grains are a very poor source of anything except protein and starch. By Roman times, adult life expectancy had dropped to the mid 20s. It made remarkably little recovery until the late 19th century, when modern science discovered the nutrients we were missing by feeding grains to the only predatory species of ape.

    By 1900, in the prosperous United States, life expectancy had risen into the high 30s. The vaccines and antibiotics provided by modern scientific medicine then took over, especially reducing infant mortality. By the 1950s, the life expectancy of a newborn baby was in the 50s, one of science's most remarkable achievements. Adults expected to live into their 70s.

    Your point is well taken. In extremely recent times, most people simply did not live long enough to die of cancer.
     
  10. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    There are many factors to consider. Sure, including the approach of health-care professionals and the administrators who oversee their activities.

    I don't disagree that we ought to concentrate more on staying well, but the whole concept 'health-care' - as distinct from care of the sick - is a fairly recent one. People have not traditionally considered illness a social or political concern. It's not entirely fair to expect a single component of our civilization to be qualitatively different from all others. If we have an impersonal, industrial, technological, profit-driven society, chances are it will include an impersonal industrial, technological, profit-driven .......-system (fill in the blank).
    While those same doctors and chemists have devised terrific vaccines, testing procedures, safety controls and aseptic technique, our lifestyle has not really made prevention and wellness all that practical. The disparity of populations within a single nation, for example; the variety of working conditions, diets and environments; the range of medical, support and educational services available... Figuring out why people get sick is difficult enough - keeping them all healthy is impossible.
    And our messy, self-indulgent lifestyle isn't altogether forced upon us.
    How long have environmentalists, reformers and documentary film-makers
    been warning about the dangers of smoking, industrial pollution, food additives and untested drugs? Do we get excited an elect representatives dedicated to tighter regulation? Do we lobby to close down the factory that's killing a town - or to keep those jobs? Do we stop buying the poisons?

    I'm a bit skeptical about that number. In 1860, there are many old men, and some old women, on record. If the average is accurate, i'd want to know what population was included in making it. World? Industrial nations? US? What causes of death were counted? War wounds? Infants damaged in birthing? Famine victims?

    I'm pretty sure that if we took out the youthful deaths from unnatural causes and compared groups with similar incomes, then and now, the life expectancy wouldn't be quite so different.
    And i imagine there were cancers, too, that went undiagnosed, or by other names.
     
  11. John99 Banned Banned

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    Theres other things not taken into account but certainly shorter lives and also many of those shorter lives could have been DUE to cancer. If you dont know what your looking for you wont find it and on top of that it wasnt even looked for at all. Could really be that you reach a certian age and something is going to kill you because now everyone dies from somehting only because we know WHY they died, what to look for etc. whereas before it was "old age". But of course its old age, in a sense.
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Actually it's the other way round. Women had longer lifespans because men fought wars and engaged in the most dangerous work. As medical care improved and women were less likely to die in childbirth, the difference increased for a while.

    This is the origin of the medieval witch image. There were very few old men and rather more old women. This meant that there were a lot of experienced, wise women around. Add to that the fact that women did the domestic work and knew a lot more about healing and plain old getting along in the world that men did, and this encouraged people to seek the advice of women rather than men. Men of course could not tolerate this, so they identified old women as witches. The classic image of a toothless mouth, hunched back and sagging skin is simply how any old person looked in those days, and most of them were women.

    But to get back to your original question, there were a fair number of older people alive in the 19th century. What this observation doesn't take into account is that life expectancy was not a smooth curve. The majority of people did not die in their 30s and 40s. They either died before age ten, or after age 50.
    There are many different figures on historical life expectancy since the data is not exactly easy to gather. Here is a source saying that life expectancy at birth in the United States was 35 in 1800 and 47 in 1900. I have seen wildly different figures, these are the highest I've seen. It's generally accepted that the U.S. had one of the highest life expectancies in the world because A) we were a prosperous country and there was lots of food, and B) most of our population lived in rural areas, which in those days were much healthier than urban areas because modern medicine was not yet developed and epidemics were common in cities--not to mention the concept of sanitation hadn't quite caught on and the streets were piled with horse manure.
    The difference is at least 20 years, there's no way to duck it. By 1999, a full eighty percent of the U.S. population lived to be at least 65. Worldwide, more than half of all the people on earth who lived into their sixties are alive today.

    The reasons include: sanitation; vaccination; antibiotics; other medical advances; safer working conditions; safety improvements (notably in auto transportation); less war (the American Civil War killed three percent of the nation's population).

    One of the leading causes of death for adolescents in America is suicide. That's a sad statistic, but it says a lot about all the other causes of death that have been mitigated over the millennia.
     
  13. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    I meant that there are a lot of old men on record, and a few old women, as an afterthought, because women didn't do much of the writing or getting recorded, in the 19th century.
    As for the dangerous work, that's why When, Where and Who matter so much in averaging life-spans. While railway-building and mining might balance childbirth in cause of early death, war takes out more males, and the post-war epidemic and starvation takes out more children. So, in that decade, US stats would be skewed by the Civil War; another place, by some other local catastrophe.

    I'm not 100% convinced of this.
    If wise women were common, they wouldn't seem remarkable. Experienced old men, being rare, would draw more attention, especially given their relative social status.
    ...except for soldiers who had to treat wounds in the field, and farmers who treated livestock, and monks who did both, plus plagues and leper colonies...
    Which 'people'? Midwife-herbalists were female; doctors, farriers and barbers (dentists), male. I doubt most villagers were prepared to kill off their local sources of healing for gender envy.
    Not men, i think - priests. The herbalist midwives were practicing pagan medicine, and at least suspected of practicing pagan rituals, as well. Nothing like religious jealousy to ignite murder.

    Yes, that's the kind of thing i was after. We still don't know how many polls were taken among people who had a roughly similar standard of living to the people who were polled in 1920, 1950, 1980 and 2010, which would account for :
    And, yes again, social malaise accounts for more kinds of death than just suicide. Lots of fights, domestic and other violent crime, firearm and vehicular accidents, as well as all the physical illnesses caused and/or exacerbated by discontent, frustration, anxiety, depression, alienation - all those things. But not cancer, i think.
    A small irony is that the increase in life-expectancy in the last three decades is partly because of huge improvements in cancer treatment. I'm proof: twenty, even 15, years ago, i would have died; now it looks like i'll be a burden on society for another decade.
     
    Last edited: Oct 28, 2010
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    As you say, it wasn't that wise women were remarkable, it's that they were an affront to the dominant phallocratic religion.
    Did I already mention phallocracy? The demise of the traditional polytheistic religions, with their balance of male and female deities, and their replacement by the pathetic one-dimensional model of the human spirit offered by monotheism, put an end to any hope of having priestesses. AFAIK it was only in the waning decades of the last century that (only) the most liberal sects of Christianity and Judaism began to ordain female pastors and rabbis. And I'm sure the hyperphallocratic Muslims will require proof that Hell is frozen over before there are any female imams.
    Twentieth-century polls were managed very bureaucratically so the information is probably available if you want to dig for it. Nineteenth-century polls were pretty scattershot, for example just New Hampshire.
    We've made equally great advances against heart disease. Individual diseases like smallpox are being eradicated one at a time. We even wiped out malaria, until we found out that DDT was killing off entire species of birds--perhaps "You Can Never Do Just One Thing" is now engraved over the entrance to every science lab.
    On behalf of all the taxpayers, insurance policyholders, supporters of universities and national charities, and other citizens who helped make that happen, allow me to say it was worth it.

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    Of course I still miss my cyclamate.

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  15. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    One is most gratified, Sir.

    I am in awe of medical research - that would be equal parts reverence and terror. I've never seen that engraving over a lab door. Suppose we tattoo it on the back of all scientists' hands?

    Maltodextrin is quite satisfactory. It remains to be seen what it causes.

    Returning to the OP. Four of us with the same cancer started therapy together. Three men, one woman; ages 41 to 62. Two smokers, two non-; three drinkers or ex-drinkers, one non-. Two carnivores, one omnivore, one herbivore. Two urban, two rural. One worked in a nuclear power station, one retired from medical laboratory, one in an office, one on a farm. We spent all evening discussing this (the stuff they give you to tolerate a massive chemo session leaves you slightly manic for hours) and could not find a single common environmental factor. And yet, i still think there may be one - something as ubiquitous, perhaps, as benzene fumes.
     
  16. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Each of the artificial sweeteners has its own distinct undertone--at least to me, from a family that considered dessert to be the four most important meals of the day. I liked calcium cyclamate the best, but I've grudgingly adjusted to aspartame. My wife loves stevia, but to me it tastes like concentrated licorice.
    Apparently this happened quite some time ago so the stuff you're talking about was not marijuana. Manic is not one of its usual effects.
    Apparently you have little respect for the overwhelmingly random nature of the universe. You need a much larger sample than four of something to derive persuasive statistics!
     
  17. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Like, proof of the the absence of a common factor in four concurrent cases isn't proof of the absence of a unifying factor in 4000 cases over ten years? Maybe so.

    Stevia also has an icky metallic aftertaste. Fortunately, i'm not diabetic and can have plain old refined sugar. I mean, you've got to die of something, and sugar at least takes its time.
     
  18. Skeptical Registered Senior Member

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    There is a lot of bullsh!t spoken about the causes of cancer. The dominant cause is, and has always been, age. The probability of a 75 year old getting cancer in his/her 75th year is about 100 times the probability of a 25 year old getting it in his/her 25th year.

    In centuries gone past, as has already been mentioned, cancer was less common for the very simple reason that there were a lot fewer 75 year old people.

    If age is taken into account, it appears that cancer rates have not increased much, if at all, in the last 100 years. However, cancer survival has increased dramatically. I am 61 years old, and when I was a kid cancer was a death sentence - almost 100%. Today about half of all cancer patients live at least 5 years after diagnosis.

    You might think 5 years is not much. However, this takes into account the fact that most cancer patients are rather older. Lots die of age, rather than cancer. Thus a minimum increase in survival of 5 years is massive. The increase in survival of childhood cancer is dramatically greater.
     
  19. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    So what are you going to do about it? Close down the economy? Stop manufacturing goods?

    There is also a link between environment and Parkinson's.

    Many modern illnesses are linked to the modern environment.

    But once again, what are you going to do about it? It will be impossible to clean up the environment. You would have to close down the world economy as we know it. It's not going to happen.
     
  20. John99 Banned Banned

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    MacGillivray, your playing with yourself. Read my post- #8.
     
  21. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    i don't see the relevance.
     
  22. John99 Banned Banned

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    What do you mean? Do you think these things just started when we developed microscopes? Or is that just some coincidence to you?
     
  23. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    I don't buy that cancer was unknown 150 years ago, not diagnosed as often yes, people not living as long to get it, yes, but cancer was there.

    For instance, smoking has been around since this country started, but consider that the average age of diagnosis of Lung Cancer is 71 years of age. Yes 71. So the fact is until a significant amount of people started living this long the number of people who died of lung cancer was a lot smaller, yet today, Lung cancer is one of the most common cancers.

    http://www.lungcancer.org/reading/about.php

    Nor do I buy that cancer is significantly linked to industrialization. Yes there have been incidents that have had specific effects, but not in general.

    As your figures show, the biggest cause of cancer is self induced, the rest is guessing that modern industrial effects were worse than pre industrial,
    But

    http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20090813/cancer-death-rate-is-going-down-in-us

    Which shows that instead of your OP, the actual result of increasing industrialization is a steady decline in cancer mortality rates for the last 60 years in the US.

    Arthur
     
    Last edited: Nov 1, 2010

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