Life as the Goal

Prevention involves lifestyle, activity, environment, employment, housing, habits, access to medical care and awareness, with the goal of decreasing your chance of developing disease. This is more than just diet and exercise; it is a complete way of living with high standards that can not only decrease your chance of developing cancer but overall make you healthier, more energetic, and more beautiful from the inside out. Secondary prevention, also known as screening, involves routing medical tests designed to find cancer at an early and curable stage. The combination of primary and secondary prevention creates a powerful and protective shield against cancer.

As prevention is not systematically embedded in our society or even in our medical practice, it is left to our own initiative. Most people go to a doctor only when there is a problem to be fixed. We react to events and we rarely visit the doctor when all is fine. As a result, many physicians become so good at fixing problems that they don’t always know what to do with healthy person who wants to stay that way. Not all have been trained in the nuances of prevention. Your physician may not have all the necessary information or even time to discuss it while you are there seeking treatment for an identifiable ailment. A survey of Americans and their colorectal cancer screening practices found that inadequate communication between patient and health-care provider was the main reason patients were not being screened and these are screening practices that are widely known and have been proven to save lives. In fact, over 60% of eligible adults do not participate in proven life-saving colon cancer screening!

Preventive guidance from a physician can save lives, but we know that this communication between physicians and patients does not always take place. The important point for anyone interested in cancer prevention is that it serves you well to be inquisitive and proactive. Studies show that awareness of the benefits of screening contributed to people getting screened. So where does one find this essential prevention information? The media can be a poor source, with its noisy sound bites designed to get you to watch, do, or buy something. Very often, premature research that does not even apply to humans is announced, only confusing and diluting what we should all do to keep healthy. Even worse are the Internet sites that promote philosophies and approaches not based on proof, but on people’s unsubstantiated ideas. The goal of this blog is to help every interested person understand how to prevent cancer, with a clear understanding of how these recommendations have evolved based on science. Then if your physician doesn’t get to these subjects first, you cn bring them up. This also holds true for screening. If you never visit your doctor or discuss these finer issues of disease prevention, how will you know that you should start life-saving screening for colon cancer at age 50?

Another aspect of prevention is the awareness of wich symptoms need medical attention. For example, if you have had a change in your bowel habits, such as constipation alternating with diarrhea, or if you have a sore on your forehead that that does not heal, these are red flags to go to your physician for any evaluation. This will also reassure you of the non- cancer causes of those symptoms as well, because, contrary to your imagination, cancer is not the only possible cause of your symptoms.

Although the focus is on cancer, you will simultaneously be educated on heart and lung diseases, stroke, diabetes, infections and other degenerative diseases of life. Adopting a cancer-free lifestyle simultaneously prevents more than just caner.