Cancer etiology, stress, opinion

[Guest guest]

If there were ever a definitional truism that has merit it is this:

" Scientists love the unknown. Engineers hate the unknown. "

Clinicians often like to see themselves as scientists, but they are not.

Patients want answers and professional opinions and clinicians are paid to

provide them. Clinicians usually get quite annoyed by the patience, the

scientific agnosticism, and epistemological fastidiousness of medical

researchers. Surely this is part of the reason that clinicians usually make

poor researchers and vice versa.

Scientists are not big on opinions. Once something is known, it is known

and not something to have an opinion about. Opinions to a scientist are a

contaminant. If a scientist expresses an opinion, other scientists will

listen courteously as perhaps their colleague has an interesting insight.

On the other hand their colleague might lack the cerebral sophistication

requisite to hold contrary thoughts or to recognize weaknesses in logic.

Their colleague could be impatient, a grandstander, a money-chaser, or even

a nut.

Clinicians are usually somewhat aware of the research in their area of

endeavor. They get the journals, but few clinicians have time to really

consider research that has few implications for their day-to-day practice.

Their opinions are largely shaped by large pharmaceutical companies and by

those with influence or authority in their professional practice.

Patients and non-professionals are at the bottom of the information totem

pole. They get their information from easily available standard-of-care

sources, from mainstream media (fronting for the big corporations),

advertising, from excitement-mongering bloggers and newsletter writers, and

from those with strong opinions within their affinity groups.

Billions of dollars have been spent studying the etiology of cancer. No one

has the time or brain capacity to learn it all, so instead we default this

chore to the big corporations and their mainstream media. These are the

conventional opinion makers that influence the bulk of the population and

the lawmakers. Their job is to harvest scientific research for what sounds

good in order to make money, and to protect the big corporations.

Look at what is presented to you as the major causes of cancer: poor food

choices, stress, oncogenes - anything that blames the victim and does not

create liability for the big corporations. Our understandings become

greatly misshapen and have a very low correlation to reality. Look at

sub-Saharan Africa during the first half of the twentieth century. The

various cultures had widely varying diets, often very monotonous, they

lacked basic nutrition and many were close to starvation. Their lives were

full of stress - survival was the issue. There were enormous numbers of

killer parasites, there was poverty and constant warring. They had all the

oncogenes that we have, yet, there was virtually no cancer until the

mid-fifties and oil production came to Nigeria. There were no controls to

the environmental pollution of the air, the food, the water, the terrain,

the workplace, and cancer rates began to reflect those that we see in the

rest of the developed world. Take a look at Irving Sax's source book,

" Cancer Causing Chemicals " and you realize that tens of thousands of

probable carcinogens have slipped into our world - chemicals that did not

exist two or three generations ago.

When we look at the causes of cancer we have to consider the contributions

of many factors: chemical, physical agents (e.g. radiation, UV, X-rays),

viruses (e.g., EBV, HSV, HPV, SV-40), geographical factors, trauma,

inflammation, phylogeny (different rates and types in different

vertebrates), ontogeny (cancer is much more likely to appear in the

post-reproductive period of life), genetic background, gender, hormones,

hemostatic correlates (DIC), and personality (cancer patients show a

tendency to abnormal emotional expressiveness, either excessive control or

extreme lability [Marcus, 1976] compared to normal controls and other

patient groups).

To answer a question such as whether or not stress causes cancer, one must

acknowledge the fact that there is no simple answer. Stress is part of the

human condition; with stress you grow brain cells. General stress tends to

SUPPRESS cancer growth (Selye, 1956). It has long been known that isolation

contributes to cancer. Mice develop spontaneous mammary tumors

significantly earlier if the animals are raised in isolation. Sanford et al

(1950) found that malignant conversion occurred in cultured cells that

received no specific treatment but were grown in isolation. Shelton and her

colleagues (1963) demonstrated that untreated normal cells underwent

malignant conversion in a completely isologous biological environment.

Sometime in the near future we will look at the reasons that hallucinating

schizophrenics seem to be immune to cancer, but paranoid schizophrenics have

rates that approach those of the mentally healthy. We will also look at

research that supports the notion that UNEXPECTED stress can contribute to

cancer rates. A useful sourcebook is: " The Psychobiology of Cancer:

Automatization & Boredom in health and disease " by Augustin M. de la Pena.

An interesting book for those less trained in science is, " 6 Psychological

Factors that May Lead to Cancer " by Tom Laughlin.