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There is a great deal of misinformation in the lay literature about what causes cancer and how it can be prevented. Moreover, most people have heard very little about how physical healing occurs after cancer treatment. Some of this lack of good information stems from a long history of cancer being a topic that the media and the public didn't discuss. According to the Crusade, the official history of the American Cancer Society, one of the first goals of the ACS was to help people become familiar with and accepting of the word cancer.
A number of things happened over time to take cancer "out of the closet."
The American Cancer Society was instrumental, beginning in 1913, in educating the public about cancer. But it was a slow process. For decades thereafter, cancer still was not given mainstream media attention. Several individuals helped to bring about a change-including two women named Betty who were both diagnosed with breast cancer in 1974.
Betty Rollin was a young television correspondent when she had her first of two mastectomies. She wrote about her experiences: First, You Cry. More than two decades after her initial brush with cancer, she told readers, "When I wrote this twenty-five years ago . . . I didn't know anyone else-any female-who had only one breast. . . . Of course I wasn't as different as I thought. But it was 1975, when no one even said the word 'cancer' . . . not too many people said the word 'breast,' and even fewer said the two words together." The same year that Betty Rollin was diagnosed with breast cancer, so was Betty Ford. On September 30, 1974, an NBC news correspondent told the world about the president's wife who had just had a mastectomy. She said, "The terror that women feel about breast cancer is not unreasonable. What is unreasonable is that women still turn their terror inward."
These two high-profile cases helped to unveil breast cancer (and other cancers). No longer was cancer a disease that people didn't discuss. Instead, before long the public and the media couldn't get enough information about cancer. Still, remnants of what cancer had meant earlier persisted, and they are present to some degree even today. One reason is the long and sordid history of the term cancer itself. If we could describe the many different malignant conditions with other words instead, the diagnosis probably would not cause the same fear and anxiety, especially for those who live many years after their diagnosis.
But cancer is cancer.
A singular noun that denotes more than 150 different diseases-many of which are highly curable. In its simplest form, cancer means "good cells gone bad." We can also say, more technically, that cancer is uncontrolled cell growth. Cells, of course, are what our bodies consist of. The way in which cancer cells defy the rules of normal cell growth and death is complicated and only partially understood. We won't delve deeply into this process, but here are some basic facts:
- Normal cells are round, and clearly defined cell membranes surround them. Cancer cells have irregular shapes and borders.
- Normal cells grow, divide, repair themselves, and die in an orderly manner. Cancer cells grow and divide in a disorderly manner that causes them to squeeze out other cells and invade neighboring and sometimes distant tissues.
- Normal cells have a nucleus with twenty-three sets of chromosomes- biological material that contains DNA. A cancer cell is likely to have a larger-than-normal nucleus and to contain an abnormal number of chromosomes.
There is a constant turnover of normal cells in our bodies.
The most obvious place where you can see this process is in the skin: it dries and flakes, and new cells grow underneath what is lost. The loss of cells and their replacement with new, healthy cells occurs throughout the body. Cancer happens when malignant cells, out of control, continue to multiply at a fast rate and take over parts of the body. When they spread to a distant part of the body, the process is called metastasis.
We don't know all of the reasons that cancer begins, but we do know that for some people it has a genetic basis. So sometimes people are said to have a tendency toward developing cancer. Such a tendency doesn't necessarily mean that they will develop cancer, just that under certain circumstances, they may. We also know that there are cancer triggers, such as nicotine, some viruses, ultraviolet rays from the sun, and some chemicals. If someone has a tendency toward developing lung cancer but never smokes, then he may not ever have to deal with lung cancer. Since for many types of cancer we don't know who is genetically predisposed and what triggers may be factors in the development of a tumor, it is not possible to predict accurately who will develop cancer and who won't. It is likely that we will never be able to trace all cancers to a specific tendency or trigger or combination of the two. Instead, for many people the cause of cancer will probably be multifactorial (related to many factors). Scientists are learning more about tendencies and triggers all the time, and this knowledge is helping to prevent cancer and cancer recurrence.
In the meantime, the treatments for cancer are improving, though they still tend to be very toxic.
One important way that they often work is to kill cells that are in the process of dividing. The good news is that cancer cells are very vulnerable to such treatments because they divide so quickly and easily. Chemotherapy, for instance, while damaging to all the body's cells, is especially harmful to cancer cells. The bad news is that healthy cells are injured with most types of cancer treatment, so recovering from toxic drugs, radiation, and so on, can be a long and distressing process. If you have recently undergone treatment or are now being treated for cancer, having an understanding of how the body heals will help you regain your energy and strength more quickly and more completely.