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Cancer Is a Man-Made Disease,


Karlis

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Cancer Is a Man-Made Disease, Controversial Study Claims:

Is the common nature of cancer worldwide purely a man-made phenomenon? That is what some researchers now suggest.

The rarity of cancer in mummies suggests it was scarce in antiquity, and "that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization," ... Read more

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I didnt read article yet but I can already assume it is sam as with Osteoporosis. Ancient people didnt suffer from it. Because they didnt live long?

Doubtly. In Catal Huyuk we can found people died in age 60.

Its modern disease.

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"Cancer is very rare in modern societies in humans under age 30," oncologist Dr. John Glaspy at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center told LiveScience. "In ancient times, people rarely lived to be much older than that. So cancer was rare. The 'sin' of modern societies is having people live to be much older."

This quote is rubbish.

Too many children have cancer....

Loads of things in our lives give us cancer, a lot of things we don't need. The things is though, nobody in authority truly cares, cause it keeps the numbers down.

Cancer is like our own natural predator now. I think it's half nature and half the nasty stuff we eat and surround ourselves with.

Can you imagine our population without cancer?! It's why I doubt we will have a proper cure recognized by Doctors, pharmaceutical companies and other authorities.

There is ways to prevent and even sometimes cure cancer if you research it. It's all about what you put into your body etc.

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I didnt read article yet but I can already assume it is sam as with Osteoporosis. Ancient people didnt suffer from it. Because they didnt live long?

Doubtly. In Catal Huyuk we can found people died in age 60.

Its modern disease.

Read the link, they did suffer from cancer, it was just less common.
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cases_crude_all_png.png

The average age of an Ancient Egyptian was 30. If they tested hundreds on random people that died before 30 nowadays then surely they would get roughly the same results.

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/incidence/age/

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_average_lifespan_of_ancient_Egyptian

Edited by DKO
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Cancer Is a Man-Made Disease, Controversial Study Claims:

Is the common nature of cancer worldwide purely a man-made phenomenon? That is what some researchers now suggest.

The rarity of cancer in mummies suggests it was scarce in antiquity, and "that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization," ... Read more

This is really a problem with understanding the biological factors that lead to a malignant cell and understanding stastics. Granted there are more things now that cause cancer because at one time no one even burned anything for heat.

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This just seems like not the most well-designed study. I mean, you don't know the social class of the people mummified; the article says nothing about their age range, the fragility of the mummies, not to mention the difficulties that might insue from trying to diagnose cancer through anything but visual identification of large tumors--after significant disease progression.

There are, I think, a number of errors in this article.

1. "Cancer is very rare in modern societies in humans under age 30," oncologist Dr. John Glaspy at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center told LiveScience. "In ancient times, people rarely lived to be much older than that. So cancer was rare. The 'sin' of modern societies is having people live to be much older."

First of all, I explained this briefly in another thread. It's a misinterpretation of life expectancy values to claim that people were dropping dead at 30, 40, whatever the average life expectancy was in ancient times. Life expectancies were low because of high infant mortality rates. So if you have 2 out of 3 babies not living to their second year of life, your overall life expectancy is going to drop significantly. In the ancient world, we have records of near-modern or modern lifespans in Greek philosophers and Egyptian pharoahs. I believe one of the Ramses lived into their 90's, Plato lived to 80, Aristotle 62, Socrates 71 (all according to wiki).

2. The rarity of cancer in mummies suggests it was scarce in antiquity, and "that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization," ...

I agree with what FurthurBB said above. Today, certain viruses such as HPV are known to increase the risk for cancer. A highly contagious cancer that is parasitic in origin is threatening the existence of the Tasmanian devil as a species. Were there no viruses or parasites in the ancient world? None of the high fat-intake and lack of exercise that are now said to increase your risk of cancers?

Cancer is not just caused by "man-made chemicals"; cancer etiology is usually very complex and multi-factorial, taking decades to develop. You can't tell an individual that "this" caused your cancer, you can only talk about increasing and decreasing risks on a population level. I don't have an in-depth understanding of oncology, but this article strikes me as very naive and simplistic.

Edited by Cybele
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And having the advantage of 2 years of hindsight it was pretty easy to see this was a crap study. Dr. Novella from the period even;

File this one under – massive and unjustified speculation based upon limited data.

There are multiple news reports of a recent study looking at mummies to see if there is any evidence of cancer. The results:

Professor Rosalie David, a biomedical Egyptologist at the
, and a colleague, Professor Michael Zimmerman, searched for evidence of cancer in hundreds of mummies, fossils, and ancient medical texts. One might say that the silence was deafening.

This was an interesting study in medical forensics, but I do not think it is so obvious how to interpret it. The spin in the media is this:

The mummies don’t lie. David concluded that their findings, “along with other data from across the millennia, has given modern society a clear message—cancer is man made and something that we can and should address.”

Slow down – let’s back up a bit. The assumption here is that if cancer occurred in ancient times there would be evidence for it in mummies. The authors are quick to dismiss the obvious factor that people live longer today, and age is the primary risk factor for cancer. The age range of the mummies they examined was 25-50. That’s young. The risk for most cancers really takes off after age 50, and continues to rise with age.

They also mention childhood cancers, but many of those are not solid tumors, but blood-based cancers like leukemia. There would be no tumors to find in a mummy. In any case, there does not appear to be any child mummies in their study.

So I don’t think the age factor can be so easily dismissed. This is not to say that there are not other factors that have increased the risk of certain cancers. Smoking is now common in the world, and is a major risk factor for lung cancer and some other cancers. Industrial exposure (from coal mining, for example) is also a factor.

Diet is often raised as a factor, and there is evidence that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables may be associated with a lower risk of some cancers. But the data is mixed, probably because the effect size is small. The data certainly does not justify blaming the modern diet for a significant increase in cancers. Also, we should not assume that the diet of ancient cultures was superior to the modern diet. It was much more restricted, and relied on a few staples, mostly grains. Today we have access to fresh fruits and vegetable from around the world year round. There are also some negatives to the modern diet, mainly in terms of excess, but it is not obvious how this all shakes out in relation to cancer risk.

Further it should be noted that this study is showing a lack of evidence, which is an inherently weak form of evidence on which to base conclusions. It is evidence, and as I said it may be saying something interesting, but much more thought and research will be needed to figure out exactly what.

Given all this, extrapolating from this mummy study to the conclusion that cancer is a result of modern society is scientifically absurd. But of course that is the dramatic conclusion that the media is going with in their endless effort (or so it seems) to confuse the public on all matters scientific.

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/do-mummies-get-cancer/

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i think it's in all of us. some people have the right set of circumstances, lifestyle, etc. for it to manifest itself.

i used to look with astonishment at those old ladies chain smoking their unfiltered cigarettes in the bingo hall, and they've probably been at it for decades. they're still here...

Edited by JGirl
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I read this a few days ago. Thank you for posting it karlis. I stopped posting items like this,because they are bashed ,as am I,because of my alleged biases .

I would say cancers existed before they were discovered by medical overviews in the 17th century,but given the causal connections made to things like smoking ,radiation and asbestos ,cancers of many kinds,have come into being.

If anyone has ever seen untreated breast cancer,you have to wonder why it was not documented somewhere by ancient man .

A woman breast turning into what looks like charred gristle,would have caught many a person's eye,especially in cultures that have women topless.

You don't hear of a lot of cases of women in these cultures ,with breast cancers .

I could be wrong . If anyone can show me cases of documented breast cancer ,from say ancient Rome,Egypt ,or even medieval times ,please do .

I picked breast cancer,as women get it ,at all ages ,not just old age.

There is also childhood cancers .

Can anyone say for sure children that died before the 17 th century ,died of a cancer ? Or was it malnutrition .

Edited by Simbi Laveau
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There are many types of cancer.

Some cancers are totally benign and essentially stay where they are, grow to a certain size and stop; others metastisize into a potentially deady outcome, as they spread within and to various vital locations of the human body, continue to grow, and choke-off vital areas.

Curiously, malignant forms of cancer have sometimes been referred to as "immortal" cells, as they continue to reproduce themselves.

Some scientists are very interested in this, as many of "normal" human cells throughout our body can only reproduce themselves so many times. In natural death, cell non-reproduction/repair is what causes us to live only so long.

Edit: I am not a doctor, so I only speak from my experience of my mother having had two different cancers. The second one killed her. So my info might not be exactly correct, but I think essentially it is.

Edited by pallidin
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..Osteoporosis is modern disease.

On topic:

Maybe cancer is caused by magnetic disturbance of earth magnetic field and in our bodies.

Scientists suspect that cancer could be cure by magnetic force.

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I could be wrong . If anyone can show me cases of documented breast cancer ,from say ancient Rome,Egypt ,or even medieval times ,please do .

\

The world's oldest documented case of cancer hails from ancient Egypt, in 1500 b.c. The details were recorded on a papyrus, documenting 8 cases of tumors occurring on the breast. It was treated by cauterization, a method to destroy tissue with a hot instrument called "the fire drill." It was also recorded that there was no treatment for the disease, only palliative treatment.

There is evidence that the ancient Egyptians were able to tell the difference between malignant and benign tumors. According to inscriptions, surface tumors were surgically removed in a similar manner as they are removed today.http://cancer.about.com/od/historyofcancer/a/cancerhistory.htm

Ancient Egyptians were the first to note the disease more than 3,500 years ago. Both the Edwin Smith and George Ebers papyri contain descriptions of conditions that are consistent with modern descriptions of breast cancer. For example, one nameless ancient Egyptian surgeon describes “bulging tumors” in the breast and states that “there is no cure.” In 460 B.C., Hippocrates, the father of Western Medicine, described breast cancer as a humoral disease. In other words, for Hippocrates, the body consisted of four “humors” (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), which mirrored the building blocks of nature (air, fire, earth, and water)--and any imbalance of the system of humors caused sickness or even death. For Hippocrates, cancer was caused by the excess of black bile, or “melonchole.” This logic made sense to Hippocrates because the appearance of an untreated breast tumor would be black and hard, eventually erupting through the skin with black fluids. He named the cancerkarkinos, a Greek word for “crab,” because the tumors seemed to have tentacles, like the legs of a crab. Hippocrates considered surgery dangerous because those who had the tumor excised “perish quickly; while those who are not excised lived longer (Olsen 2002).

In A.D. 200, Galen, Hippocrates successor, also describes cancer as excessive “black bile” but, unlike Hippocrates, Galen also realized that some tumors were more dangerous than others. Galen also discusses a wide range of pharmaceutical agents to treat breast cancer, such as opium, castor oil, licorice, sulpher, and a variety of salves, as well as incantations to the gods. For humoral physicians, surgery to remove the tumor or entire breast was not even considered to be an option for a cure since they assumed the cancer would just reappear near the surgical site or somewhere else in the body. For Galen and physicians succeeding him over the next 2,000 years, breast cancer was a systemic disease, which meant it was a disease of the entire body, not just one localized part. The dark bile was believed to course throughout the entire body--so even if a tumor were removed, the bile would still remain in the body, ready to create more tumors.

Until the seventeenth century, physicians assumed that Galen had the final word on breast cancer and that there was nothing left to discover. However, in 1680, French physician Francois de la Boe Sylvius began to challenge the humoral theory of cancer by arguing that cancer did not come from an excess of black bile but from a chemical process that transformed lymphatic fluids from acidic to acrid. In the 1730s, Paris physician Claude-Deshais Gendron also rejected the humors theory and insisted that cancer developed when nerve and glandular tissue mixed with lymph vessels (Olson 1999).http://www.randomhistory.com/1-50/029cancer.html

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There is also childhood cancers .

Can anyone say for sure children that died before the 17 th century ,died of a cancer ? Or was it malnutrition .

Most childhood cancers are cancers of connective tissues or soft tissues: Leukemias, lymphomas and neuroblastomas. These are conditions that probably wouldn't have been recognized for what they are in antiquity with the knowledge of what cells even were. However that isn't to say it didn't exist or that they didn't recognize it as 'tumors' if it created large metastases that were visible to gross inspection.

For example there have been Homo erectus skeletons found with jaw tumors consistent with Burkitt's lymphoma, a cancer endemic to parts of Africa caused by epstein-barr virus. See A history of Leukemia

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From the other topic; this maybe instructive for some on what cancer actually is:

Timeout!

As this is the science section of the forum, I think some people should take care to post a little more accurately regarding cancer. There is a lot of misinformation in this topic thus far.

First and foremost, as has been alluded too, cancer is a disease of age. Why?

When your cells replicate, the protein machinery which copies the DNA can make errors. The rate of error is very low, maybe like 10-8 per base pair, per gene. We see a couple of things which refute what some posters have said on this topic. Firstly, cancers are more common in tissues which continuously divide throughout the life of the organism, like epithelia tissues. Secondly, as others have pointed out, cancer is normally a disease that is associated with "older folks". Hmmmmmm.....A clue?

Yes in deed. It was incorrectly pointed out that cancers were an "old adaptation to cell growth". This is blatantly false. When a cell is going to replicate, it has various checks and balances which occur during interphase of the cell cycle. These checks say things like "DNA for such and such gene is too damaged, therefore you should not replicate and instead die". Cells do a heroic little then, called apoptosis--In which they choose termination over potentially dangerous growth.

The problems occur, because over the course of a lifetime, you accumulate (despite the low error rate) errors to this system of checks and balances. And a cell will be more likely to "break away on his own" than follow the colony rules. That cell's progeny (he keeps dividing) also inherit his selfish approach to colony live and thus a tumor is born.

This in itself wouldn't be that big of a problem, because your body has specialized white blood cells which can still induce apoptosis in these "breakaway" cell lines, dubbed natural killer (NK) cells. These NK cells work by affecting a "death receptor" on the surface cancerous cells activating a signal transduction pathway that ends with a special type of protease (think of them as little pac-mans for proteins) destroying the cell from the inside out. If you are over the age of 20ish, this is a process which happens in your body every day. Problem solved, back to life as usual. But is it?

Remember we said that cancerous cells require an accumulation of errors to become "cancerous". They also acquire more errors which do a funny thing, they begin to excrete soluble copies of these death receptors so that when NK cells come around, their surface ligands (the thing which binds to the death receptors) get blocked and are ineffective.

Never fear, there is yet more checks and balances which can stop the cancerous colonies. Because these cells are quickly proliferating they require an increased supply of oxygen and nutrients. A cancerous colony will quickly burn itself out and die without the proper nutritional requirements met (for anyone who's ever taken a gross anatomy course and dissected a human, you'll note the many tumors and "pre-cancerous" growths found in the older cadavers, which did not kill them).

So again, cancerous cells must "get lucky" with more errors. They have to have certain genes turned on which are expressed during regenerative healing or embryological development that stimulate the growth of vasculature (blood vessels) to the tumor, otherwise starvation will ensue (in deed a great many chemotheraputic agents target this ability for cancerous to acquire vasculature and work by "starving" the tumor).

We are yet still faced with another problem for cancerous cells. As a tumor grows and gets crowded the cells, despite improved vasculature, will burn up nutrients and the tumor size will be self-limiting. This is why you could have a tumor in your leg or another "non vital place" for years and years with no problems.

We come again to an accumulation of errors (see the repeating theme?). Some of the offspring in that tumor may happen upon another group of "lucky" errors which allow them to "pick up and move shop". This is of course, really bad for the over all health of the organism and is often the point of "terminal no return"-Or what we say in medicine, metastasis.

Cancer is literally "a series of unfortunate events" (Great book by the way!), that take (in most cases a life time to accumulate).

There are of course, more rare cancers which can manifest earlier in life and the genetic basis of these (with your new education now, I'm sure you could hazard a correct guess) is inherited mutations to these cell control cycles. For instance, a rather famous one(s) (really a group) comes from xeroderma pigmentosum. Mutations to the "repair machinery" which allows us to repair DNA damage caused by UV light (thymine-thymine dimerizations for any of you biology savvy people).

In the case of these inherited dispositions to cancers, by damaging the repair or "checks and balances" machinery, cancerous growth is expedited and manifested at a much earlier age.

So is cancer a "outcome of the modern world"? Inadvertently yes. Because people in the west don't die at the age of 30 from things like small pox, scarlet fever or diphtheria because of modern technology and medicine, your more likely to live a longer healthier life which gives your cell lines a chance to accumulate errors to the "point of no return". Of course, people argue about returning to a "healthier life-style" like that of the "ancients" and if living fast and dying young (<30 years of age) is your cup of tea then I'd encourage you to forgo the perks of "modern life-styles".

The up note is that modern medicine is becoming exceedingly good at treating, preventing and stopping cancers before they become a problem.

Patients often ask, why cancer? We get trained at the hospital to explain to patients, their families and loved ones, any number of causes and reasons for various types of cancer. From "just plain unlucky" to "maybe you shouldn't have smoked for 40 years" (of course we don't say it like that).

But the real answer is in our old friend the American public loves to hate: evolution. Because, we are (as someone remarked above I think) vessels for our genes, our bodies only need to serve the purpose of replicating those genes. How long we live, is a function of the age needed to successfully replicate those genes. Because once you've won at the game of evolution (pass on your genes) anything that happens to you afterwords cannot be impacted by natural selection.

From an evolutionary standpoint then, it makes little sense to evolve "better" replication machinery less prone to error. Because doing so would cost the organism in some areas that may require sacrifices which hurt the individual's chances of reproductive success-A very bad thing as far as your genes are concerned. They are much happier to take the approach that you live long enough to reproduce, then are free to die any kind of messy death you may or may not deserve. From their standpoint, your "job" is complete once you've replicated and from natural selection's standpoint replicating ensures no penalty against your genes.

If you study reproductive biology, you'll see a wonderful correlation in the lifespan of an organism and its reproductive strategy.

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I always thought cancer was a mutation, something that each of us can get because of millions of years of cross breeding. But is usually dormant until some specific thing we come in contact with activates it, yet that specific thing could be a different thing for each of us. To put it in another way, it could be something we all have in our genes, but for some people it never developes in their bodies and for some it does. And for those of us when it does deveolpe, it can be a ton of different things that may have activated it like smoking for one person or working around asbestos for another; or maybe a combination of both.

Besides that, the population today is a hellvua lot more than it was thousands of years ago. So this disease/mutation or whatever you wanna call it, is likely to be more noticeable because their are so many of us than before and we have come a long way in educating ourselves since then.

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Please read "The cause and cure of all cancers" by Dr. Hulda Clark.

Incredible insight into what cancer really is, why you can get it, how not to get it and how to get rid of it if you do.

Edited by praetorian-legio XIII
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Please read "The cause and cure of all cancers" by Dr. Hulla Clark.

Incredible insight into what cancer really is, why you can get it, how not to get it and how to get rid of it if you do.

Oh, but before anyone goes out and buys a copy, read this first:

http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Cancer/clark.html

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Oh, but before anyone goes out and buys a copy, read this first:

http://www.quackwatc...ncer/clark.html

Well of course that would be the response from the AMA. The last thing they want is a treatment and cure out there.

Remember, according to the medical community, only drugs or surgery can treat a desease. If that is what you believe, power to you and good luck, sincerely, with your chemo and radiation.

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Well of course that would be the response from the AMA. The last thing they want is a treatment and cure out there.

Remember, according to the medical community, only drugs or surgery can treat a desease. If that is what you believe, power to you and good luck, sincerely, with your chemo and radiation.

My chemo and radiation? Good luck to you if you ever develop cancer; may you discover that skin galvanometers do not cure cancer in time to find real treatment.

I mean, seriously, look up the scientific facts behind these claims, especially with regards to the intestinal fluke. They can be easily debunked.

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Cancer is an ancient disease before the advent of modern lifestyles said to accelerated the rate of cancer, I don't buy into the idea of why we have so much cases nowadays is from the way we live. Sure, there are carcinogens and cancer-causing materials we never use to have in our bodies, the problem is we feel there's a "pandemic" of cancer when the truth is there's no pandemic. I'm not picking a bone here, I gave out an opinion on the matter of cancer a "modern disease" when cancer always existed before we have or came out with the foods, chemicals and radiation devices said to caused cancer.

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