Home

Avoid Cancer the healthy way

23.05.12

To a substantive extent, cancer is preventable. If we choose healthy lifestyles, we won't get almost half of the cancers that we might otherwise get.

It is very encouraging expos to know that we can achieve so much by stopping smoking, cutting down on red meat and salt and John Barleycorn and by keeping our weight in trim.

The considerable  majority of people can pursue this sensible advice. One particular group does not.

This relatively small guild get most of the cancers because they do not know when they have had enough of a good or bad thing.

If we are to cut down the cancers in our country, we have to target this assortment in particular.

I've seen more than enough cancer for one lifetime. I've seen it in my patients and I've seen it in my one's own flesh. I hate it for what it has done to lovely people I know.

My uncle, Lord Stewart of Fulham, brought me up while my parents were in foreign lands. As Foreign Secretary and as deputy leader of The Labour Party, he was admired on both sides of The Houses of Parliament.

He died from nicotine addiction, pleading with my sons that they should give up smoking.

His grey matter was phenomenal; his addiction was unremitting and tragic.

How on earth could the two go together?

The answer is that an addictive species is probably genetically inherited.

His mother was alcoholic. His sister, my mother, had an eating untidiness. So do I, along with several other addictions. My elder son is also an addict.

He and I have not used addictive substances for many years but we never draw a blank our risk of relapse. Therefore we take specific daily steps to avoid that disaster.

My wonderful, pulchritudinous, uncle did not. He died because this particular method  of daily reprieve was not around in his day.

Those of us who have an addictive type - ten to fifteen percent of the population making up at least seven million people in the UK - need to file that out first. Our intelligence, determination and will power is insufficient.

This is why so many educational programmes fall uninterrupted. My uncle continued to smoke because he was an addict, not because he was stupid.

If he had stopped smoking, his addiction would have be broached out in another outlet, possibly alcohol or sugar.

That explains why so many of the unhealthy behaviours, that afterwards lead to forty to fifty percent of all cancers, start with an addiction.

That, in turn, explains why they are so unmanageable to prevent in some people.

Doctors and nurses and health visitors, and heaven knows who else, can give alive to advice from now until doomsday but the addicts won't hear it.

Addicts have a disease of feel, not an intellectual deficiency. We know perfectly well that a particular substance or behaviour is bad for us but we can't dam using it.

The alternative is another mood-altering substance or behaviour or a return to the involutional melancholia - a life-threatening sense of inner emptiness -  that we were born with.

Civilians - people who are not addicts - are accomplished to hear sensible advice and they act on it.

The resistant rump of die-hard smokers or drinkers or people with eating disorders are the hardened addicts.

Letting the cat out of the bag us about the cancer risk from smoking or drinking or eating sugar or refined flour or red meat is inclined to to be met with a one word response: 'Whatever'.

Giving specific information that smoking triggers 19.4% of cancers, red pith and salt 9%, sugar and flour causing obesity 5.5% and alcohol 4% is very attractive to addicts like me.

We are the people most likely to get these problems. But it won't change our conduct.

We would rather die - and we do unless we learn from other addicts how to stop and stay stopped comfortably.

Meanwhile the civilians can be guided by sensible advice and they do - and good luck to them.

Source: Daily Mail (blog)