Lung Cancer Association
why is lung cancer the only cancer caused by a person’s actions?
why is it that the american medical association can directly pinpoint smoking as the cause of lung cancer but they can’t pinpoint any cause for any of the other cancers? Could breast cancer be caused by the simple wearing of a bra? Could bone cancer be caused from drinking too much milk? Could cervical cancer be caused from having sex? I don’t think so. The doctors say these cancers are all hereditary. Explain to me how a 50 year old acquaintance of mine has smoked for 35 years and has a 98% lung capacity and no sign of cancer. wake up people this is one more way for the government to scare people. the more your scared the higher taxes they force you to pay.
Bless you, you need some detangler for all those knotted assumptions in your question.
The relationship between actions, or whatever, and cancer are determined by mathematical correlations. In other words, in X many people who do Y, Z many people will get cancer. The higher the ratio between X(Y)/Z, the more likely it is that the action and the illness are related.
Your assumption that lung cancer is the only self-inflicted cancer is not true. There is plenty of evidence that, for instance, colon cancer has shown a relationship to diet, as has stomach cancer. Skin cancer is related to sun exposure. Some cervical cancers are related to exposure to HPV (a virus), which is transmitted sexually, which means that cervical cancer is at times related to sexual activity. These cancers are all related to some degree to what people do to themselves.
Heredity is another one of those factors. X many people who have Y cancer have Z children who get the same. On the other hand, A many people who have B cancer have C children who don’t. You have to determine what the statistical probability of A happening vs C.
In a group of 50 year olds who smoke, Z many will get cancer and C people won’t. In this case, the Z/C number is high. Just because you happen to know a C personally doesn’t make Z untrue. This is known as confirmation bias–that you tend to think whatever is in front of your face (and whatever you personally believe in) is more true than something that isn’t, and you don’t look for evidence to the contrary. And then, there may be things that your friend is doing (like eating lots of vegetables) that protect her against cancer.
Now let’s deal with your “government scare” claim. In this case, you’re onto something. You know, all those nutritionists, cancer researchers, doctors, and politicians have to have someone to blame. If we didn’t care, they would mostly be out of jobs. So they scare us to get us to pay attention to what they have to say. On the political end, it is considered politically easy to tax so-called vices, such as drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco. So politicians make this peculiar argument that because it’s bad for you, it is reasonable for them to raise taxes on it. This is a conflicted moral stance, because then gov’t stands to make money off of other people’s bad behavior. But that’s what it is. [IMO, people who are buzzed on alcohol, tobacco or anything else are less likely to be politically active.]
On the other hand, sometimes this type of policy backfires. In Oklahoma, cigarette taxes were raised a great deal a couple years ago. Politicians were rubbing their hands with glee that revenues were going to increase, because all those sinners would have to pay double what they were before, and since they were engaging in behavior that is considered less than acceptable (mostly by politicians, who stand to gain), the smokers deserved what they got. In reality, the tax increase led people to quit smoking and to switch to chewing tobacco. So many people stopped smoking (or bought their cigs from Native American sellers, who were not subject to the tax), that tax revenues dropped a great deal. The state had to make up the money elsewhere.
So, here you can see that there are logical and consistent ways of understanding the relationships between behavior and illness. You can also see that sometimes, people will just do crazy stuff anyway, and politicians and other professionals just do whatever gets them the most attention and support first, and make up explanations later.
If you have a brain for math, you can study statistics and perhaps have a career figuring these things out for others. It’s a career that usually pays well. Thanks for asking a challenging question.
Research on TCM Evidence-based Medicine in Lung Cancer Part 2 of 2
