Cancer Runs in the Wrong Direction

By Menopause Taylor

The “C” word. 

Everybody knows what the “C” represents: “Cancer!”

It wasn’t until the mid 1900s that people could even bring themselves to actually utter the word “cancer” instead of merely whispering “the C word” when speaking about cancer. It’s as if they were trying to distance themselves from mere mention of the word “cancer.”

This goes to show just how much fear we associate with cancer. We fear dying from it. We fear treatment of it. We fear diagnosing it. We even fear talking about it. In essence, we really just want to run away from it in every way possible.

So, maybe that’s why there are so many fundraising events for cancer that involve running:

• Run for the Cure
• Run to Beat Cancer
• Race for the Cure
• Run for the Cancer Cure
• Race for Life Without Cancer
• Charity Run for Cancer
• Walk, Run, or Wheel 5K Cancer Cure

Multiply all those by the various societies and foundations that host them, and you’ve got dozens of different ways to run from cancer.

The first cancer society was the American Cancer Society, formed in 1945. And it was more of a religious-like movement than anything else. It was as if eradicating cancer equaled eradicating sins. The aim was to “convert” people. (Hey, that’s another “C” word!) It was headed by non-medical people for the purpose of educating the public about cancer. But, instead, it mostly scared the public about cancer. And, by the mid 1950’s it represented a crusade (“C”) against cancer.

The underlying problem with the “C” word is that cancer is not just one disease. It’s many different diseases, caused by many different culprits (“C”), with many different manifestations, and many different treatments. Very few of those treatments constitute “cures.”

So, grouping hundreds of different diseases under the umbrella of the “C” word is just plain cooky.

The runs from cancer eventually became “the war on cancer.” In 1968, curing cancer became a national goal in the United States. This was after the “moon shot for cancer” failed in 1960. That had been a matter of asserting that, if we could put a man on the moon, we could find a cure for cancer. But, of course, there’s only one moon, while there a many different cancers!

What everybody seems to have forgotten is that, throughout the entire history of medicine, no disease has ever been eradicated by a treatment program alone. All cures have been a combination of targeting the cause of the disease and learning how to prevent it.

Cancer is a disease of civilization and aging. In other words, the more we get away from primitive ways of life, and the longer we live … the more likely we are to get cancer.

So the real focus on cancer needs to be on cause (the good “C”), not cure. What is it about our modern way of life and the aging process that increase our risk for cancer? Ironically, all cancer societies ignore cause … and focus instead entirely on cure.

And the more common a risk factor for cancer becomes, the more cancer cases there are … and the more difficult it is to pinpoint the cause. This is further complicated by the fact that it takes a decade or two for a cancer to develop into a diagnosable cancer. And risk factors are merely correlates (“C”) for cancer. They aren’t causes of cancer. So cancer causes are not “proximate” causes. They are “distant” causes.

I guess the runs from cancer should be double and triple marathons rather than 5 or 10 Ks.

So now we have people running around, blaming all the wrong things as causes of cancers. For example, instead of accepting the fact that many aspects of our current way of life cause breast cancer, women choose to blame HRT. So they’re all running around citing HRT as the proximate cause of breast cancer. The thought that their diets and lifestyles are the culprit is unfathomable! And we have medical professionals firing the shot to start the race and declaring the winner at the finish line. They incorrectly terrorize women with the warning that HRT “causes” breast cancer. And, although the entire race is a complete falsehood, everyone just keeps running around in circles perpetuating the lie.

It’s as if we just can’t accept the fact that it is we who cause our cancers. Yet, we just have to blame something else.

Funnily (or infuriatingly) enough, many of the basic causes of cancer were identified hundreds of years ago. The problem is that modern man and modern medicine suffer from a collective amnesia about its history.

We’ve even created “courts of law” requiring “proof’ that something causes cancer. And, despite the fact that the causes of some cancers have been obvious for centuries, centuries old knowledge of what causes cancer are not admissible in court. And the long timeframe over which cancers develop make it an uphill run to prove a cause for any given cancer. It’s absolutely impossible to meet the burden on proof.

So the verdict on cause ends up being one for which there is absence of evidence. But, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Every cancer has a cause.

Of course, there’s all sorts of “research.” But what does the research target? Cure … not cause.

Besides, discovering cause makes no money, whereas discovering more cures does. So all the research runs toward cures.

And who are the researchers doing that research? They are the very industries that want to conceal the true causes for their own monetary benefit … not independent researchers who what to reveal the causes for the overall public benefit.

So, the industries doing research claim that the causes are sooooo complex … so much so that more research is necessary. This, obviously, warrants more money in order to do all that research.

And that’s where all the runs for the cure come in.

People are running here and running there. They are raising piles and piles of money in search for the cure for the “C” word. They produce study findings that shed doubt on the real causes and perpetuate the need to find false cures. Ultimately, they manufacture both chemotherapeutic drugs and doubt. This ensures a steady stream of funding, while side-stepping the underlying matter of cause.

The runs for the cure are fueled by the false belief that a cure is actually within reach. I mean, do all those runners think they’ll find a cancer cure at the finish line? All these promises to run toward the cure are an example of over-promising and under-delivering. The very idea of finding a single cure for hundreds of different kinds of cancer is just preposterous. How did people come to believe in such a possibility?

The whole thing reminds me of a song entitled, “Against the Wind.” The lyrics go:

Against the wind:

I’m still running against the wind.

I’m older now, but still runnin’ against the wind.

Like the singer of this song, the cancer cure runners are running against the wind!

Another interesting shift in the direction of all these runs for the cure has been a change of focus from general causes to individual cures. Instead of educating all of society to avoid the likely causes of cancer, the goal has become to pressure each individual cancer victim to pursue the available cures for it. Face it: Once you have cancer, you think about cure, not cause.

Over time, the “C” word had become one great big booming business. And it’s all because we’ve created a great big game of cancer hide and seek. The causes have been right under our noses for centuries, and yet, we’re running for the cures.

I think everybody is running in the wrong direction. We should be running from the cause, not running for the cure.

Turn around, everybody! Let’s start running in the right direction. Let’s run from the cause!