Cancer is the abnormal and rapid growth of our own body cells which may be due to multiple reasons and some reasons are still not fully known
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Cancer is a disease which is mostly misunderstood in today’s world. Some equate it with death, some call it a contagious disease and isolate the patient fully from society, some call it a haunting by the ghost and some delay the treatment out of fear. All these misconceptions have been there since ages and still persistent which cause a delay of proper treatment and make it incurable.
It should be clear what cancer really is. It is the abnormal and rapid growth of our own body cells which may be due to multiple reasons and some reasons are still not fully known. Cancer can affect any part of the body and each cancer is different and has different prognosis and treated differently so cancer is just not limited to one specific organ.
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Only 5 to 10 % of cancers are hereditary and rest of the cancers are caused by gene mutations either due to personal habits like tobacco chewing, alcohol intake, smoking, a high-fat diet like meat, exposure to harmful chemicals either in food or in the environment in which we live. Healthy lifestyle such as regular exercise, eating a lot of fruits and vegetables and avoiding harmful things can avoid cancer to a large extent but still, there are some cancers whose definite reasons are still not known and research is going on.
All cancers do not behave in the same way. Some cancers are more dangerous and some are slow growing. There are some cancers in which treatment is of short duration and some cancers need the long duration of treatment. Sometimes the patients and relatives compare their cancer with other patient’s cancer and its treatment and get confused that why this is happening to their patient and not to other patient but the fact is that other patient may be having cancer of different organ or it may be at a different stage.
Cancer is not an incurable disease if timely intervention is done. The main problem is that people don’t go to the doctor for a checkup for a long time even if they have some symptoms doubtful of cancer with the fear that they may not be diagnosed with cancer and this leads to delay in diagnosis and treatment of cancer. This leads to cancer advancing from stage 1 to stage 4 where it becomes incurable.
Many people believe that treatment of cancer is even worse than cancer itself but it if we don’t treat cancer early, it will progress and spread to the whole body which will become more painful and incurable leading to death. Also in the present times, there are various ways to deal with the side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy both by medicines and other alternative ways.
For example, patients fear of chemotherapy-induced hair loss but the fact is that it is temporary loss and hairs come back within a few months of completing treatment. With the advent of minimally invasive surgery like laparoscopic and robotic surgery, the surgery is done with minimal cuts in the body that leads to minimize postoperative pain and faster recovery and early discharge of patients with much-reduced complications.
Cosmetically also it causes the minimal scar to patients. Leaving cancer without treatment especially when the cancer is in the curative stage is not at all advisable. Cancer is not contagious in general except in cases of organ transplant from cancer patients, in that also the risk is extremely low. Only some cancers are caused by virus-like human papillomavirus or hepatitis b and c virus.
Although this virus can spread to each other by blood transfusions or can be sexually transmitted. In these viruses, in turn, may or may not later cause cancer. As cancer doesn’t spread directly from one person to each other so there is no harm in living closely with cancer patients.
Some individuals avoid a tumour being touched either for biopsy or surgical removal as they think that it leads to spreading of cancer but this is a myth and leads to either delay or complete abstinence from the treatment leading to the advancement of cancer and making curable cancer an incurable disease.
The most important thing to remember that if one feels any symptoms persist for a long time like any abnormal lump anywhere in body, unusual loss of appetite or weight, persistent blood loss or a chronic cough,one should consult doctor immediately and not speculate himself or herself .most of the times it is not cancerous but even if it is diagnosed then it will be in a curative phase which can be treated .delaying out of fear or myth can be dangerous.
Written by Dr.Vishnu Agarwal, Consultant Laparoscopic and Robotic Cancer Surgeon at Jaslok Hospital and Research Centre
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