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Strategic plan
We have posted our first essay to discuss details of our strategic plan to substantially reduce cancer deaths. Currently, cancer is the #2 cause of death in the United States, after heart disease, causing about 600,000 deaths per year. This essay discusses cancer deaths in more detail. See https://www.pathologyoutlines.com/ccnblog/strategicplandiscussion.html
How Cancer Kills
We have updated our essay, How Cancer Kills, at https://www.pathologyoutlines.com/ccnblog/howcancerkills.html. Excerpt:
"Our strategic plan aims to reduce U.S. cancer deaths from 600,000 (projected cancer deaths in 2022) to 100,000 per year. To reach this ambitious goal, we must better understand how cancer actually kills people. This essay proposes that cancer often kills indirectly by promoting marked physiologic disruptions in life's essential networks; however, physicians can prevent these deaths by correcting the network changes even before the cancer itself is treated. In addition, advanced cancer kills by creating a sense of futility, which causes individuals and the medical system to give up the fight."
More at https://www.pathologyoutlines.com/ccnblog/howcancerkills.html
American Cancer Society - updated mission statement
The American Cancer Society has updated its mission statement, which now reads as shown below:
"The mission of the American Cancer Society is to improve the lives of people with cancer and their families through advocacy, research, and patient support, to ensure everyone has an opportunity to prevent, detect, treat, and survive cancer." See https://lnkd.in/gbKwWdS6
The prior mission statement was “to save lives, celebrate lives, and lead the fight for a world without cancer.”
I don't know the details regarding the change, but I am pleased with this new, more rational mission statement that reflects that cancer is an inherent part of our biology that cannot be vanquished. I had previously criticized the phrase "world without cancer":
"The human body is composed of a myriad of interacting networks positioned at critical states, which is required for network flexibility to enable embryonic development, the inflammatory response to trauma and infection and the capability for our species to evolve to a changing environment. However, the tradeoff for maintaining these critical states is that cancer, a type of catastrophic systemic failure, is inevitable. We can reduce its incidence, we can detect it earlier and we can treat it more effectively but attaining a “world without cancer” (American Cancer Society, accessed 13Nov20) is not possible."
American Cancer Society - Annual report
The American Cancer Society published its Annual report to the nation on the status of cancer on 27Oct22. It concludes that "Cancer death rates continued to decline overall, for children, and for adolescents and young adults, and treatment advances have led to accelerated declines in death rates for several sites, such as lung and melanoma." See https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.34479.
Prevention
Replacing a poor diet with more nutritious foods has sizable health benefits at any age. The Washington Post (18Oct22, O'Connor) reports a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine shows “that people can gain sizable health benefits at any age by cutting back on highly processed foods loaded with salt, sugar and other additives and replacing them with more nutritious foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, lentils, seafood and whole grains.” In the study, researchers followed roughly 74,000 people between the ages of 30 and 75 for over two decades and found that "people who had consistently high diet scores were up to 14% less likely to die of any cause during the study period compared to people who had consistently poor diets.”
Eating fiber alters the microbiome. It may boost cancer treatment too because the composition of the gut microbiome appears to influence whether immunotherapy is successful (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/11/08/microbiome-fiber-immunotherapy-cancer/).
Social media accounts
We are now posting interesting images of malignancies on our LinkedIn pages.
Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Newsletters
Click here to sign up for this newsletter. You can also text CURINGCANCERNET (with no spaces) to 22828 to sign up.
We now list our prior newsletters on the Newsletters page as well as below. See https://www.pathologyoutlines.com/ccnnewsletter.html
Latest versions of our documents:
Strategic plan (updated 28 September 2022)
American Code Against Cancer (how you can prevent cancer)
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