Does cancer screening prevent cancer?
I have been reading about cancer screening and overdiagnosis a few times lately. For every 200 women getting mammograms, one will have her life saved..and three will receive chemo/radiation/surgery unecessarily. The cancer would never have been life threatening.
There is so much we still don’t know about treating cancer, and which ones might need treating. So there is some personal responsibility and risk involved even in deciding to do the screening tests. Many are non- invasive, like the free bowel cancer tests for older Australians- I recommend them. Nothing to lose.
However, I like to think and act preventatively, because most cancers are lifestyle-related. We don’t really know what role viruses or environmental toxins or stress or trauma or radiation etc play in the overall cancer picture, let alone in any one individual. But we do know that eating lots of fruits and vegetables, exercising, not smoking and various other lifestyle factors make a big difference in cancer susceptibility. It's not all just bad luck.
In Naturopathy, we call this supporting the terrain. By keeping our immune system healthy with a good diet, enough sleep and some known immune boosting herbs or superfoods, we help protect ourselves from viruses, bacteria as well as cancer. We can make sure our detox channels are working well- we poo daily, we drink enough water, our skin is healthy, we eat good food.....so our bodies don’t get clogged up with waste. In other words, we keep our bodies healthy...there’s plenty of science behind that....and this makes us far less susceptible to disease. Any diseases including cancer. Or if we get it, we recover more easily, or it is a milder form.
Then we can get screening, or not. We have already helped ourselves- we are not relying on a very imprecise tool that may work on a general population level, but is not always beneficial to every individual. I am not against screening at all, because we all have genetic tendencies, past histories, toxins in the environments and there are some diseases some people get that just suck, and we never know why....but it's not a replacement for taking some responsibility with basic preventative medicine.
Here is a link to a medical journalist’s discussion of the topic of medical overdiagnosis:
