cancer awareness.......forever

[Carl]

You seem to be setting up your views as a "strong man" and other views as a "straw man" by conveniently changing your definitions to suit yourself.

First, you use the term "immune system" very loosely? Why? what is already defined as the immune system is complex enough to do a variety of things. There's the humoral arm which includes antibodies and the complement system involved in inflammation as well as cell-mediated immunity. They both function differently but in a complementary fashion and are also mutually inhibitory.

Why would there be less lung cancer in Japan? You may be right that diet plays a role with things such as lower levels in Vitamin D being present in Western diets. But that cannot be the only answer because Japan and Korea also have higher rates of gastric and esophageal cancers than the US. Any beneficial differences in diet don't seem to help there and what gets exposed to the things in our dietary intake more than the stomach and throat?

You seem to look around and want to see simple answers to the things that interest you. And if the simple answers aren't there you seem to discount the knowledge gained by those in science that actually endeavor to illuminate and understand the world in it's true complexity. Truth does not have to be simple to be true. It requires work. Not pontifications by a dilettante presented with the air of authority that even bona fide experts eschew.

[theaustinescorts]

I respect you Carl but you're just dead wrong on this one.

The link between vitamin D and cancer is the hottest topic in medical research right now. It's the focus of more research funding, peer-reviewed article publications, and conference topics than any other subject. The prominence of this research is so well regarded that it's product is now being directed against otherwise sacred medical dogma - such as the Harvard study released this summer indicating that skin cancer is caused by insufficient exposure to the sun! Do you have any idea how shocking that is to the dermatologists?

Where I went to school the immune system was defined as that which destroys foreign bodies. Although some of this can suppress cancers it is systems other than that directed against foreign bodies which largely contain and destroy one's own malignant cells. These definitions are neither here nor there.

Just because the facts point to an elegant solution to a problem doesn't mean that those studying it are "simplistic."

So far I've only heard from you on this what my clinician MDs told me when my cancer was discovered five years ago.

"Gee we don't really know where it comes from, or what might cause it to spread or not, and if you do what I want I can charge you a lot of money for something with about a 5% chance of success....."

Standard medical practice on most cancers is bankrupt...utterly bankrupt for the patient [but boy it makes A LOT OF MONEY for the clinician].

I'm reminded of this every morning on the radio when I hear these stupid ads telling the public that they should come in to the advertiser's hospital for their "heart health CT scan" whether they need the test or not, and that if you have cancer you should go to the advertisers' hospital because,

"this is how TEXANS fight cancer!"

Yaaahooo! Let's all fight cancer like real Texans.

Wake up people. Medical practice is this partly science but mostly business.