Hot MedFax

Here's a horrifying fact.  We're giving ourselves cancer .  Or so says a New York Times op-ed. Rita F. Redberg and Rebecca Smith-Bindman write that all the CT scans and MRI's and PET scans and full-body imaging we get for just about anything medical are assaulting our bodies with radiation, which, as we all know, can cause cancer.  (I had 6 1/2 weeks of radiation for breast cancer and I think about that all the time.) " The use of medical imaging with high-dose radiation — CT scans in particular — has soared in the last 20 years," according to the writers. "Our resulting exposure to medical radiation has increased more than sixfold between the 1980s and 2006. . . The radiation doses of CT  scans. . . are 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional X-rays." They give credit to the technologies for early diagnosis (which, I suppose, I certainly should be grateful for), but note " there is distressingly little evidence of better health outcomes ...

Big surprise.  Doctors are only now finding out that if they don't use the word "cancer" in a diagnosis, women are far more likely to opt for watchful waiting and medication than surgery. That's because recently medical boards have been talking about taking the word out of a common diagnosis for women with noninvasive breast cancer, or ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).  It's the word carcinoma that makes us sit up and freak, and it was the word used when I was diagnosed, so I went through treatment to the max. I wrote about this recently when I first heard about it.  I was diagnosed with stage 0 precancerous breast cancer but I was treated as if I had full-blown invasive cancer.  Nine years ago, that's the way it was done. To be fair, my cancer or abnormal cells or whatever they were, were grade 3, right on the edge of becoming invasive cancer, so decisions were made based  mostly on that. There was no doubt that if I didn't have treatment, in time I w...

The guessing game is over.  In May researchers discovered 12  genes  that, when expressed, can predict fairly accurately the chances of a recurrence for woman already diagnosed with ductal cell carcinoma (DCIS), or non-invasive breast cancer eliminating treatment that may not be necessary. I wish this had been around when I was diagnosed with the disease.  Instead, I had radiation but was ultimately forced to have the major surgery most women dread, anyway.  I did have a recurrence, which is what led to the surgery, but  looking back, doctors think the cancer cells were there all along, just not thought to be significant.  Scary. Had these additional cells been spotted with my first bunch of abnormal cells, I most likely would have immediately been faced with a mastectomy, but I would have avoided six weeks of radiation that can cause cancer in the future, and which pretty much ruined my reconstruction. Radiation stretches and tightens the skin and...

I may never eat corn again.  According to a story in today's New York Times Sunday Review, the supersweet corn  I wait anxiously for every summer was born in a cloud of radiation. Jo Robinson writes that we are "breeding the nutrition out of our food." As farmers and scientists try to make our food more tasty, they're often breeding out the very nutrients that make it good for us, she reports. Corn originally started out more bitter, with kernels you had to crack open with a hammer, and farmers and others started mucking around with it to come up with a more tasty version.  More on that later. Robinson says it didn't just happen with corn.  She notes that while we're all being told to eat more fruit and vegetables, a lot of the very good stuff we're supposed to get just isn't there anymore.  She gives corn as an example.  "Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000...

Is it for you?  If you've just been diagnosed with breast cancer, are you going to opt for the "guaranteed" cure?  I say guaranteed because nothing, with cancer, is. But would you take the route Jolie did?  With an 87% chance of getting the disease, she made, I believe, the right decision.  More and more women are opting for this more drastic approach, even though researchers have found that lumpectomy is often just as effective. More women, also, are choosing to have both breasts removed, even if only one is cancerous.  I took this route.  At the time, I had a 5-year-old and I wanted to do anything I could to be around him.  Looking back, would I have made the same choice, after complications with reconstruction due to lumpectomy and radiation, the first time around? Probably, yes.  Cancer strikes such deep fear in all of us.  Even though two out of three people now survive cancer, I don't know anyone who doesn't immediately think abou...

Recently I learned that I did not have breast cancer – after going through radiation and a bilateral mastectomy, as if I did.  What I had was stage 0 cancer, or ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).  Which, I just found out, means abnormal cells in the milk duct that have not spread.  Not cancer. So for eight years I have been telling people I am a breast cancer survivor – erroneously, as it turns out.  I’m a victim – survivor? – of the scary conscientiousness – or the over-prescribing of treatment  – that women are being subjected to. Call it fear of malpractice (what if it turns into cancer?), or what we’re now learning, that DCIS becomes invasive cancer 25 to 50% of the time, if not treated, but more and more women are undergoing drastic medical treatment even before they have the illness.  Am I sorry?  No way.  At the time I was diagnosed, I had a three-year-old.  When it was found again in my breast, he was five.  I wanted to live....

Want to still be having hot sex in your 90s?  People on a Greek island live longer than we do and have relations far more often than the average senior.  A connection?  Maybe. It's the wine, and the radiation -- radiation -- from the hot springs, they say.  As a cancer survivor, can't say much positive about radiation, though! http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/the-secret-to-longevity-wine-and-radioactivity/9560?tag=nl.e660&s_cid=e660

We may learn from cow brains how cellphone radiation affects ours. http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/mri-maps-heat-from-cellphone-radiation-in-jarred-cow-brains/8951?tag=main;river