Cancer has been around for a very long time. A hundred years ago, your odds for survival were a lot more grim. Nowadays, the odds are much better, especially for certain types of cancer. Doctors and scientists are making amazing discoveries as they try to figure out a way to beat the disease once and for all. There’s still a lot of work to do, but there’s hope for something resembling a cure. That doesn’t mean people know everything there is to know, of course. In fact, the terrifying nature of cancer allows a lot of con artists and swindlers to take advantage of desperate people.
Natural treatments won’t cure you
Things like radiation and chemotherapy are really scary to contemplate, even if you know that they might save your life. They can be incredibly hard on the body, and that takes an emotional toll as well as a physical one. No one wants to think about throwing up all the time and losing hair for a treatment that might not even work. However, the odds of conventional treatments helping you are still much higher than alternative treatments. A recent study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that opting for alternative treatments doubled a patient’s risk of death. The risk appears to be even higher among breast cancer patients.
A naturopath who promises he or she can cure your cancer the “natural” way is full of it. A naturopath also not a doctor or a scientist, since naturopathy is more of a pseudo science than anything. If it helps you feel more at ease, you may be able to employ some natural remedies alongside conventional treatments, but conventional treatments are usually the key to curing the most common types of cancers. It’s invasive and unpleasant, but you stand a way better chance of being alive at the end of it. If you’re scared about the side effects of chemo and radiation, that’s perfectly understandable. Talk to your doctor about finding the best place to get treatment. It should be at a legitimate medical hospital with a long track record of treating cancer patients. Never believe anyone who says he or she can cure your cancer with diet. That’s not a thing. If it were, cancer would have been cured a long time ago. The people who say claim that pharmaceutical companies are actually hiding a cure for cancer from the masses must have forgotten that pharmaceutical companies like money, and a cure for every type of cancer (or even just one type of cancer) would instantly make a lot of people very rich.
The causes of cancer
People without any sort of medical training also love to tell people lies about how the patient developed cancer. There’s no real evidence linking artificial sweeteners like aspartame to cancer, and that’s true regardless of how many times your aunt forwards you that one chain e-mail. Dental fillings won’t give you cancer either, so there’s no need to cancel that trip to the dentist.  If you eat a lot of meat, there’s evidence linking that to cancer, so you might want to cut back, even if you don’t go fully vegetarian. It’s also a good idea to exercise and try to live a generally healthy life. But there’s no foolproof way to guarantee you won’t ever get cancer. People want easy answers, but a disease as complex as cancer doesn’t offer many of them.
