Topics of Cancer Blogs

I read a bit of news on the health risks of excessive CT scans this week that produced a shock of recognition. In my late teens or early twenties, I had discovered a book recommendation in some magazine or another, and decided to follow up and read it. The novel wasn’t a new one. It had been written in another language (Russian), so as is common in these cases, the quality of the translation could make an enormous difference in how the reader experiences what the writer is trying to convey (I bought a second translation to overcome this).

To be honest, at that age, a lot of the subtleties of “Cold War”-era Russian society were lost on me. This was an important part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward”, and the murky relationships of the characters and the words they spoke to one another were that of a chilling and alien culture. These portions of the novel, I admit with embarassment, I initially scanned over quickly in confusion and intellectual laziness.

The other part of the novel was, of course, the topic of cancer, in the early days of modern oncological procedures. Radiation, that nearly universal cancer diagnostic tool/treatment that focuses its immense and mysterious power directly onto the tumor/lesion site, had already been established for maybe ten years or so. In “Cancer Ward”, written in 1968 but based on the author’s personal cancer experiences in mid-1950’s Russia, the long-term effects of radiation therapy on its initial subjects were just coming to light. “Light” is not a condition found easily in this somber novel, even from memory. Perhaps it is better to say that the concept of ”acceptable risk” in cancer treatment took its first myopic steps at this time. Acceptable risk was a recurring theme in “Cancer Ward”. If the bodies and faces of irradiated infants matured into stunted limbs and grotesque contortions, why, they were alive, weren’t they? And, should an adolescent girl, with the morbid self-consciousness of body associated with the age, develop a malignancy in a young breast destined for “the trash bin” as a result of gross childhood radiation exposure, wasn’t she a lucky young lady to have modern medicine on her side? Modern medicine, that has become ever more “modern” with each new generation of patients personifying “acceptable risk”, how far it has come from those dim, charmingly naive days of the 1950’s! Or so one might think prior to reading this latest bit of news: researchers from the Columbia University Medical Center of New York estimate that CT scans can cause as much as two percent of all cancers in the United States alone, in the next 20 to 30 years.

Now, health insurance companies will shell out without question for CT scans, of course. Meanwhile, magnetic resonance imaging that won’t add to the accumulation of medically-applied radiation received during your lifetime that is increasingly found to POSITIVELY! CAUSE! CANCER! is “too expensive” an alternative for Big Medicine. I have my own MRI/cancer story, but I’ll save that for another day. Here’s a hint: there are some things that an MRI can ”see” that standard, radiation-based cancer detection methods can’t find.  Remember, there are alternatives to x-rays, be it for cancers or kidney stones. You can only accept so many risks before one morphs into a deep and ugly regret.