Helpless to Prevent Cancer? Actually, Quite a Bit Is in Your Control

Perhaps more importantly, a huge fraction of those "preventable" cancers are lung cancers that could only be prevented by giving up smoking.

> Lung cancer is by far the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women; about 1 out of 4 cancer deaths are from lung cancer.

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/lungcancer-non-smallcell/detail...

and from the article:

> About 82 percent of women and 78 percent of men who got lung cancer might have prevented it through healthy behaviors.

Back of the envelope: ~20 percent of all cancer deaths are lung cancer deaths that wouldn't have happened without smoking. That leaves just 5-15% of cancer deaths being "potentially preventable" once you've given up smoking. (Here, I'm not distinguishing between cancer cases and cancer deaths; please point to better data if you have it.)

I'd wager less than 5% of cancer deaths are preventable if you neither smoke nor are overweight.

I think this article, and especially its headline, is highly misleading.

It's not doctors who provide the most trouble, it's rules and regs coming from your health insurance or your job. There are plenty of stories about guys in the Army who can meet all their physical requirements but are getting dinged for having a BMI a smidge too high. Or if your job gives you a discount on health insurance for meeting certain standards, you may not qualify if your BMI is a bit high -- even if you're a champion athlete.

When I last went through a health screening with a qualified professional, I was congratulated on my great health and great cholesterol levels. However, on some online screening I had to do for health insurance around the same time, I was warned that my BMI is a smidge high and my cholesterol is 1 point higher than desired. The online screening did not take into account activity level, functional health, or the differences between HDL and LDL. When health or financing decisions are made algorithmically there are some real traps.

Who said anything about throwing stones, or pointing fingers? Nothing in my post indicates that help should be refused to individuals who make poor decisions and then try to recover from them, just that, in a free society, the onus should not be solely on the head of "a higher authority" (govt, industry, etc) to be responsible for doing so.

The world you seem to desire would make cellphone manufacturers and service providers fully liable for accidents that happen when an idiot is using their phone and gets in a car wreck.

The individual chose to get into a car, and drive somewhere, and use a cellphone, all at the same time. This despite the fact that it is made abundantly clear that doing so impairs driving ability much like alcohol would, via advertisement and public notice and safety publications, in the news, and even by state law in some cases. You cannot prevent people from doing stupid things. You can, however, make them bear the repercussions of those stupid decisions.

The world you seem to desire is one where every device and tool is covered in thick layers of bubble wrap and warning labels and dozen-pages-thick usage contracts to indemnify the manufacturer.

The world you seem to desire is one where no criminal is punished for their actions because they were just "a victim of their environment and don't know how to do anything else".

And that is something that I cannot and will not agree with, ever, on a fundamental level. Personal freedom comes with personal responsibility.

If there's a tool designed in such a way that using it in an accidentally-slightly-incorrect manner will electrocute the person using it - sure, hold the manufacturer responsible.

But if there's a tool that does exactly what it's designed to do, but someone uses it for a completely different purpose in a completely different way than it was designed to do, and it electrocutes them - that's on the user's head.

You might want to look into a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)

http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

I was thinking the other day you don't see very many or any smokers or obese people in old age homes do you?

The majority of my family on my father's side who are smokers have died of heart disease, strokes, lung damage.

Even at my workplace 9 of 10 people who died were smokers. I think the buddy system where they need to smoke in groups just enforces their denial.

I've seen the "scared straight" situation many times where a middle aged smoker suddenly decides to quit only to be diagnosed a month later with cancer. Only now it's e-cigarettes instead of quitting so they can still be addicted to nicotine but quit cigarettes.

I like to tell them there are worse things than cancer which has a possibility of a cure or surgery. My dad has IPF a scarring of lung tissue and there is no chemo or surgery to cut it out or slow it down. It occurs from many years of small amounts of lung damage in my dad's situation it was blue collar work welding, paint fumes, wood dust, grinding dust etc.