Antidepressants Blog

Most of you would like to put your whole cancer experience completely behind you. You would like to say, “I had cancer, but it’s all over now. I am, or soon will be, as healthy as I was before I got sick. I can go back to my routine medical care.”

Can you really face your future by ignoring your history of cancer? Should you? Unless your doctors have given you a 100 percent guarantee that your cancer will never come back, you will have some concern about recurrent cancer. Depending on what treatment you received, your body will need to recuperate. And many treatments cause their own problems, in the short run or the long run.

Your health is not the same as it was before you developed cancer. Your knowledge about the vulnerability of your health is painfully changed. Believing that you are back to the way you were before cancer may save you immediate anxiety about possible future problems. But it would be at an enormous cost to you, emotionally and physically.

There are many reasons why you should continue learning about your cancer. In the short run, you can take steps to prevent or minimize problems, and thus maximize and speed your recovery. In the long run, knowledge allows you to take measures to help prevent future problems such as recurrent cancer (recurrence) or the development of a new type of cancer.

You have met the challenge of treatments. But your situation is like that of a marathon runner, whose efforts are not over at the end of the race. Successful runners are careful about their recovery. For days afterward they get extra fluids, nutrients, and rest. They know that it takes weeks to get their primed, but spent, bodies completely back to normal.

Given that an optimally conditioned runner has to make adjustments to recover from a race, imagine the needs of a competitive runner who sprains her ankle. She has to decide how to deal with her injury. She can ignore the injury and risk further injury while performing at less than peak performance. Or she can find out what to do to maximize and speed her recovery. This may mean slowing down or even stopping her training schedule for a while. If, after complete healing, some ankle weakness remains, she can act as if there were no problem, running in pain and risking recurrent injury. Or she can learn about modifications to make in her shoes, running style, training schedule, or running route that would allow continued, though changed, running.

Your cancer and treatment caused changes in your body that can take days, weeks, months, or even years to disappear. Some changes may be permanent. Like the runner, you will feel better and heal faster if you learn about the changes in your body and the ways to help yourself recover.

Many survivors who have completed treatment struggle with a sense of vulnerability and an urgent desire to do something to help protect their renewed health. Learning what you can do to stay healthy will allow you to regain a sense of control and will maximize your chance of staying healthy.

After cancer, you may feel bombarded by information about what causes, cures, or prevents cancer. Newspapers and magazines, books, and well-meaning friends and family offer frightening, exciting, confusing, and often contradictory messages. Knowledge can help you sort out useful facts from inaccurate or misleading stories.

Each year brings advances in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. In the future, new options for screening, follow-up, and preventive measures for your type of cancer may be offered to you. Staying informed about your medical situation after cancer will make it easier for you to appreciate the benefits of these developments.

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Here I would like to speak out loud and clear: I advocate compulsory periodic medical examinations for everyone.

Already there is the compulsory X-ray examination for tuberculosis. At schools, doctors and dentists give our children regular ‘physicals.’ We accept the fact that our community water and milk supply and the food we eat should be subject to inspection. We take it for granted that our children should be vaccinated against polio. We agree that individuals have a social obligation not to transmit illnesses to others. Nurses and individuals in certain other professions and jobs are examined regularly.

It seems obvious to me that this practice should be extended. Why not include everybody, in these days when we come into close contact with total strangers every day in trains, stores, movies, swimming pools, and so on? In addition to the examinations and tests for communicable diseases, optional examinations for other potential killers and disablers should become a national habit. These would include tests for diabetes, cancer, heart and kidney diseases, and other illnesses, according to the age or condition of the individual being examined. Naturally, I realize that this programme will not be introduced today or even tomorrow. I hope some of you will help to speed its realization.

When people come to accept such examinations and tests as a part of their regular lives, diseases can be prevented or cured without arousing alarm.

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Most of the harm done by campaigns against the killing and disabling diseases stems from the fact that such campaigns are conducted over relatively short periods of time. Organizations that do excellent work every day of the year are limited to a week or so in which to educate the public and publicize their work. Whether they wish to or not, they must in a sense compete with other valuable organizations. If they want to put across their message, they must use advertising methods and publicity techniques similar to those intended to sell a commercial product.

This situation would be greatly improved if these organizations could obtain the money they need without having to engage in intensive fund-raising campaigns—for example, by increased donations from individuals and foundations and by aid from the Government. It would also help if the campaigns placed even more emphasis on the fact that the health hazards they are publicizing can be cured or controlled if they are detected early enough. As an example, this positive approach to the dangers of childbirth has done a great deal to eliminate fear and anxiety in prospective mothers.

But most important of all, health education should be a continuous process, so that organizations would not have to crowd their warnings and recommendations into a single intensive week.

Health education should begin in childhood. Some elementary schools train young children in many of the essentials of health and hygiene. Some high schools continue this excellent work, teaching first aid, human biology, and the prevention of disease. How about your school? By working through parent-teacher associations or by organizing interesting after-school programmes, parents can see to it that their children’s health education is not neglected.

This education should not end when young people leave school. Churches, adult education centres, clubs, trade unions, and other organizations should keep health on their agenda, working out ways of interesting their members by means of lectures, exhibits, and so on, and of bringing these projects to the entire community.

The public health department in your community can be of great assistance. Many of us tend to overlook this valuable agency. The effectiveness of your local health department depends to a great extent on the interest of the local citizenry. Public health departments and health inspectors have learnt how to get excellent results without resorting to scare techniques.

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I am by no means opposed to health campaigns. On the contrary, I feel that they and the voluntary or governmental agencies sponsoring them do wonderful work. They alert and educate the public. They raise money to carry out vital research and to assist the victims of various diseases. They deserve great credit for helping to eliminate or control many illnesses that once took a toll of disability and death.

It is impossible even to estimate the number of lives that have been saved and the amount of suffering that has been prevented by the efforts of national health campaigns. The endless, tireless—and unpublicized— work of our local public health departments protects us against typhoid fever, dysentery, undulant fever, and other milk-, water-, and food-borne diseases. Public health agencies have all but eliminated malaria, smallpox, and yellow fever.

Not so very long ago, a man who was even suspected of having leprosy might be stoned to death, and people who had touched him were apt to consider suicide. We know now that the danger of catching leprosy by touching a leper is, practically speaking, non-existent.

Having eliminated the ignorance responsible for such panics, must we now pay for our knowledge by becoming a nation of chronic hypochondriacs?

My answer is No. We can have the tremendous advantages that come with enlightenment and at the same time avoid the danger of being frightened into becoming hypochondriacs by (1) continuous health education; (2) routine periodic medical examinations; and (3) a sensible attitude towards the calculated risk in health

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When one of my non-medical friends learnt that 1 was writing the Reader’s Digest Family Health Guide and Medical Encyclopaedia, he remarked, ‘But don’t you think there’s a danger that it will make some people worry about themselves—that they’ll get to be hypochondriacs who think they have every disease they read about?’

Doctors know that patients do not need to read about actual diseases in order to suffer from imaginary ones. We have all had patients who could invent more ailments than medical science ever dreamt of.

After each health campaign or drive to raise funds for a health organization, doctors are besieged by people who are afraid they have the disease that has been publicized. Campaigns concerned with cancer, tuberculosis, heart disease and high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, rheumatism and arthritis, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, and venereal disease give suggestible people something to worry about all year long.

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