Mission Impossible?

 Today will be a short post. Brevity? What’s that? Like gravity? Going to start doing these every 1-3 days depending on the alignment of the moons of Jupiter with Mars, Betelgeuse, Mount Everest, and the shadow of the Washington monument. Yes really. 

Cancer is interesting and a continuing problem in the world. Is it because we need more of President Biden’s cancer moonshot? HR 4414 approving coverage under Medicare for more cancer prevention and care coordination? The National Cancer Act of 1971? The myriad organizations dedicated to cancer research like Miles for Melanoma? I don’t have the answer, don’t look at me like that. 

I write this after I read an interview with David Fredrickson, the executive vice president of oncology business at AstraZeneca. Pretty interesting, it’ll be in the resource section. But is there really anyway to prevent all cancer? Anyone who is alive knows that as time goes on, things start to go bad. Usually joints but maybe you also think of hearing, cognition, CV functioning, thin skin. We can work with that but can we stop those from happening? Think about each time you make a copy of a paper, it keeps fading, you can only replicate it so many times. 

Are we meant to keep getting older and older and older? As medicine improves, how many articles and studies have you read about the risk of (insert random thing here)? Are we eating more junk, moving less, and depending on technology for everything? I’m not a scientist but are we simultaneously adding water to a bucket with a hole in the bottom? 

I’m definitely not saying stop anything, except smoking and inactivity, but is some inaction better than action? I don’t know. I’m going to keep reading and thinking. I’ll refer you to that interview but also a book by Drs. Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying called A Hunter Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century to get some insight into our constant action, I liken it to the “hyper novelty” they talk about on their also grand podcast “the Darkhorse Podcast.”

Keep thinking, bye bye and buy books. 
References 

Image from the Melanoma Research Foundation website. 

The 4 Ps of Cancer Care: Policy, Politics, Priorities, and Prevention from Medscape on March 6 2023. 


(I don’t get anything for that link, it’s just what they have on their Podcast page).

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