Although I am actively involved in the ongoing pursuit of the genetic determinants of cancer risk along with my colleagues, I daily feel that my time and effort to improve public health would be better spent in an elementary school classroom with a clear and simple message on tobacco use, sun protection, physical activity, and energy balance. In my opinion, we should be cautious in communicating our expectations of genetics to explain disease risk and its ultimate public health impact. We should be globally diligent in engaging national leaders to continue to direct resource and policy change to community leaders, planners, and educators to deliver broadly acting societal support for healthy lifestyles and choices; a strategy derived from the tobacco control policies with proven value (13, 14).

Wrote Patricia Thompson in 2007 in her honest and candid article on why hunting down bits and pieces of our genetics is not really going to do much to cure cancer.

But did anyone listen? I don't know.

Its easier to believe that eventually someone will come up with a magic test to pre-detect cancer 10 years before it occurs. It will probably be sold along with a magic pill which will silence all our (still to be found) cancer-causing defective genes. Oh right, and let's not forget about the super-crazy-awesomeness of aspirin and Vitamin D. You can forestall all the cancers in the world or maybe even prevent them completely. Who cares about the eminent aspirin induced holes in your stomach and intestines and the insoluble Vitamin D deposits in your kidneys.

Doesn't that sound awesome?

Optimism is well and good but there is now enough body of evidence that it might be misplaced. Sometimes, we just need to wake up and look at ourselves, the crappy eating habits, lack of personal involvement in food preparation, the impossibility of calorie-control and portion-sizing while eating out, smoking and drinking, physical inactivity, incessant harmful energy imbalance along with a heavier reliance on animal-based protein, reliance on pre-processed everything and the deep underlying lack of motivation and sometimes, resistance against any kind of behaviour change.

We want hard, incontrovertible, randomized-control-trial-level replicable proof that our absolutely awful habits are causing damage. We will keep pointing at that one old woman who chain-smoked for 90+ years and didn't end up with lung cancer to defend our habits. We will keep hoping that we will be that one old woman and not the zillion others who did end up getting sick. Heck, after a million papers have linked the tiniest amount of alcohol to all disease imaginable and pointed out its role as a powerful carcinogen, we still get on the high road about moderation and grasp at the red-wine-is-good-for-cardiovascular-health farce while wilfully discarding the cold fact that fresh fruit sources bring as many benefits, if not more. We also cite helplessness, bring out our social crutches, blame our environments and even blame the government and the scientific establishment for the odious habits we choose to hang on to and the food that we choose to eat everyday. In other words, we are in denial.

And that's the message that the establishment of cancer research wants to publish in clear unambiguous, simple terms. A pity it doesn't quite get round to it because someone just found yet another string of small gene variants that could possibly have a 0.000000000000000000000001% effect on cancer risk in a group of 10 people belonging to some esoteric ethnic group that lives deep in the suburbs of Detroit in a subgroup analyses of a study on 10, 000 people.

Did you know that a simple page is visualized like this by LaTeX?


But I am convinced M$hitWord must view it like this:


I am seriously so annoyed right now that I need to suffer through Word (in addition to wrestling with LaTeX) just because people haven't even heard of LaTeX. Why do I have to even make a crap Word document when I have already compiled a good enough PDF from tex? Why??

Because of the decades of misthinking and mistakes M$hit has heaped upon the world, that's why.

I was looking at the mobile version and was appreciating how minimal and efficient it was. But I didn't like the mobile green so much, so I made my own brighter pop-your-eyes-out green!

With Chromebot

Hee Hee

The title gave me an idea... and I missed the orange. And we had something similar like this before...

Et voilà!!! Tree-hugger (e:strip)!!

Get it here:

img.mini_userpic {
    border-style: none;
}

#stripe {
    display: none;
}

div.section.flip {
    display: none;
}

div.padding {
    display: none;
}

ol li a {
    display: none;
}

div.section h1 {
    font-variant: small-caps;
    font-size: 10px;
}

#col_left {
    display: none;
}

div.link_list {
    background-color: #8fad15;
    height: 0;
}

html body {
    background: url(http://cdn.tomorrow.do/Woodtable-merge.jpg)

;
    margin-left: 250px;
}

.buttons a {
    background-image: none;
    border: #eee;
}

#signup p {
    background-color: =;
}

#latest_entries ul li {
    font-size: 16px;
    line-height: 2.1em;
    letter-spacing: 1.6px;
}

#latest {
    background-color: #8eb320;
    padding-left: 30px;
    width: 350px;
    padding-right: 30px;
    moz-border-radius: 15px;
    -webkit-border-radius: 15px;
    border-radius: 15px;
    border-style: dotted;
    border-color: #6d8217;
    border-width: 1px;
}

div.mini_comment {
    letter-spacing: 1px;
    padding-bottom: 0;
    border-style: dotted;
    border-color: #6d8217;
    border-width: 1px;
    background-color: #8eb320;
    width: 350px;
    height: 120px;
}

div.mTopBottom {
    -moz-border-radius: 15px;
    -webkit-border-radius: 15px;
    border-radius: 15px;
    width: 400px;
    overflow: hidden;
}

div.link_list.buttons {
    margin-left: 729px;
    border-style: none
;
}

div.link_list.buttons a {
    border-style: none;
    color: #ffffff;
}

#comments {
    width: 400px;
    margin-left: 250px;
    margin-top: 20px;
}

div.section label {
    font-size: 15px;
    color: #ffffff;
}

#banner {
    width: 400px;
    height: 100px;
    margin-left: 250px;
    margin-top: -500px;
}

div.frontleft {
    margin-top: -30px;
}

div.body {
    color: #ffffff;
}

.module a {
    color: #8eb700
;
}

#comments p {
    
#comments p {
    margin-left: -250px;
    width: 300px;
}

Cute... and so alien.

In a study published last month, researchers who asked cancer survivors about their health behaviour found that survivors indulged in poorer/riskier behaviours than people who have never been diagnosed with cancer:

From:

A total of 18,510 had detailed history on health behaviors and previous cancer history. Overall 2713 (14.7%) reported a previous cancer history. We found statistically significant results indicating that cancer survivors were less likely than those with no cancer history to:
report their overall health as “excellent” (13.6% vs. 21.5%), ...

Was that a trick question?! You said you have had a diagnoses of cancer. Would you say your overall health is "excellent"?

to engage in moderate or strenuous exercise (56.5% vs. 63.3%), and to use complementary and alternative medicine (57.4% vs. 60.2%).

Wonder whether the analyses stratified people with a recent vs. distant diagnoses of cancer... need to look at the tables. Maybe the survivors were physically unable to exercise so much or maybe were on standard medication that could have had interactions with random alternative medicines had they chosen to take them. Maybe they were advised not to take OTC medicine.

Conversely, cancer survivors were more likely to be current smokers (6.3% vs. 5.5%), rate their overall health as “poor” (15.8% vs. 9.1%), and to report more weight gain over time. Among cancer survivors, differences also emerged by the type of primary cancer. For example, cervical cancer survivors (n = 370) were most likely to report being current smokers (15.7%) and regular alcohol users (71.7%) compared with other survivors. Ovarian (n = 185) and uterine (n = 262) cancer survivors most frequently reported being obese (41% and 34.4%, respectively). Cervical cancer survivors reported the largest weight gain (4.9 lbs at 5 y and 13.4 lbs at 10 y).

The study totally begs these questions:

• Do people who are diagnosed with cancer always have poorer behaviours to start with?
• Do cancer survivors indulge in poorer behaviours because they are fatalist?
• Or do they just feel like they have poorer behaviours just because they got diagnosed with cancer and answer in that vein on the administered questionnaires ie. a kind of survivor bias?
• Or did they feel obliged to assign blame for their diagnoses on past and present behaviours?
• Or maybe the non-cancer survivors in this study didn't really feel the need to spill on their current health behaviours in so much detail as the survivors?

Who knows.

Do you remember what you ate last Monday through Friday - in detail, morning, afternoon, evening? Do you remember how you generally ate in the past decade? If you are not tracking your periods for some specific reason (or maybe have an android period-tracking application to record days and symptoms for fun), how accurately do you remember the date your last period ended? Do you remember the brands and compositions of the hormone pills you took 20 years back?

Sometimes I wonder if our questionnaires are eliciting anything useful. Or if we should trust them so much. It would be nicer to have more objective ways of tracking health behaviours and milestones.