Medical myths not only mislead but also may hamper proper treatment. Find out why these common cancer myths are wrong.
Timothy Moynihan, M.D.
As advances in the detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer have increased, you may have discovered more opportunities to learn the facts about this disease. Yet some misleading ideas about cancer and cancer treatment still persist. Timothy Moynihan, M.D., a cancer specialist at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., helps debunk some of the most common misconceptions and explains the truth about them.
A positive attitude is all you need to beat cancer.
Although many popular books on cancer talk about fighters and optimists, there's no scientific proof that a positive attitude gives you an advantage in cancer treatment or improves your chance of being cured.
What a positive attitude can do is improve the quality of your life during cancer treatment and beyond. You may be more likely to stay active, maintain ties to family and friends, and continue social activities. In turn, this may enhance your feeling of well-being and help you find the strength to deal with your cancer. A positive attitude may also help you become a more informed and active partner with your doctor during cancer treatment.
If we can put a man on the moon, we should have a cure for cancer by now.
Cancer actually includes a large group of diseases. Each can be caused by many different factors. Despite advances in diagnosis and treatment, doctors still have much to learn about what triggers a cell to become cancerous and why some people with cancer do better than others.
In addition, cancer is a moving target. Cancer cells may continue to mutate and change during the course of the disease. This may lead to the cancer cells no longer responding to the chemotherapy drugs or radiation treatments that were given initially.
Finding the cure for cancer is, in fact, proving to be more complex than mastering the engineering and physics required for space flight.
Drug companies and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are blocking or withholding new cancer treatments.
Going through cancer treatment is never easy. Even when things are going well, it's natural to become frustrated and wish for a magic bullet to cure your cancer. You might even wonder if such a treatment is being withheld.
That's not the case. Your doctor and the FDA, which must approve new drugs before they can be marketed, are your allies. As such, they make your safety a high priority. Unfortunately, scientific studies to determine cancer treatment's safety and effectiveness take time. That may create the appearance or lead to reports that effective new treatments are being blocked. However, the thorough testing required has kept many unsafe and ineffective drugs from being used in the United States.
Hiding or withholding an important treatment advance would be difficult because the public has many ways to access medical information. In addition to verbal, print, video and electronic means, you may even gain access to information about experimental treatments by participating in a clinical trial.
If you still believe a cure is being purposefully withheld, ask yourself why a doctor may choose to specialize in cancer research. Oftentimes doctors go into cancer research because they have a family member or friend affected by the disease. They're just as interested in finding a cure as anyone else, for exactly the same reason — it affects them personally. They hate to see a loved one in pain and don't wish to lose this person. They also want to spare others what they have gone through.
As to suggestions that organizations keep cures a secret because they would otherwise lose their sources of funding, human nature makes this scenario highly unlikely. It is indeed an unusual human being who would pass up the prestige associated with finding a cure in order to keep funds flowing to a research organization.
Regular checkups and today's medical technology can detect all cancer early.
Routine screening has clearly led to an impressive decrease in deaths from several cancers, including cervical, breast and colon cancers. Although regular medical care can indeed increase your ability to detect cancer early, it can't guarantee it. Cancer is a complicated disease, and there's no sure way to always spot it. Cancer cells can grow anywhere in your body — often deep within it. Until the cancer reaches a certain size, there isn't a technology or exam capable of detecting it. By the time you feel a breast cancer lump, for instance, the cancer may have been there for four to six years. Scientists are looking for tests capable of detecting cancers even earlier, but these tests are experimental and have not yet been proved effective.
Antiperspirants or deodorants can cause breast cancer.
According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), there's no conclusive evidence linking the use of underarm antiperspirants or deodorants with breast cancer.
Some reports have suggested that these products contain harmful substances that can be absorbed through the skin or enter the body through nicks caused by shaving. According to the NCI, some scientists have also proposed that certain antiperspirant and deodorant ingredients called parabens may be associated with breast cancer because they're applied frequently to an area next to the breast.
Two studies of underarm antiperspirants and deodorants and breast cancer have provided conflicting results:
- In 2002, a study involving 1,606 women evaluated the possible relationship between breast cancer and underarm antiperspirants and deodorants. This study showed no increased risk of breast cancer in women who used these products.
- A 2004 study found parabens in 18 of 20 tissue samples from breast tumors. Parabens, which act like estrogen in the body, are preservatives used in antiperspirants and deodorants. However, this study didn't prove that parabens cause breast cancer. Also, the study didn't identify the source of the parabens. More research is needed to evaluate whether the use of antiperspirants or deodorants causes parabens to accumulate in breast tissue and whether these chemicals increase the risk of breast cancer.
Unlike lung cancer, for instance, where you see a steady rise in cancer rates when the smoking rate increases, there isn't a clear link between antiperspirants and breast cancer. In the United States today, more than 90 percent of adults regularly use an antiperspirant or deodorant. But the death rates for women due to breast cancer haven't changed significantly since the 1930s — when, presumably, fewer people used antiperspirants or deodorants on a regular basis. For smoking and lung cancer there is a clear association — women began smoking in larger numbers in the 1940s and lung cancer deaths rose significantly beginning in the 1970s.
Microwaving plastic containers and wraps releases harmful, cancer-causing substances into food.
According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), stories have circulated for years about the harm from chemicals in plastics leaching into microwaved foods. There is some evidence that substances used to make certain plastics can migrate into some foods. But the FDA has evaluated the migration levels of these substances and has found them to be well within the margin of safety.
The FDA carefully reviews the substances used to make plastics designed for food use, including microwave-safe plastic wraps and containers. These plastics are classified as "food contact substances." The FDA must find them safe for their intended use before these products can be marketed as such.
Other claims have suggested that plastics contain dioxins, a group of contaminants labeled as a "likely human carcinogen" by the Environmental Protection Agency. But according to the FDA, there is no evidence that plastic containers or wraps contain dioxins.
Undergoing cancer treatment means you can't live at home, work or go about your usual activities.
Most people with cancer are treated on an outpatient basis in their home community. At times it may be helpful to travel to a specialty medical center for treatment. But often, doctors at such a medical center can work with doctors in your hometown so that you can be with your family and friends and perhaps even resume work. In fact, many people do work full or part time during their treatment. A great deal of time and effort has gone into making it easier for people to live a more normal life during their treatment. For example, drugs are now available to help better control nausea. The result is you're often able to work and stay active during your treatment.
Cancer is always painful.
Some cancers never cause pain, while many advanced cancers do cause pain. But over the past five to 10 years, doctors have become more aware of the need to control such pain and have learned better ways to manage it. Many newer pain medications are available to keep you comfortable, and strong pain medication is no longer withheld for fear you'll become addicted. Although all pain may not be eliminated, it may be controlled to the point at which it has little to no impact on your day-to-day living.
People with cancer shouldn't eat sugar, since it can cause cancer to grow faster.
Sugar doesn't make cancer grow faster. All cells, including cancer cells, depend on blood sugar (glucose) for energy. But giving more sugar to cancer cells doesn't speed their growth. Likewise, depriving cancer cells of sugar doesn't slow their growth.
This misconception may be based in part on a misunderstanding of positron emission tomography (PET) scans. Doctors use PET scans to help determine the location of a tumor and see if it has spread.
During a PET scan, your doctor injects a small amount of radioactive tracer — typically a form of glucose — into your body. All tissues in your body absorb some of this tracer. But tissues that are using more energy — exhibiting increased metabolic activity — absorb greater amounts.
Tumors are often more metabolically active than healthy tissues. As a result, they may absorb greater amounts of the tracer. For this reason, some people have concluded that cancer cells grow faster on sugar. But this isn't true.
Exposing a tumor to air during surgery causes cancer to spread.
Surgery is one of medicine's main weapons against cancer. It can't cause cancer or cause it to spread. Because you may feel worse during your recovery than you did before surgery, you might believe your surgery caused your cancer to spread. However, "air hitting the tumor" doesn't cause cancer to spread. In some animal studies, removing the main tumor mass sometimes temporarily facilitates growth of cancer that has already spread (metastasized), but this hasn't been seen conclusively in humans.
Some tumors will grow to a certain size and become relatively dormant. This occurs if the tumors secrete a substance called endostatin, which suppresses tumor growth in both the primary tumor as well as in distant sites.
Unfortunately all tumors, no matter what their size, secrete angiostatin, which promotes tumor growth — particularly the growth of new blood vessels that supply oxygen and nutrients to the tumor. Therefore, if you have a large primary tumor and only microscopic metastases, the endostatin produced by the large tumor may prevent the metastases from growing. But if you remove the tumor, you remove the source of growth-inhibiting endostatin, and the metastases, which produce angiostatin, may continue to grow.
Although it's possible that during surgery your doctor may find the cancer more widespread than previously thought, an operation can't cause cancer to spread nor can it cause cancer to start. Don't delay or refuse treatment because of this myth. Surgically removing cancer is often the first and most important treatment.
A needle biopsy can disturb cancer cells, causing them to travel to other parts of the body.
There's no conclusive evidence that needle biopsy (fine-needle aspiration) causes cancer cells to spread (metastasize). This procedure is sometimes used to diagnose cancer. It involves inserting a thin, hollow needle connected to a syringe into a suspicious lump and removing fluid and tissue for further examination.
For many years, there has been concern that needle biopsy may disturb cancer cells and cause them to spread. However, a study published in 2004 compared people who did and didn't have a needle biopsy before cancer treatment. Those who had the procedure showed no increased spread of cancer.
Everyone with the same kind of cancer gets the same kind of treatment.
Your doctor tailors your treatment to you. What treatment you receive depends on where your cancer is, whether or how much it has spread, and how it's affecting your body functions and general health.
In addition, cells from the same type of cancer may have different features in different people. These differences can affect how the cells respond to treatment, which in turn may influence your doctor's recommendations.
Everyone who has cancer has to have treatment.
It's up to you whether or not you want to treat your cancer. You can decide this after consulting with your doctor and learning about your options. A person with cancer might choose to forgo treatment if he or she has:
- A slow-growing cancer. Some people with cancer might not have any signs or symptoms. Lab tests might reveal that the cancer is growing very slowly. These people might choose to wait and watch the cancer. If it suddenly begins growing quicker, treatment is always an option later. Keep in mind, though, that not treating the cancer makes it harder to stop it from spreading.
- A late-stage cancer. If the burden of treatment side effects outweighs the benefit that treatment can bring, you might choose not to be treated. But that doesn't mean your doctor will abandon you. Your doctor can still provide comfort measures, such as pain relief.
Good people don't get cancer.
In ancient times illness was often viewed as punishment for bad actions or thoughts. In some cultures that view is still held. If this were true, though, how would you explain the 6-month-old or newborn who gets cancer? These little ones haven't been bad. There's absolutely no evidence that you get cancer because you deserve it.
Cancer is contagious.
There's no need to avoid someone who has cancer. You can't catch it. It's OK to touch and spend time with someone who has cancer. In fact, your support may never be more valuable.
Though cancer itself isn't contagious, sometimes viruses, which are contagious, can lead to the development of cancer. Two common cancers caused by viruses are cervical cancer and liver cancer. Human papillomavirus (HPV) — a sexually transmitted disease — can cause cervical cancer. And hepatitis C — a virus transmitted through sexual intercourse or use of infected intravenous (IV) needles — can cause liver cancer, though only a small number of those with the virus will develop liver cancer.
Last Updated: 05/16/2005
• For Employees 
Site Designed by Carbon 42