Health And Quality Of Life: Through Cancer And Beyond

This is a guest post by David Haas of the Haas Blaag:

Maintaining a healthy body can tremendously improve a person’s well-being and quality of life, both during and after cancer. During treatment, cancer patients are looking for ways to cope with their symptoms and the side effects of treatment. Afterwards, survivors are generally eager to return to good health. 

Beyond their initial recovery, cancer survivors are often left feeling tired, depressed, angry, or lost. Fortunately, there are ways to address these issues, improve long-term health, and truly enjoy life after cancer. The American Cancer Society (ACS) recommends certain individual choices in several key areas, including weight, exercise, and diet.

A Healthy Weight

Research links weight gain, overweight, and obesity to several different types of cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), breast, prostate, endometrial, colon, kidney, and esophageal cancers are a few examples. To help prevent cancer from returning, cancer survivors should avoid excessive weight gain and strike a balance between food intake and physical exercise.

An Active Lifestyle 

Physical activity is beneficial for everyone, and cancer survivors are no exception. Regular exercise improves a person’s physical, psychological, and emotional well-being. Exercise makes cancer patients and survivors fitter and stronger. It also reduces tiredness, improves mood, and increases self-confidence. The ACS recommends 30 minutes of exercise a day, five or more days a week. 

Some cancer patients are unable to exercise or participate in physical activities. People undergoing mesothelioma treatment, for instance, are weak and may require machines to help them breathe. And breast cancer survivors cannot exercise after surgery, until drains and stitches are removed. But most cancer patients and survivors can start with mild or moderate doctor-approved activities, increasing intensity and duration over time.

A Healthy Diet

According to the ACS, everyone, including cancer survivors, should strive for a healthy diet that emphasizes plant sources. They should consume five servings of fruits and vegetables each day, along with whole grain foods. Red meats and processed foods are discouraged. And people should limit their alcohol intake to one or two drinks a day. Like exercise, a healthy diet can combat fatigue, depression, and other after-cancer issues. It can also help prevent cancer recurrence.

A healthy body is as important for cancer survivors of any kind. A balanced, healthy body is better able to cope with the struggles of cancer. More importantly, a healthy body improves quality of life, which allows people to enjoy their life through cancer and beyond.

The American Cancer Society and Evil

Wow, it can be difficult to sort through all the things people recommend to me.

In the midst of researching some natural therapies people are pushing on me, I ran across an attack on the American Cancer Society. I was pretty offended, as cancer.org has some nice resources and good information on cancer.

With a little research, though, I have to say that nice information on a web site ought to cost less than $350 million, and the people who produce that web site ought not to be making over a million dollars a year.

I was very surprised that the ACS has two people on staff who make over a million dollars a year with benefits. It is also extremely hard--read impossible here because I had to rely on other web sites to find them--to get the Form 990 for the ACS, which most charitable organizations, especially large ones, provide. For example, go to preventcancer.org and look for their financial statements and Form 990. I'll bet 95% of you can find them in under 60 seconds.

Try that at cancer.org, which I'm not going to give a link to because my link would help their web site.

Others who have found the ACS Form 990 have reported that they have 2 people over a million dollars a year and many, many more over $100,000. Total salaries for their administrative people consume about 60% of what you give them.

Thus, while I think this link overstates the case, I am going to give the link because I think people need to avoid giving to them.

I know the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society only covers blood cancers, but I found their financial statements in about 10 seconds on their web site. They also had the easiest to read financials of anything I've seen today.

I already know them as an excellent organization. They give easy to follow stats on the increased survivability among leukemia and lymphoma patients over the last 30 years. They have done an amazing job, and I'm sure everyone reading this has heard of leukemia before they read my blog.

Of course, right? Everyone has!

Yeah, that's because of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and their hard work.

You would not believe the kind of work the doctors are going through to determine treatment for me. They're looking at multiple markers on cells, calling other doctors with experience at what works on those markers, and determining a treatment based on experience with those cells.

It's not simple. There are lymphocytes, monocytes, neutrophils, T-Cells, B-Cells, and NK-cells, which are "Natural Killer Cells." There are plasmacytoid dendritic cells, and all of those come in immature and mature forms. And then there's determining whether the problem is occurring in blood production in the bone marrow or after production in the blood itself.

The next step is to find out whether I have the FLT3 length mutation, then call the heads of a clinical study, and find out whether I can take their drug along with my chemo even if I don't the Acute Myeloid Leukemia markers, like the rest of the people in their study.

I wrote all that to make it sound complicated. Here, let me let it feel more complicated. Chances are, the original incorrect (or at least unconfirmed) diagnosis of Blastic Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cell Neoplasm was probably based on my testing positive for CD₄ and CD₅₆. But there's a lot more to consider. Take this case I read about, for example:

The tumor cells were positive for CD₄₅, CD₄ (weak), CD₅₆, CD₄₃, CD₆₈ (KP_-I, partly), and negative for B-cell and all other T-cell, NK-cell, and myeloid markers. Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) was not detected with EBV-encoded small nuclear marker RNA (EBER) probe.

You get the point. These people are working hard, and their research is not being wasted. They are finding varied and amazingly precise defects and learning how to cure them.

Could they be better at preaching prevention? Oh, yeah. From what I can tell, advising patients to change their lifestyles to a healthier one is some sort of horrible crime against humanity.

But is the research worth it?

Yeah, it is. They're doing research and not paying multiple millions of dollars in six and seven-figure salaries like the American Cancer Society is. The Prevent Cancer Foundation, on the other hand, has a total salary of around $500,000 to handle their $7 million in donations. Those salaries are still stiff, with the top one at $290,000, but nothing like those of the ACS.

Keep in mind, though, that the Prevent Cancer Foundation only supports research towards preventing cancer. That's a great and important idea, but actually keeping cancer patients from dying is a good idea, too.

Okay, enough for today. This probably wasn't a very exciting post, but I wanted to take a good hard poke at the American Cancer Society for spending so little of their money on research and having such awful salary figures.