HealthCare

Steve Jobs of Apple is dead. Steve jobs pancreatic cancer
Is it possible that one of the greatest geniuses, inventors and innovators the world has seen - Steve Jobs could have been alive today if only he had been bit more smart when it came to his health? There are currently talks that Steve Jobs relied more on natural and herbal medicines to treat his cancer rather than surgery. Question arises whether it is really true.

Firstly we have to understand the type of cancer Steve Jobs was suffering from. He was suffering from a rare form of pancreatic cancer known as islet-cell neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer does not show any visible symptoms for as much as 12 years in most cases. By the time it is diagnosed the malignancy would have already grown and spread beyond manageable levels. This is the reason why it has such a high mortality rates. The first year survival rate - the year after which it is diagnosed is 24 percent. The 5 year survival rate is as low as 3%. That means that of 100 persons diagnosed of pancreatic cancer as many as 75 will die at the end of first year and as many as 97 out of 100 persons will die by the fifth year. Pancreatic cancer is the fourth most leading cause of cancer deaths in America. It has highest mortality rates of all the cancers. To aggravate this mortality rate further Steve jobs was suffering from a rare form of pancreatic cancer which has even higher mortality rates.

Steve Jobs' pancreatic cancer was diagnosed in 2003 and he died in 2011. . There only a 3% chance for him to survive beyond 2008. Going by the statistics he definitely lived much longer and gave the world few more great products. Steve Jobs took a number of herbal medicines along with conventional treatment. The news that Steve Jobs relied upon herbal medicines and hence he did not take conventional medical treatment or undergo surgery is totally wrong. No one least of all Steve Jobs would have ever done such a thing. Surgery for cancer is something that is truly daunting and outright scary.

Being such a busy man with the entire world looking towards him in 2003 it was quite possible that he in consultation with his doctors opted for Chemotherapy or radiation and delayed surgery. It is also very common for doctors to administer radiotherapy and chemotherapy on pancreatic cancer patients for a couple of months before doing surgery. This is considered a more effective practice as the chances of relapses are reduced.

Herbal extracts, diet etcetra do have proven anti cancer properties. In fact they are known to be very effective in reducing the risks of cancer. Just as tobacco increases risk of cancer certain herbal extracts can reduce the risk of various types of cancer. But it has to be born in mind that only a doctor and modern medical science can treat cancer effectively. No herb or supplement can treat or cure cancer.

Tamoxifen is a drug that interferes with the activity of estrogen particularly in the mammary glands of women. It has been used to treat and prevent breast cancer for the past 3 decades. Breast cancer cells needs estrogen to grow. Without estrogen these cells are deprived of their vital nutrition and may die. This principle is used when Tamoxifen drug was formulated. Tamoxifen binds with the estrogen receptors in the breast thereby depriving breast cancer cells of vital protein in estrogen.

To put it in layman's terms imagine an auditorium with a  limited number of seats and assume the auditorium manager gives advance information to all the well behaved people and books their tickets. The auditorium gets filled with all the good guys the unruly bad elements who come late do not get a place inside. The show in the auditorium goes on without any trouble or untoward events. In this case the good guys are the molecules in the Tamoxifen which bind to estrogen receptors and the bad elements are the breast cancer cells. This process is also known as competitive antagonism.

Tamoxifen is effective only in estrogen receptor positive breast cancer cases. It does not have any effect on progesterone receptor breast cancer and HER2/neu (Human Epidermal growth factor Receptor 2) breast cancer. But the good news is that almost 70% of all the breast cancer cases are Estrogen receptor positive ones and this drug can very effectively treat breast cancer and even prevent it well in advance.

But there is a major catch and use of this drug is not without a cost. No it does not pinch the wallet that much even if insurance does not cover it in some cases. Tamoxifen is off the patent since 2002. It is now classified as a generic drug. It’s price has dropped drastically ever since.   Even though Tamoxifen is very effective it is not commonly prescribed as a preventive medicine because of it’s chronic side effects. This drug is known to trigger uterine or endometrial cancer in many women. The risk of developing this type of cancer is quadrupled even after using Tamoxifen for as low as 2 years. American Cancer Society has listed Tamoxifen as a known carcinogen. In many women this drug is known to cause a spurt in triglyceride levels as well as fatty liver syndrome. Needless to say these are not good for heart or liver.

Tamoxifen can have adverse effect on the central nervous. It can severely impair cognition and memory. A good number of patients who are prescribed this drug experience a severe drop in sexual drive and libido. As in case of any risky treatment a cost benefit assessment has to be made. Breast cancer is a serious and fatal disease. If Tamoxifen has been assessed to be very beneficial in a particular patient’s case then it has to be used. There are well established preventive and alleviating treatments for the side effects caused by Tamoxifen.

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Dr.Harness on Tamoxifen And The Side Effects

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Cancer Of Mouth and Tounge

Cancer of tongue and mouth forms almost 1% of all the cancers and as much as 1.5% of all the cancer deaths. Men are 3 times as likely as women to be affected by Cancer Of Mouth and Tongue.

Cancers of the tongue, mouth, and pharynx (other than nasopharynx) are all related to smoking (of pipes, cigars, and cigarettes) and to the consumption of alcohol. The two factors act synergistically and cancers in these sites are extremely rare in non-smokers who do not drink alcohol. Cancer of the tongue is much less common in Britain than it was early this century, but the reason for the sharp decline in incidence is unknown. One explanation
could be the decrease in syphilis, which was commonly believed to be a predisposing factor because of the clinical association with syphilitic leucoplakia. Recentincreases in oral and pharangeal cancer in men are partly due to increased consumption of alcohol and possibly, in the case of pharyngeal cancer, to human papilloma virus infection.
Cancers that occur low in the hypopharynx are distinguished by a tendency to affect women who have suffered from iron-deficiency anaemia and dysphagia.
Cancers of the mouth and pharynx (excluding nasopharynx) are particularly common in South-East and Central Asia where tobacco smoking is largely replaced by chewing tobacco, betel nut or leaf, and lime (calcium hydroxide). A close association with such chewing habits has been established by studies that have shown that the cancers tend to originate in the part of the mouth in which the quid is usually held—a characteristic that varies both between individuals and between areas. The materials chewed differ in different places and, although the disease is commonly described as 'betel chewer's cancer', betel is not invariably a component of the quid
and the most characteristic constituent seems to be a small amount of lime and, in most cases, some form of tobacco. In parts of Asia, the disease is so common that it accounts for 20 per cent of all cancers and in those populations the abandonment of chewing would be the single most effective means of reducing the total incidence of cancer—so long as the habit was not replaced by an increase in tobacco smoking. Among habitual quid chewers, the risks are particularly elevated in those who both chew and smoke—indeed, in parts of India the majority of deaths from 'betel chewer's cancer' could have been avoided if those affected had not also smoked. The incidence might also be reduced by improved nutrition, as the disease in Southern Asia tends to be associated with vitamin A deficiency.

Cancer Of Mouth and Tongue Videos

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lip cancer causes : what causes lip cancer?

Lip cancer as such is not a common type of cancer. The incidence of lip cancer is about 0.1 per cent of all cancers and it causes 0.02 per cent of cancer deaths.
Carcinoma of the lip was one of the first types of cancer to be related to an extrinsic cause when, more than 200 years ago, it was noted to occur characteristically in pipe smokers. Many years later it was realized that the disease could also be produced by smoking cigarettes, although much less readily, so that it must be produced by the chemicals in smoke rather than by the non-specific effect of local heat. It is also much more common in outdoor than in indoor workers and is induced by ultraviolet light in the same way as other cancers of the exposed skin. Ultraviolet light and tobacco account, between them, for the great majority of all cases in Britain, probably multiplying each other's effects. The disease is much less common than it used to be, because of the decrease in both pipe smoking and outdoor work.

All cancers have certain pathological and clinical characteristics in common, but those arising in different organs often have very different causes. The epidemiology of cancer- the study of the incidence of the disease in people under different conditions of life, is, therefore the epidemiology of specific types of cancer, usually, but not always, defined as cancers of specific organs.

In this sense, the subject has a history dating back nearly 300 years to Ramazzini's observation that cancer of the breast occurred more often in nuns than in other women of similar age and to Pott's observation, 200 years ago, that scrotal cancer in young men occurred characteristically in chimney sweeps. The high risk in nuns (which largely reflected the protective effect of multiple pregnancies in the general population) helped the realization that hormonal factors can substantially affect the incidence of several types of cancer, while the latter led to the recognition that the combustion products of coal to which sweeps had been exposed could cause cancer on any part of the skin with which they came into repeated contact and to the isolation of the first specific chemical carcinogen.

Many other similar observations were made over the next 150 years, mostly as a result of the acumen of individual doctors who were struck by the observation that clusters of cases of a particular type of cancer occurred in patients with a similar occupational or cultural background. Lip and tongue cancers were found in pipe smokers, bladder cancer in certain aniline dye workers, buccal cancer in those who habitually chewed mixtures of tobacco and betel in India, lung cancer in miners of particular ores (who, it was subsequently realized, were heavily exposed to radon and its daughter products), and skin cancer in the early radiologists and radiographers who were heavily exposed to X-rays and in farmers and seamen heavily exposed to sunlight. Gradually, however, clinical anecdotes were replaced by statistics as the epidemiological methods that are described below began to be applied to the study of cancer and other non-infectious disease.

As a result, many other causes were identified with sufficient certainty to justify preventive action and data were obtained to suggest hypotheses that could be tested in the laboratory.