The whole area of cancer diagnosis is fraught with error, fear and apprehension as far as the general public is concerned. We receive e-mails asking if mammography causes cancer, if the PSA test is any use?
You can read our section on cancer diagnosis, which will tell you the truth about everything from mammograms to CT scans.
The fact is that some orthodox screening programmes do pick up problems before they turn into cancer - eg Colon cancer screening may find polyps, cervical cancer screening may find pre-cancerous lesions.
Others, however, only tell you if youve already developed the disease and then not always 100% accurately. One research study showed that a cancer divides about 40 times during its lifetime, and a mammogram cannot pick up a lump until it has divided about 20 times already. This is hardly early diagnosis is it?
However, official screening programmes often involve expensive machinery which the health bodies have already invested in and are loathe to throw away.
There are alternatives. In Cancer Watch we covered research findings that showed vinegar was a better cervical cancer test in terms of accuracy that the current orthodox approach. But vinegar is cheap and companies wont get rich. There is also US evidence that oestrogen-driven cancers can be picked up by sensitive pregnancy testing kits (even male cancers). Certainly one woman in my audience had thought she was pregnant for two months (as did her Doctor) before breast cancer was diagnosed.
We cover official screening under our heading of
orthodox cancer. Here under complementary and alternative therapies we tell you how you can safely be
screened for breast cancer or how iridology might help show up cancers and associated weaknesses. Cancers can show up using bioenergetic systems like VEGA tests, or through Kirlian photographs (prices can be as low as 35 pounds for a full body picture). Then there are new blood tests coming that will diagnose a cancer while it is still in the precancerous state. Already there are more sophisticated blood tests which can also show the presence of microbial infections or even viruses. Finally, we include metabolic typing, which aims to analyse your biochemistry and sort out which foodstuffs are better or worse for your metabolic type.
One wonders, is one test ever enough to be sure?