![]() Remember, 50 percent of men, 35 percent of women, and the odds seem to be worsening. I emphatically encourage you to do your own research, whether you have cancer or not. But I also know-and this is not a caveat or a sign of hesitation on my part-the science and recommendations I’m citing are NOT sanctioned by the American Medical Association, the American Cancer Society, and all the other top medical organizations. I’ll feel great if anything I say moves you to make some lifestyle changes to improve your own odds of avoiding cancer. And that’s the attitude I’m hoping to share with you. In the main, I came to realize that the cancer specialists who saved my life, the conflicting health information reported daily in the media, the norms and habits of American society in the twenty-first century-all of those entities and information sources didn’t begin to offer what I felt I needed to stay healthy and cancer free for the rest of my life. I’m setting these thoughts down on paper not because I want to scare you with details of my experience as much as I want to share some of what I learned during my recovery. But I got through it better than most and a PET scan a couple months later confirmed I was cancer free, for the time being. From the first tingles of feeling the platinum cocktail enter my body via IV to the seventieth hour of nausea afterwards, even the thought of chemo chills my bones all these months later. So late last January, 2016, I was diagnosed and proceeded to spend the next seven weeks getting pummeled by chemo and radiation, with the months after devoted to gaining back weight, strength, and a sense of taste-as well as that little matter of mojo because chemo is a total mind fuck. While the lump just seemingly appeared one morning, chances are the cancer developed many months earlier. Perhaps because I smoked a cigar daily or drank more than the recommended amount of wine, the virus conspired with cancer cells in my right tonsil and then moved into the lymph glands in my neck, sprouting a walnut-sized tumor under my ear. And while cancer specialists are getting pretty good at treating cancer once it materializes in the body, the medical industry is piss-poor at helping to prevent it from occurring in the first place.Īccording to the lab reports, my cancer was caused by HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus. Today, a mind-boggling 50 percent of men will get the disease in their lifetimes, and 35 percent of women. One hundred years ago the chances of getting cancer were about one in twenty. And like a dutiful son, I caught the cancer bug last year at 53-stage 4 throat cancer-it’s a family thing. My mother barely survived breast cancer at 45.
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