Cancer is quite the conversation starter.

Mention cancer and suddenly somebody's cousin has a story about a deodorant that causes tumors. A friend who cured theirs with juice.

Or a Facebook post exposing Big Pharma for hiding the truth from us for decades. And sometimes some of these claims sound plausible, which is a problem. It's also the topic of this week's Healthcare Triage.

Let's start with what cancer actually is, because understanding that makes a lot of the myths around it easier to untangle. Cancer isn't some kind of external thing that invades your body. It's actually a corruption of something your body does constantly cell division.

Your cells have to divide for you to grow. Heal wounds, replace old cells and maintain your tissues. That process is tightly controlled.

You can think of cell division as a car with an accelerator and brakes. In cancer, those controls become disrupted. The accelerators are pushed too hard, the brakes stop working properly, or both cells keep dividing when they shouldn't, which produces a mass of cells called a tumor.

Importantly, not every tumor is cancer, benign tumors can grow, but they don't have the ability to invade surrounding tissue and travel to distant parts of the body. Malignant tumors are cancerous, and they can invade surrounding tissue and spread or metastasize throughout the body. when someone says cancers caused by X, we're really asking whether X can contribute to the cellular changes that eventually allow cells to become cancers. that brings us to our first myth. Your local cell phone tower is giving your cancer.

This one feels intuitively scary because the tower is right there, silently broadcasting invisible radiation into the neighborhood. And we know radiation is bad, right? But radiation is a huge category.

Radio waves, visible light, x rays, and gamma rays are all radiation, and they're not all interchangeable. Some of them can physically impact the human body, and others absolutely cannot because they simply don't have enough energy Cell towers use radio frequency radiation, as do the Wi-Fi routers in our homes, our cell phones, Bluetooth devices, and modern TV remotes. Fortunately, radio frequency is non-ionizing radiation, which means it doesn't have enough energy to directly damage DNA in the way that ionizing radiation, like X-rays can.

I hear some of you saying, but Aaron, if it isn't dangerous, why are the areas immediately in front of the tower restricted? And why do workers have to adhere to safety practices around them? Excellent question.

The answer is that high intensity non-ionizing radiation exposure can cause tissue burns. Those suck, but the risk is only in the very near vicinity of the tower. And it's not cancer.

So does that mean researchers have simply declared radio frequency radiation completely harmless and moved on? Almost, but not quite. There has been research into whether radio frequency exposure could cause cancer through other biological mechanisms.

But based on the results we're seeing, it's time to put our research dollars elsewhere. Studies estimating exposure among people living near a tower have not shown an increased risk of childhood tumors. And overall, the evidence hasn't established a clear causal relationship.

And while it's worth noting that the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified radio frequency radiation as group 2B or possibly carcinogenic to humans, it's also worth noting that all that means is that while some credible evidence may exist, it is very limited or inconsistent evidence. That's not the same thing as evidence that living near a cell tower causes cancer. So thankfully, choosing a home that has good cell coverage isn't likely to put you at more risks for cancer.

Just to further drive home that point. Pickled vegetables are also classified as group 2B or possibly carcinogenic to humans. All right, let's move on to something slightly more personal.

Your deodorant. You've probably heard the antiperspirant caused breast cancer. Often citing aluminum is the culprit, but the scientific literature just isn't telling the same story.

Instead, antiperspirants fall pray to a recurring problem with cancer claims Something can sound scientifically sophisticated without actually being supported by evidence. There's a chemical in that product, is followed by that chemical has been detected in humans, followed by some chemicals can cause cancer. And suddenly we're crashing to the conclusion that this product causes cancer.

There are several enormous steps missing in the middle of this process. Dose matters. Exposure matters.

How the substance behaves biologically matters, and importantly, evidence that something can cause harm under particular experimental conditions is not automatically evidence that the amount encountered in an everyday product causes cancer to be exceptionally clear, a study that exposes rats to 500 times the typical dose for an entire year is not representative of the outcomes you would see in a human using it once a day at the tiniest fraction of that dose. Water at 500 times more than what you currently drink daily would also make you pretty sick. The same principle applies to a whole parade of scary sounding household chemicals.

Some personal care and cleaning products contain substances that can be classified as carcinogens or endocrine disruptors, and some of those substances can be detected in blood or urine. That doesn't mean every person using the product is poisoning themselves. Also, let's look at the idea of scary chemicals with a wider perspective.

All matter in the universe is made of chemical elements. Everything and everyone everywhere are made up of chemicals. Some are essential to life.

Some will kill us. Having chemicals in your life is not necessarily bad, though, if we're looking at things on a cosmic scale. Of course, none of this matters, but health care is not a place for nihilism.

It's a place for optimism and understanding. The tagline here is that the presence of a chemical isn't synonymous with the presence of meaningful risk. Unfortunately, chemical detected is one of the easiest ways to manufacture a scary headline. that brings us to our third cancer myth that cancer can be prevented simply by avoiding all the toxic products in modern life, and replacing them with natural alternatives.

Don't get me wrong, there are legitimate concerns about certain chemicals, but turning that into the idea that replacing commercial products with vinegar, homemade shampoo, or a collection of herbs will dramatically prevent cancer is not scientifically supported cancer isn't caused by a handful of modern toxins. It's a complex disease in which a lot of genetic, behavioral, and environmental factors play a role. There isn't one hidden ingredient responsible for all of it Which brings us to another favorite sugar feeds cancer.

This one is really persistent. The idea is basically the cancer cells use glucose. So if you stop eating sugar, you can starve the cancer.

The problem is that every cell in your entire body needs glucose, and your body will generally maintain blood glucose levels, whether you eat a cookie or swear eternal allegiance to kale. Which brings us to the opposite myth. If sugar is bad, maybe some special food is the antidote.

Turmeric. Ginger. Blueberries.

Apricot pits. Lemon juice. There's literally no shortage of things that have been promoted as cancer cures.

And often there's a tiny kernel of real science hiding inside the claim, which is actually part of the problem. for example, some substances can slow the growth of cancer cells in laboratory cultures. That sounds impressive, but cancer cells sitting in a laboratory dish not the same thing as a human being with cancer. A substance can kill cells in a petri dish and still be completely useless as a cancer treatment in an actual person.

That doesn't mean the laboratory studies aren't useful. Researchers may discover a molecule worth studying, then tested in cells, then test a modified version in animals. That's how drug discovery can begin. it's not the step where we find a cure for cancer.

Unfortunately, the internet is not often a place for nuanced discussion. Online discourse takes that distinction and throws it directly out the window. And now for the ultimate cancer claim.

Big Pharma is hiding the cure. According to this story, pharmaceutical companies and mainstream doctors supposedly know about cheap natural cancer cures but suppress them because cancer treatment is too profitable. This sounds compelling because it gives us a villain and it gives us a secret answer.

But there just isn't compelling evidence for a giant conspiracy hiding effective cancer cures. There's also an interesting business incentive problem with the conspiracy itself. Many of the people promoting these conspiracies are selling something a book, a supplement, a documentary, a consultation.

And if it's someone suggesting they have the cure, they probably aren't revealing it until you've paid up. Then on the flip side, there's another uncomfortable problem with the idea that conventional medicine is suppressing all the natural cures. Scientists love finding new things, and they love getting credit for it The discovery of effective cancer treatments, which we do already have, by the way, is a really big deal.

If a new one came along tomorrow, researchers would want to replicate it and test it. Doctors would want to know about it and patients would want to access it. Science's competitive, messy and sometimes annoying, but it is not one giant group chat where everyone agreed to hide the turmeric from cancer patients. in the same vein, what about vitamins?

If you aren't sold on super secret cancer cures, maybe you've got a cabinet full of supplements promising to prevent disease instead. The idea that vitamins are basically harmless little health insurance policies is pretty pervasive, but the evidence isn't that simple. In fact, recommendations from the US Preventive Services Task Force specifically advised against using beta carotene or vitamin E to prevent cardiovascular disease or cancer in the general population.

Additionally, beta carotene supplementation can actually increase cancer risk in certain populations. There are legitimate reasons for people to take certain vitamins. Vitamin deficiencies do exist, but that's different from saying everyone should take a pile of supplements every morning because they might prevent cancer. there's an interesting psychological component here because people often want to do something.

If the choice is between taking an expensive supplement and sitting there doing nothing, taking the supplement feels like action. Researchers call this action bias the tendency to prefer doing something over doing nothing. Even when doing something isn't necessarily helpful.

It's the same reason people honk in traffic, even though the car in front of them has nowhere to go. You're not necessarily accomplishing something, but you're doing something. So those are a handful of things that don't cause cancer or help treat it.

But what about the flip side? Survey data actually suggests that people are often less familiar with established cancer risk factors than they are with factors that have no proven relationship to cancer. For example, only about 30% of respondents correctly identified HPV infection and low fruit and vegetable consumption as known cancer risk factors. meanwhile, almost half thought stress and food additives cause cancer and more than a third thought genetically engineered foods were a cancer risk.

They aren't, and that's another myth worth killing. The cancer is always the result of bad choices. Some risk factors are modifiable, but cancer is not a punishment for eating the wrong food or failing to drink enough organic green juice.

This matters because cancer misinformation doesn't only scare people about harmless things, it can distract attention from things that actually matter, like secondhand smoke. Repeated childhood sunburns. Having a relative with cancer and HPV infection.

Long story short, we cannot take a complicated disease and turn it into a simple story. Risk isn't an on off switch, and there is no one secret compound that can make it all go away. Cancer is the result of disrupted cellular regulation.

There are multiple pathways to get there, and there are different kinds of cancer. Some of our evidence is strong, some is uncertain, and some is pretty weak. The goal isn't to make every cancer story reassuring, and it isn't to make every cancer story terrifying.

The goal is to figure out what the evidence actually says, so we can translate that into real impact for patients. Hate. Enjoyed this video.

You might enjoy this previous video on mRNA cancer vaccines. We'd appreciate it if you'd like this video and subscribe to the channel down below. Maybe go on over to Patreon.com/HealthcareTriage where you can help support the show.

Make it bigger and better. We'd like to thank our research associates, Edward Liljeholm and Christopher Learn and of course our Surgeon Admiral Sam.