What Can You Do To Prevent Cancer Of The Lungs?

| Tuesday, February 1, 2011
By Owen Jones


Cancer is the top or second biggest killer in most countries in the world in spite of the fact that there has been a blitz on smoking. There are not that many countries left in the Western world where there are not some limitations on smoking. This is hardly surprising really, we all know what smoke and pollution is doing to the world's ozone layer and to the world's foliage - it's lungs - so why should it not be doing the same to us? In spades, even?

Cancer is a condition where cells start increasing out of control, as most of us already know. The majority of people affected are over forty rears old and it affects women smokers equally as much as men smokers. By tradition, more men smoked than women, but that ratio is changing.

These days, it is more common to see women smoking than men. This is normally because women try to use smoking as a hunger suppressant - in other words an aid to losing weight.

Smoking is the foremost reason for cancer and so it is thought that during the following decades, that there will be a higher percentage of women dying of lung cancer than men for the first time in history.

An off-shoot of smoking is passive smoking, which is the situation in which someone breathes the secondhand smoke of a smoker. This used to happen most often in bars and offices, but smoking there has now been banned, so it is likely that most passive smoking now takes place in the home, which puts children most at risk. There are equivalent experiences to passive smoking from pollutants from vehicles.

The problem with lung cancer is that there is no cure. Your body can repair itself if you give it a fair opportunity, but it does require a fair chance. Lots of people have been able to do well with a little lung cancer, but you cannot do well with merely a few percent of your lungs.

This is why some of the symptoms of lung cancer are coughing, wheezing, blood in the phlegm that smokers cough up, being out of breath and having chest pains. Heavy smokers who are developing lung cancer are frequently under weight as well.

Unfortunately, chemotherapy and radiotherapy do not have a immense deal of effect on this kind of cancer. The most a sufferer can look forward to is a wheezy life in an oxygen tent. And not a long life at that. Drugs can alleviate the pain and improve breathing, but not much more.

Surgery can help, but you just have so much lung capacity and if that is cut away it will not grow back. You can do fairly well with only one lung, but a full and active normal life is a problem. You would require an inhaler to walk any distance.

The other thing is that blood flows through the lungs to pick up oxygen which it distributes to each part of your body. While it is oxygenating this blood it will also pick up cancerous cells and distribute these around your whole body too. It could well be that it is one of these secondary cancers that will do for you.




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