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  • One out of every two men and one out of every three women will be diagnosed with cancer.

  • But despite those huge numbers most individuals don't know what that really means.

  • At the simplest level, cancer or cancer cells are cells that have lost the ability to follow

  • the normal control that the body exerts on all cells. In our body we have billions and

  • billions of cells and they have different functions. It's a very complicated process

  • under incredibly phenomenal control and if something goes wrong and that control is lost

  • and particular cells escape the normal control mechanisms and they continue to grow and they

  • may spread. That's what we call cancer.

  • Those cells together, we would call that a tumor. Specifically cancer is a malignant

  • tumor and we call it malignant because not only can it invade into adjacent organs, but

  • unfortunately cancer can spread to other tissues and that can be life threatening.

  • Cancer can actually occur anywhere in the body because there are cells everywhere in

  • the body. In women one of the most common cancers of course is breast cancer and men

  • prostate cancer. And in both men and women lung cancer and colon cancer are common cancers.

  • It's important to understand that the cancer that occurs in one individual is very different

  • than the cancer that occurs in another, just like those individuals are different. So a

  • lung tumor in one person will be very different from a lung tumor in another person.

  • Once the diagnosis of cancer is made of course the next obvious question is what do you do.

  • There are several things that are really relevant. The stage of the cancer, which is information

  • about where is the cancer. You say it's a particular kind of cancer. How much cancer

  • is present? Has it spread? Is it in lymphnodes? Has it spread to other organs of the body?

  • Cancer treatment actually is very complex and part of the reason is because cancer is

  • this constellation of over two hundred different diseases. They have common characteristics

  • but they're all very different from each other. In addition to that, the cancer itself is

  • not homogeneous. There may be three or four or five or six different slight variations

  • in the cancer cells that are there. People ask why? Why does my cancer not go away? It

  • shrunk by seventy percent. What's wrong with the other thirty percent? Well it's probably

  • a different subtype of that cancer which is going to require a different kind of treatment.

  • There are three primary therapies for cancer. Surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Surgery

  • works by directly removing the tumor. Radiation therapy provides x-rays to kill individual

  • cells and the chemotherapy provides chemicals that can kill those individual cells. But

  • they have side effects.

  • The best therapies that we can produce really are the result of optimizing the amount of

  • tumor that we can kill by any treatment and minimizing the amount of damage that we cause

  • to the normal cells that would be affected by that treatment.

  • At Cancer Treatment Centers of America, we have a very robust integrative oncology program.

  • Integrative oncology is taking those conventional oncology treatments and integrating those

  • with therapies like acupuncture, naturopathic medicine, chiropractic, nutrition. To blend

  • those together and to create the most appropriate treatment plan for that individual patient

  • at that moment in time.

  • Cancer Treatment Centers of America has invested in a model in which all of the effects of

  • cancer and its therapy are aggressively treated and managed. It's not just enough to kill

  • the cancer, if we don't treat the pain, the fatigue, the depression, or the anxiety that

  • comes with a diagnosis of cancer.

  • Receiving a diagnosis of cancer can be a frightening thing. The good news is that today is probably

  • the most exciting time in history in terms of the treatment of cancer. Options that didn't

  • exist a few months ago certainly didn't exist a few years ago, like the ability to genomically

  • profile a tumor, and to take that individualized fingerprint of that cancer may direct us to

  • tailor treatment in very specific ways.

  • We believe that in the future, many more patients with a number of different tumor

  • types will potentially be able to benefit from the advances in precision medicine.

  • There are very hopeful options that are available to us as clinicians to make a difference in

  • patients lives and it's therefore just as important for patients to know that, so they

  • have those hopeful options and they take advantage of them.

One out of every two men and one out of every three women will be diagnosed with cancer.

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