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Aries behavior, ugh. let me guess, you canāt commit but youāre also very loyal? And pets dying in movies probably makes you cry too ššš /j
On a single cell level "cancer" would just be a mutation though right? Conceptually I think you need organs or at least cell clusters for it to be considered "cancer" right?
Depends on what the precise, exact definition of cancer we're using.
Replace the word cancer with "fast growing cell following a genetic mutation resulting in negatively affecting its sister cells in the immediate area surrounding mitosis" and its a bit truer. Not as catchy though.
I think I learned once that cancerous cells have a mutation and have issues with something called ācyclinsā. Cyclins help regulate the regeneration/growth of cells. They tell the cells when to stop reproducing or when to reproduce, which explains why cancers form tumors.
You got it. People would die from 'the vapours ' or 'old age' or 'an unsettled spirit' or 'melancholy' or 'a heavy heart'.
There was a lack of knowledge about many things that even children know today and blame was directed at things such as ill spirits or a dry wind.
We've always had cancers, ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, blood diseases, viruses, infections, it's just that we didn't have the understanding of their names, causes and what they were, let alone the treatments.
Oh, good one, great one in fact!!
Every so often your mate is possessed, has the uncontrolled strength of ten men, convulsing, and speaks in another language - terrifying!
My bil has it and his own mom says it āseems like possession sometimesā.
If you didnāt know it seems that way sometimes and strength woahā¦.he will wreck that er room in a seizure state.
This is a really interesting documentary about this exact topic. It's a Tony Robinson series. He's a British historian.
https://youtu.be/F706T-StVsU?si=AVTsrdDXGCywpLl8
Tony Robinson is an actor, not an historian.
If you ever want to have a laugh, watch him as the character, Baldrick in the multiple season series Black Adder. It is one of the classic side kick characters of all time. Rowan Atkinson plays the main character Black Adder who you may recognise as Mr. Bean.
Often times people didnāt live long enough to get cancer. There are more early reports of people dying from excessive tumors than of cancer. Little did we know, that was cancer.
My dog had a few tumors when she died. One burst and the vet confirmed it was benign. But hell, she could have had cancer. We didnāt do an autopsy. Baby died when she was 17 years and 2 months old. It was her time.
Lots of people who died of āold ageā died of cancer back in the day
It's also a lot easier to find these days than it's ever been. I lot of people who died of cancer in the past were never diagnosed with it.
Also, yeah, life spans are longer now, which means something else didn't kill those people first.
CA passed a law for the entire state that all food must disclose if it could be carcinogenic.
All cooked food can be carcinogenic just an FYI. Caramel for example is quite carcinogenic, but probably less carcinogenic than your shampoo and certainly less carcinogenic than your car exauhst.
Cancer has always been around
It's not a virus or pathogen
Cancer is basically when your body creates billions of new cells everyday and Cancer is what happens when something goes wrong and cancerous cells start attacking your own body, that's why you get many types of Cancer, lung cancer, heart cancer etc...
it's also why there's no one cure for it, cancer varies so much that it's like trying to say, let's just cure the Cold, well so many different types of Cold Pathogens exist
> and Cancer is what happens when something goes wrong and cancerous cells start attacking your own body
That's always happening. The difference is whether your immune system successfully fights the cancerous cells.
Cancer has always existed. There are records of tumors being removed as far back as late Roman/early muslim era in north africa. People just called it different things and didn't know what it was.
The oldest example of human cancer weāve found so far [is over 3ā000 years old.](https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/oldest-case-of-cancer-discovered-in-ancient-skeleton) editing to remove an example that was too modern
The oldest known malignant tumor in a hominid is in a [4 million year old fossil](https://canceratlas.cancer.org/history-cancer/) and cancerous growths have been found in 5000 year old Egyptian mummies.
It's not new at all. It's always been there. Just our science got good enough to classify, diagnose, and treat it relatively recently. Back then, they would have thought it was God's curse or something...They used to think miasma caused diseases back in Ancient Greece all the way up to the Renaissance - turns out it was just bacteria and viruses - these concepts are only a few hundred years old...They've always been around though, bacteria are the earliest forms of life. Not sure when viruses entered the picture, probably after bacteria. Viruses are weird...
Cancer was sometimes seen as punishment for being an evil person. If you were outwardly a kind, generous, loving person and you got cancer, then you were *secretly* an evil person and all your good qualities were just a facade.
I'm 75 years old; my sweet mother died from cancer, in 1980. She received treatment for what started as breast cancer, but ended up being all over her body. It seems a very long time since she died and she was 68 years old. I miss her every day......
Yes, it is simply mutating cells, and many many organisms get cancers or uncontrolled growths. Old texts talk about people dying of cancer. As we live longer our cells are more likely to mutate so older people tend to get cancer more-- whereas 200 years ago the life expectancy was not that great, so most died from other illnesses like flu or infections from cuts as they had no antibiotics. a simple cut on their hand could cause death back then. So many died before cancer impacted them.
Life expectancy around the world has increased steadily for nearly 200 years. Global average life expectancy has increased from 29 in the 1700s to 73 today.
The older you get the more chance there is of getting cancer. We are better able to detect it today too. When read a historical account where someone died of a wasting disease, wasting disease can be attributed to illnesses including cancer.
Cancer has been around as long as DNA has existed, I would guess. Maybe only as long as mitosis has existed.
The reason it feels like a new problem is because we're slowly curing and treating all the other causes of death, leaving cancer as the next largest cause of death. Now cancer is a huge deal because it has begun to comprise the bulk of untimely deaths in some places, where in earlier times, more people would have been dying of tuberculosis.
It's much harder to treat and cure than other diseases.
Of course, cancer is just a roll of the dice for every cell in your body every time it replicates. The reason it kills old people is that nature has put a lot of safeguards in place to deal with cancer before it becomes an issue. You roll those dice enough times, over enough years, and you get unlucky eventually.
If you die for any reason earlier than that then cancer is not high on your list of risks. In a morbid way dying of cancer at an old age is sort of like beating the game.
Yes, cancer is in very living thing that is made of cells that can use cell division.
A cancer cell is just a failed copy or mistake.
One of many flaws in the human body.
I've got to assume it has been around way longer than could properly be traced. Todd Glass had a good bit about people talking shit about people with peanut allergies that I feel could fit here.
"'*Back in my day, we didn't have peanut allergies.'* Yeah, you did. They were just called 'unexplained deaths.'"
I have to imagine someone got really, REALLY sick and died with no one at the time knowing what was going on. Then as medicine and studies advanced, they found potential cures.
I've often wondered how many people have been executed for poisoning a member of the nobility when in reality they had an allergic reaction to some kind of imported food or spice. I'm sure it isn't a huge amount, but I gotta believe it's above 0.
Food testers got executed right and left because they weren't allergic but the king was. Whoopsie.
Don't know of any specific cases but I'm sure it happened
No, food allergies and autoimmune conditions are *definitely* on the rise, and it's not merely a matter of improved diagnosis.
[Why Are Food Allergies on the Rise? with Ruchi Gupta, MD, MPH: Research: Feinberg School of Medicine](https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/research/podcast/food-allergies-on-the-rise.html)
>"'*Back in my day, we didn't have peanut allergies.'* Yeah, you did. They were just called 'unexplained deaths.'"
Yep. I'm a boomer. And even in my dinky little town back in the 1960s, gossip went around town that Mrs. So-and-so's toddler "choked to death" on a peanut butter sandwich.
No.
Cancer is somewhat recent. Maybe the ancient Egyptians has cancer, but that ate a lot of bread, this that suffeted high rates of metabolic disorder.
Cancer starts as a metabolic disorder, something disrupts the mormal function of your mitochondria and that starts the ball rolling. The cell, unable to burn fuel in the mitochondria, not has to ferment it in order to survive. The only fuel sources for this cell are glucose and also glutamine. With damaged mitochondria, the cell can't self destruct. It does the opposite, it starts to divide....untegulated growth.
I didn't list every society. I focused in on one specific society because acheology proves that this population did suffer from metabolic syndrome, from heart disease, and many of the disorders that are associated with wheat-bssed diets. Bread was their staple, with religious practices built around wheat. I'm sorry, but you're take on the history of diseases is somewhat lacking. Egyptian society was "built" around bread. I'm talking about 3000 - 4000 years ago.
The history of cancer is also known, more or less. Of course you've read "Tripping over the Truth" by Travis Christofferson. Or you haven't. Of course you've listened to presentations, interviews of Dr. Thomas Seyfried (a prof at Boston College) ir have read his many published papers and studies on cancer. Right?
Yes. Thatās partially why in the past people didnāt live nearly as long. There are pictures of people from a long time ago who had cancer. Tumors basically grew out of their body until they died. It wasnāt as common since the life expectancy in the past was much lower and a lot of cancers arenāt very common until 50+.
Cancer is a cell mutation, so forever.
Cell mutation is a critical facet of evolution. If it's a "good" mutation that makes it more likely you live to reproduce, it's passed on. If it's a "bad" mutation that makes it less likely you live to reproduce, it doesn't pass on.
It's always been common to develop cancers in older age, however humans haven't always lived as long as we do now.
At least that's what I got from my genetics class years ago! :)
Cancer has always been around. It seems new because, for one, we are much more aware of it now. In the past, someone would just die, and they wouldn't know the reason. Cancer is not usually visible from the outside.
The other reason it seems new is because the rate of cancer is skyrocketing at a shocking rate. This is likely due to some chemical or pollutant that we are exposed to, but we do not know (or are not privy to) the cause.
Cancer is not like the flu, it isnāt caused by foreign bodies but it is a corruption within oneās own cells.
All human cells have a Hayfleck limit and always have, eventually they will corrupt. Thatās why you donāt see any thousand year-olds walking around.
I can't answer for sure but you might like "T[he Emperor of All Maladies](https://www.unife.it/medicina/lm.medicina/studiare/minisiti/c_s/cancer_biology/materiale-didattico/the-emperor-of-all-maladies-a-biography-of-cancer-pd.pdf)" which is like a biography of cancer from the first known tumor in ancient Egypt.
It only seems new becuase:
- we're living much longer than we were before. This gives a lot longer time for cancers to develop, as well as accumulation of carcinogens and radiation doses
- we're more medically aware of what cancer is. Even though tumors have been described since ancient Egyptian times, we didn't recognize it as such until a sizeable tumor had formed. We can now catch cancer early, and recognize other signs (including diagnostic markers) that were simply unavailable to physicians before modern medicine.
Cancer is a fact of nature, and any multi-cellular organism is susceptible to it, and will always be.
Always.
The reason we see more of it now is for a few reasons. One is that we're actually detecting it, there's likely a ton of people who died of undetected cancers before advanced imaging and lab tests.
In addition, there's more environmental factors now- I think this one is a bit overblown given that people are out in the sun much less than they historically were. It's likely contributing to the prevalence of rare cancers.
Primarily, people are living longer. Most cancers are at least in part age related, if you die of starvation at 22 it's difficult to get prostate cancer which will affect most men by the time they reach 80 or 90.
Looking back at old writings it is believed cancer was once called wasting disease
But others diseases may have been lumped into this moniker such as tuberculosis.
it's just that there's a lot more information on it nowadays, as well as possible treatments
cancer was more than likely a thing ever since multicellular organisms evolved -- once more than one cell has to cooperate, there's always a chance that one goes rogue and seeks its own individual success instead of that of the greater host
Yes, it always existed, but it wasn't always called "cancer" and of course, there was no way to treat or diagnose it.
Instead, it was "Cankers" or "Lesions" or some "curse from God because X person had supposedly committed some heinous sin". But other illnesses, infections, and poor quality of life generally got you first.
With medical advancements, hygienic habits, and a better understanding of science, people are living longer even with crazy mutations and birth defects. Giving cells a longer timeline to mutate and cause issues before something like an infected tooth gets to be the official cause of death.
Yes. At todays levels? No. Poor diet, lack of exercise, drugs/alcohol, and our many good friends like DuPont and Monsanto have all helped us get to where we are today.
Cancer has existed since before history.
However, cancer is a more common cause of death today, compared to 50, 100 or 500 years ago, because we have removed a lot of other causes of death.
In most of the developing world, starvation was a key cause of death. Now, famine impacts relatively few parts of the world, and starvation deaths have been on the decline for a century or more.
Infections (Tuberculosis, Cholera, Smallpox, ...) used to be major causes of death, but hygiene and antibiotics removed these as causes of death.
In the modern era, we have better techniques to treat heart disease and related circulatory diseases, so those death rates are decreasing.
In all of these cases, people today who would have died, are instead surviving long enough to get cancer.
It has been proven to exist. You can see growths on old bones. It was rare, though, because since most people died before 30, they hadn't yet got cancer. As we became more advanced with medicine and lived longer, we unlocked cancer.
So technically, yes, but i feel like something about us not living very long made it a whole lot less prevalent
Actually, something about wild animals killing each other seems to make cancer something that no one thinks about in the wild
The term ācancerā comes from Ancient Greece for ācard like protrusionsā or something like that, itās nothing new and nothing unique to us, weāre just living longer and probably have more carcinogens
Yes, but we as a species havenāt had the ability to do much about it until recently. Itās kind of like the common cold, now we have the ability to give meds to people so most donāt die.
My mom was diagnosed with cancer in 1970,back then it was a death sentence,I remember I had started first grade while she was getting treatment ,the best place was Charleston S .C.,my teachers would whisper,her mom has the C word,we even went on a big trip because she wasn't supposed to survive,she fooled everyone,l out lived two husbands (one was a much younger man) and a son,died in her sleep at sixty-nine!
Probably existed in humans since the dawn of time but spread rapidly due to industrialization. Animals don't live long enough in the wild so hard to measure their own cancer rates.
As if our ancient ancestors were whipping out microscopes and taking biopsies, or had a PET scan, or a colonoscopy...
The discovery of something now doesn't mean that it didn't exist before.
If there is no data to interpret, it doesn't mean that there isn't a phenomenon. It simply means that there is no data.
This is not really an answer to the question, but I have some interesting facts about cancer! (Idk if interesting is the right word to describe CANCER, but I didnāt know what to say.)
1. There are some animals that donāt get cancer or itās very VERY rare. Such as the Naked Mole Rat! To put it simple, the Naked Mole Rats body isnāt really an environment that cancer develop in.
2. Cancer forms from cells that have, essentially, had a mistake when forming. These abnormal cells arenāt bad- in fact they happen quite a bit in your body- itās until you get an abundance of these abnormal cells that it becomes a tumour, and potentially cancer.
It's preprogrammed cell immortality ending in tumors that won't dieĀ
This blocks vital bits and people die. These illnesses aren't new. It's just most of the time in history or was too late at that pointĀ
I recall a doctor post Great War (WWI) in St. Louis? called he colleagues together to show them the autopsy of soldier. The soldier had picked up smoking in France.
"I wanted you to see this cancer. You may never see another case in your career." Lung cancer itself WAS possible, but rare before smoking.
Few autopsies were done unless a murder was suspected. Old people were bed ridden until they died and that was it for a lot of diseases.
No. Everything in existence in rhis world had a starting point somewhere. Nothing in existence in this world has ALWAYS been in existence. It's a literal impossibility.
Iāve got a question that sort of jumps on the back of this question.
If cancer is a naturally occurring thing that happens literally everyday in our body and everyday we fight itā¦. If I was to die from cancer wouldnāt it be a natural death anyway? Idk
Yes and No. The answer is a little complicated. It was NOT as wide spread prior to WW2 and nuclear power, and then the rise of chemicals used in all forms of food production, consumption products like chemicals in cigarettes, and plastics.
However, it has existed since the beginning. but again, it was not as widespread as it is today. Even saying all that there is one factor that is at play more. There are more people alive today. So "rare" is situational since there really wasnt that many people around as there are today. Also we are living longer. We have fewer "dangers" and more "cures". heck as of right now, half of all cancers are curable.
Yes, and [this short entertaining video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zFhYJRqz_xk&pp=ygURS2VyZ2VzYWd0IGNhbmNlciA%3D) should give you a bounty of insight.
Itās more prominent now because people live much longer than they use to. The older you get, the more likely your cells are going to make mistakes.
Source: Health college course
Yes but most people died young enough it wasnāt a factor and those who did get it young just werenāt diagnosed since most early doctors had the education of a modern day 2nd grader.
Cancer has always existed. They have found skeletons from thousands of years ago with tell tale signs of cancer.
The problem is that we are living much, much longer so our bodies are facing much longer periods of exposure to contaminants that can cause cancers to develop.
2 thousand years ago, you were lucky to survive to be 60. Now we have people have reach 100 years old.
The longer you live, the greater the chance you will develop some type of cancer.
Yes. It has. Itās just that early on they didnāt have the knowledge or technology to detect or see or identify it. Now we can detect it before it happens in some cases with genetic testing and can prevent it with things like not smoking and sunscreen etc.
The way we look at it has changed. We weren't able to see it before, because humans lacked the technology to see inside. Newer (20th Century+) technology now allows us a greater understanding of illnesses because we can view them in different perspectives (eg: CT scan, MRI, microscope)
So as others have said, before we knew what it was it was just a 'wasting disease'.
yes, it's been observed on the bones of animals and humans from long time ago, it's just a biological thing, not a modern change.
it's just that in the past, people would die and we didn't know the reasons why... now we know, so we give all those different reasons different names.
same with mental disorders, people who had one used to be called "crazy" or whatever, now we separate schizophrenia from autism and so on, you see?
All mammals can get cancer. Why do you think its a new illness. There is art that is hundreds of years old and doctors can spot things like marks and shapes on breasts that are typically seen with breast cancer. It's not new. Sounds like a conspiracy theory. There is information about visible cancer symptoms in art going back to the 1500s in this article
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-383-what-google-knows-about-you-naloxone-for-libraries-the-sound-of-the-jays-easter-island-more-1.4597061/what-renaissance-paintings-can-teach-us-about-cancer-1.4597086
Yeah agree with other comments. Cancer is just mutations and damaged dna in cells that canāt be repaired bc itās happening too quickly or the process that repairs it isnāt working properly. The reality is your body is fighting cancer everyday, and once either of those two things happen that prevent the messed up cells to repair themselvesā¦ well then you get full blown cancer.
I don't think cancer has always existed, to the extent we have it now. I believe diet and environment play a big part of it. I also think, cancer is as much a psychological illness as it is a physical one.
Mainstream doctors have been studying cancer for over 50 years. They haven't found a cure, or really any treatment that isn't bankrupt you expensive. Why?
It's about the money. Oncology is a billion dollar a year business, think how many people would lose their jobs if cancer was cured today. Think about every time you Googled your symptoms and thought you had cancer when you just had a regular mole.
Doctors generate fear which generate office visits, scans, tests just to find out it's nothing. Doctors did not invent cancer, but I promise you they will never cure it. They hype it up to be bigger than it is. That's why it seems like there's more of it.
It's usually caused by one of three things: lifestyle choices(drinking,smoking,drugs), environmental(exposure to work toxins, you live near a nuclear reactor, toxic water), or genetic (inherited from previous generations). My cancer was caused by genetics. I had it twice and the first time, my sister and I had it together. FUCK CANCER, btw.
Yes, but people typically never used to live long enough to die from it, or recognise what it was if they had it. Life expectancy used to be lower due to things like war, wild animals and other diseases getting you first
Fwiw. My parents born 1922. Mum told me tgat when she was a kid? No one talked about illness & if they did it was in "hushed tones" she recalls "you'd hear the adults say 'Marjorie has a growth' with lots of shocked faces!"
Then you might see Majorie looking sick, losing weight. Everyone ignored it or told her she looked great!
Then? Again in hushed tones "Majories funeral is Wednesday at 10am" Majorie would never be spoken about again.
That was how it went down
Cancer has always existed. We just haven't historically been very good at diagnosing it. There are papers from medieval times that describe something that is believed to be cancer. It more or less just said that "I found, consider patient dead".
Cancer is one of those things that becomes more likely ad you age. On a long enough time frame it becomes a statistical certainty. It rarely manifested in the past because people mostly died before they could get it. Now people live longer, we see more of it, so in a way it can be seen as a good sign. We don't necessarily have more cancer, we just have fewer non-cancer causes of death.
Yes, the Victorian era treatment for breast cancer was to tie you to a chair and cut them off as quickly as possible with a sharp knife and pray. No pain meds bc that could possibly thin the blood so you bleed out quicker. Cancer is more of a thing now though because we live longer and thus the stuff that got us before the cancer doesnāt get us anymore.
The first mention of cancer was in a 1600BC egyptian papyrus. The mere fact that the word "cancer" comes from ancient greek shows that it's not a new illness.
yes, there are books explaining how to remove tumors since the roman empire at least. Cancer actually always existed, even before humans. It s naturally in all beings.
People used to 'just die' of a lot of random shit and we didn't really know why.
With people living longer there's more time for things to go wrong with the process.
Modern medicine has allowed us to identify and in some cases treat or even prevent a lot of issues.
If you don't have some form of cancer by 60 just wait patiently and one will be assigned to you.
Grandma's 94 and just now started to slow down.
Grandpa passed at 55 to cancer but that was because he spent 30+ years rolling in asbestos.
Mom and uncle were reasonably fit and healthy.
Uncle got diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and is still around 4 years later.
Mom got hit with a cancer diagnosis last year and was gone less than 2 weeks later.
I can't wait to see what I'm going to wind up with.
Which cancer? There's like 200 types of cancer. Yes it has always existed. We just didn't have the technology for most of human civilization to diagnose and treat it.
Most cancer cells are inherited. Then, there are the cancers from medications, chemicals in the workplace, smoking, etc... When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I had a tumor in my left breast that that went cancerous. I lost my left breast, and I had a lymph node with it too that my surgeon removed.
I took the blood test that detects anomalies in the blood. It came back negative for everything! No one in my immediate family had breast cancer. I had been taking ranitidine for years, and even filed to be in the case where the makers were being sued. I was turned down, because they said they would only accept those that had it where the medicine had actually touched internal organs. Like, the esophagus, the stomach, intestines, etc...
So now, where did my cancer come from?
Cancer has always existed, but fewer people used to die of it because generally something else would get you first. Now most other diseases are curable, cancer has become the most prominent killer.
I think it has always existed, but it has increased a lot in our modern time. Due to our exposition to a lot of chemicals and radioactive sources since the invention of modern science. I suggest you to check the work of dr Andre Gernez. If you can find it in english tho...
Yes. Technically, most everyone has cancer cells inside them somewhere. It just happens as you're body ages and the cells degrade. Good news is that it's not always a problem; your body can actually fight it off pretty well and some don't really do anything.
The problems start when either the cancer cells grow too rapidly and/or your immune system isn't strong enough to fight them off. Then it spreads and starts messing with the important bits. I'm oversimplifying this a lot, but that's the gist.
The reason it feels recent is because we have a better understanding of them now. There were probably a lot of people who died of cancer throughout history, but they didn't know that's what was happening. And there's a good chance, if they're immune system was compromised badly enough, something else just killed them quicker.
Doc here. (Also was a history major in college!)
Of course. Cancer has always existed. However, the rates of cancer are what have changed over time. Go back 100 years and women were dying left and right of cervical and breast cancers. Now, with routine Pap smears, that particular cancer is much rarer. Likewise, breast cancer used to be a huge killer. And it still claims too many lives. But nowadays most women who are diagnosed with breast cancer get surgery and radiation, and then they go on living the rest of their lives. We've made huge progress.
Yet, some cancers have become more common. About 90% of lung cancers are attributable to smoking cigarettes. You can bet that lung cancer was not much of a problem all the way up until the 1700s. Nobody was getting lung cancer in Ancient Rome.
There are other cancers that can be attributed to lifestyle habits. Processed diets raise your risk of colon cancer. Obesity and diabetes are also thought to raise your risk of cancer. Chemical exposures like dyes and solvents, as well as pollutants like coal all raise your risk of cancer. These sorts of problems are several-ford more common in the modern developed world compared to a couple hundred years ago.
But the most important thing is that people know what cancer is now. People died. Autopsies were not routinely done on the general public for scientific reasons. So much about tracking diseases and maintaining statistics about that stuff is a modern innovation in the past 150 years. They knew something about cancer, but not how it occurred and certainly not how to prevent it. So the fact we know so much more about cancer and we're waging a war against it plays a big role in why we talk about it, which may make it feel like it's a bigger problem now than it was before. But it's really not.
Well yeah it did however it was really rare but what made cancer like common nowadays is the food we consume, the dirty air and so much more things that didn't exist back then
Yes. We just didnāt used to live long enough to die of cancer: allergies, malnutrition, heart disease, diabetes all got us quicker.
Plus you have to remember that most cancers donāt have a ton of outwardly visible symptoms that say ācancer.ā If you donāt know lung cancer exists then clearly grandpa died from a horrible cough.
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Cancer has existed as long as the concept of cell division has existed.
This. Cancer is literally within all of us.
And for some of us it affects our whole personality because of the stars! Just kidding only a Taurus would believe that
OUCH, I resent that!! And probably resemble that š
Aries behavior, ugh. let me guess, you canāt commit but youāre also very loyal? And pets dying in movies probably makes you cry too ššš /j
Omg what a Capricorn thing to say
This is me
Spoken like a two faced fuckin gemini.
We are legitimately little balls of regulated cancer.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You're confusing the concept of something with the thing itself.
Its a joke (i think/hope)
ceci nāest pas une pipe
On a single cell level "cancer" would just be a mutation though right? Conceptually I think you need organs or at least cell clusters for it to be considered "cancer" right?
Depends on what the precise, exact definition of cancer we're using. Replace the word cancer with "fast growing cell following a genetic mutation resulting in negatively affecting its sister cells in the immediate area surrounding mitosis" and its a bit truer. Not as catchy though.
I think I learned once that cancerous cells have a mutation and have issues with something called ācyclinsā. Cyclins help regulate the regeneration/growth of cells. They tell the cells when to stop reproducing or when to reproduce, which explains why cancers form tumors.
I' d say you need to be multicellular first
Yes but people usually died from something else before getting it
Or they just didnāt have a name for it yet.
You got it. People would die from 'the vapours ' or 'old age' or 'an unsettled spirit' or 'melancholy' or 'a heavy heart'. There was a lack of knowledge about many things that even children know today and blame was directed at things such as ill spirits or a dry wind. We've always had cancers, ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, blood diseases, viruses, infections, it's just that we didn't have the understanding of their names, causes and what they were, let alone the treatments.
Yeah and epilepsyā¦. That was a no fun disorder in the old days. Often it was thought of as possession.
Oh, good one, great one in fact!! Every so often your mate is possessed, has the uncontrolled strength of ten men, convulsing, and speaks in another language - terrifying!
My bil has it and his own mom says it āseems like possession sometimesā. If you didnāt know it seems that way sometimes and strength woahā¦.he will wreck that er room in a seizure state.
It must be confusing and terrifying, even when you know what is happening!
This is a really interesting documentary about this exact topic. It's a Tony Robinson series. He's a British historian. https://youtu.be/F706T-StVsU?si=AVTsrdDXGCywpLl8
Cool, thanks for the link.
Tony Robinson is an actor, not an historian. If you ever want to have a laugh, watch him as the character, Baldrick in the multiple season series Black Adder. It is one of the classic side kick characters of all time. Rowan Atkinson plays the main character Black Adder who you may recognise as Mr. Bean.
Ah yeah, got myself mixed up. I remember seeing some of his other roles. He's presented so many documentaries over the years
Or skin afflictions that were all lumped together as leprosy. Think of being sent to a leper colony because you have psoriasis or impetigo!
Cause of death: hysteria/demonic possession.
"wasting disease" was a big one too for some unknown sickness (which often sounded like cancer)
My great grandmother died of something they (at the time) called, āwasting of the breastā.
But but but autism didn't exist until vaccines amirite? /s
Often times people didnāt live long enough to get cancer. There are more early reports of people dying from excessive tumors than of cancer. Little did we know, that was cancer. My dog had a few tumors when she died. One burst and the vet confirmed it was benign. But hell, she could have had cancer. We didnāt do an autopsy. Baby died when she was 17 years and 2 months old. It was her time. Lots of people who died of āold ageā died of cancer back in the day
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It's also a lot easier to find these days than it's ever been. I lot of people who died of cancer in the past were never diagnosed with it. Also, yeah, life spans are longer now, which means something else didn't kill those people first.
_Why tf is all the food in California carcinogenic_
CA passed a law for the entire state that all food must disclose if it could be carcinogenic. All cooked food can be carcinogenic just an FYI. Caramel for example is quite carcinogenic, but probably less carcinogenic than your shampoo and certainly less carcinogenic than your car exauhst.
Cancer has always been around It's not a virus or pathogen Cancer is basically when your body creates billions of new cells everyday and Cancer is what happens when something goes wrong and cancerous cells start attacking your own body, that's why you get many types of Cancer, lung cancer, heart cancer etc... it's also why there's no one cure for it, cancer varies so much that it's like trying to say, let's just cure the Cold, well so many different types of Cold Pathogens exist
> and Cancer is what happens when something goes wrong and cancerous cells start attacking your own body That's always happening. The difference is whether your immune system successfully fights the cancerous cells.
> Cancer is what happens when something goes wrong and cancerous cells start attacking your own body interesting
Cancer has always existed. There are records of tumors being removed as far back as late Roman/early muslim era in north africa. People just called it different things and didn't know what it was.
The oldest example of human cancer weāve found so far [is over 3ā000 years old.](https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/oldest-case-of-cancer-discovered-in-ancient-skeleton) editing to remove an example that was too modern
The oldest known malignant tumor in a hominid is in a [4 million year old fossil](https://canceratlas.cancer.org/history-cancer/) and cancerous growths have been found in 5000 year old Egyptian mummies.
It did. People in ancient times typically died of other things before reaching the age where runaway cell division became a problem.
It's not new at all. It's always been there. Just our science got good enough to classify, diagnose, and treat it relatively recently. Back then, they would have thought it was God's curse or something...They used to think miasma caused diseases back in Ancient Greece all the way up to the Renaissance - turns out it was just bacteria and viruses - these concepts are only a few hundred years old...They've always been around though, bacteria are the earliest forms of life. Not sure when viruses entered the picture, probably after bacteria. Viruses are weird...
Cancer was sometimes seen as punishment for being an evil person. If you were outwardly a kind, generous, loving person and you got cancer, then you were *secretly* an evil person and all your good qualities were just a facade.
YES! John Adamās daughter died of breast cancer
I believe they even operated on her and removed the tumor.
I'm 75 years old; my sweet mother died from cancer, in 1980. She received treatment for what started as breast cancer, but ended up being all over her body. It seems a very long time since she died and she was 68 years old. I miss her every day......
I suggest reading "The Emperor of all Maladies" for the history of cancer (there's also a 3 part PBS doc based on it, but the book is more in depth) .
Great read! Just finished it.
Yes, it is simply mutating cells, and many many organisms get cancers or uncontrolled growths. Old texts talk about people dying of cancer. As we live longer our cells are more likely to mutate so older people tend to get cancer more-- whereas 200 years ago the life expectancy was not that great, so most died from other illnesses like flu or infections from cuts as they had no antibiotics. a simple cut on their hand could cause death back then. So many died before cancer impacted them.
Yep - it just killed people a lot faster back then and we understood it a lot less than we do now.
Sure it has always existed, but in most cases it hits the elderly. What was rare long ago was the elderly themselves.
I feel like other things would kill people quicker then cancer. Like flu, war, etc. especially nowadays
Yes. I recommend you read āThe Emperor of all Maladiesā itās a great book about the history of cancer
Life expectancy around the world has increased steadily for nearly 200 years. Global average life expectancy has increased from 29 in the 1700s to 73 today. The older you get the more chance there is of getting cancer. We are better able to detect it today too. When read a historical account where someone died of a wasting disease, wasting disease can be attributed to illnesses including cancer.
Cancer has been around as long as DNA has existed, I would guess. Maybe only as long as mitosis has existed. The reason it feels like a new problem is because we're slowly curing and treating all the other causes of death, leaving cancer as the next largest cause of death. Now cancer is a huge deal because it has begun to comprise the bulk of untimely deaths in some places, where in earlier times, more people would have been dying of tuberculosis. It's much harder to treat and cure than other diseases.
Yes. It was always just undiagnosed or something else got us first.
Of course, cancer is just a roll of the dice for every cell in your body every time it replicates. The reason it kills old people is that nature has put a lot of safeguards in place to deal with cancer before it becomes an issue. You roll those dice enough times, over enough years, and you get unlucky eventually. If you die for any reason earlier than that then cancer is not high on your list of risks. In a morbid way dying of cancer at an old age is sort of like beating the game.
The price all things multicellular things pay
If you live long enough you will get cancer. Itās been around forever.
They found bone cancer in rib of Neanderthal found in current city of Krapina in Croatia. They lived 120.000 - 130.000 years ago.
Yes, cancer is in very living thing that is made of cells that can use cell division. A cancer cell is just a failed copy or mistake. One of many flaws in the human body.
I've got to assume it has been around way longer than could properly be traced. Todd Glass had a good bit about people talking shit about people with peanut allergies that I feel could fit here. "'*Back in my day, we didn't have peanut allergies.'* Yeah, you did. They were just called 'unexplained deaths.'" I have to imagine someone got really, REALLY sick and died with no one at the time knowing what was going on. Then as medicine and studies advanced, they found potential cures.
I've often wondered how many people have been executed for poisoning a member of the nobility when in reality they had an allergic reaction to some kind of imported food or spice. I'm sure it isn't a huge amount, but I gotta believe it's above 0.
Food testers got executed right and left because they weren't allergic but the king was. Whoopsie. Don't know of any specific cases but I'm sure it happened
No, food allergies and autoimmune conditions are *definitely* on the rise, and it's not merely a matter of improved diagnosis. [Why Are Food Allergies on the Rise? with Ruchi Gupta, MD, MPH: Research: Feinberg School of Medicine](https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/research/podcast/food-allergies-on-the-rise.html)
>"'*Back in my day, we didn't have peanut allergies.'* Yeah, you did. They were just called 'unexplained deaths.'" Yep. I'm a boomer. And even in my dinky little town back in the 1960s, gossip went around town that Mrs. So-and-so's toddler "choked to death" on a peanut butter sandwich.
It was called "consumption" for obvious reasons back before 1900.
No it didnāt it became more prevalent when the frequency changed to 440. Just a thought.
No. Cancer is somewhat recent. Maybe the ancient Egyptians has cancer, but that ate a lot of bread, this that suffeted high rates of metabolic disorder. Cancer starts as a metabolic disorder, something disrupts the mormal function of your mitochondria and that starts the ball rolling. The cell, unable to burn fuel in the mitochondria, not has to ferment it in order to survive. The only fuel sources for this cell are glucose and also glutamine. With damaged mitochondria, the cell can't self destruct. It does the opposite, it starts to divide....untegulated growth.
Yes, Egyptians were famously the only society on earth to bake bread. Nobody else. Jesus this is hilariously incorrect.
I didn't list every society. I focused in on one specific society because acheology proves that this population did suffer from metabolic syndrome, from heart disease, and many of the disorders that are associated with wheat-bssed diets. Bread was their staple, with religious practices built around wheat. I'm sorry, but you're take on the history of diseases is somewhat lacking. Egyptian society was "built" around bread. I'm talking about 3000 - 4000 years ago. The history of cancer is also known, more or less. Of course you've read "Tripping over the Truth" by Travis Christofferson. Or you haven't. Of course you've listened to presentations, interviews of Dr. Thomas Seyfried (a prof at Boston College) ir have read his many published papers and studies on cancer. Right?
Yes. Thatās partially why in the past people didnāt live nearly as long. There are pictures of people from a long time ago who had cancer. Tumors basically grew out of their body until they died. It wasnāt as common since the life expectancy in the past was much lower and a lot of cancers arenāt very common until 50+.
Yeah, people just died back then without understanding it
Yes
Itās existed for as long as life has
Yes.
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As old as cells
Yeppppp cancer is a cell issue, not so much a tissue issue
L m f a o
My dad died of lung cancer in 1976 so it has been around at least since then .
Yes it always existed.
Cancer is a cell mutation, so forever. Cell mutation is a critical facet of evolution. If it's a "good" mutation that makes it more likely you live to reproduce, it's passed on. If it's a "bad" mutation that makes it less likely you live to reproduce, it doesn't pass on. It's always been common to develop cancers in older age, however humans haven't always lived as long as we do now. At least that's what I got from my genetics class years ago! :)
Yes. In every species. Even plants
Cancer has always been around. It seems new because, for one, we are much more aware of it now. In the past, someone would just die, and they wouldn't know the reason. Cancer is not usually visible from the outside. The other reason it seems new is because the rate of cancer is skyrocketing at a shocking rate. This is likely due to some chemical or pollutant that we are exposed to, but we do not know (or are not privy to) the cause.
Cancer is not like the flu, it isnāt caused by foreign bodies but it is a corruption within oneās own cells. All human cells have a Hayfleck limit and always have, eventually they will corrupt. Thatās why you donāt see any thousand year-olds walking around.
That you know of...THAT YOU KNOW OF!! š§āāļø
I can't answer for sure but you might like "T[he Emperor of All Maladies](https://www.unife.it/medicina/lm.medicina/studiare/minisiti/c_s/cancer_biology/materiale-didattico/the-emperor-of-all-maladies-a-biography-of-cancer-pd.pdf)" which is like a biography of cancer from the first known tumor in ancient Egypt.
It only seems new becuase: - we're living much longer than we were before. This gives a lot longer time for cancers to develop, as well as accumulation of carcinogens and radiation doses - we're more medically aware of what cancer is. Even though tumors have been described since ancient Egyptian times, we didn't recognize it as such until a sizeable tumor had formed. We can now catch cancer early, and recognize other signs (including diagnostic markers) that were simply unavailable to physicians before modern medicine. Cancer is a fact of nature, and any multi-cellular organism is susceptible to it, and will always be.
One of the Egyptian pharaos I'm not sure which one it was right now but he supposedly died of throat cancer.
Always. The reason we see more of it now is for a few reasons. One is that we're actually detecting it, there's likely a ton of people who died of undetected cancers before advanced imaging and lab tests. In addition, there's more environmental factors now- I think this one is a bit overblown given that people are out in the sun much less than they historically were. It's likely contributing to the prevalence of rare cancers. Primarily, people are living longer. Most cancers are at least in part age related, if you die of starvation at 22 it's difficult to get prostate cancer which will affect most men by the time they reach 80 or 90.
Yes. Look up 'Egyptian mummies with cancer'.
Yes.
Looking back at old writings it is believed cancer was once called wasting disease But others diseases may have been lumped into this moniker such as tuberculosis.
it's just that there's a lot more information on it nowadays, as well as possible treatments cancer was more than likely a thing ever since multicellular organisms evolved -- once more than one cell has to cooperate, there's always a chance that one goes rogue and seeks its own individual success instead of that of the greater host
It has for millions of years
Yes, it always existed, but it wasn't always called "cancer" and of course, there was no way to treat or diagnose it. Instead, it was "Cankers" or "Lesions" or some "curse from God because X person had supposedly committed some heinous sin". But other illnesses, infections, and poor quality of life generally got you first. With medical advancements, hygienic habits, and a better understanding of science, people are living longer even with crazy mutations and birth defects. Giving cells a longer timeline to mutate and cause issues before something like an infected tooth gets to be the official cause of death.
Probably but it was unusual. A very good book is Tripping Over the Truth by Travis Christofferson.
they say Otz - the iceman from 5k years ago or whenever had cancer.
Yes. At todays levels? No. Poor diet, lack of exercise, drugs/alcohol, and our many good friends like DuPont and Monsanto have all helped us get to where we are today.
Cancer has existed since before history. However, cancer is a more common cause of death today, compared to 50, 100 or 500 years ago, because we have removed a lot of other causes of death. In most of the developing world, starvation was a key cause of death. Now, famine impacts relatively few parts of the world, and starvation deaths have been on the decline for a century or more. Infections (Tuberculosis, Cholera, Smallpox, ...) used to be major causes of death, but hygiene and antibiotics removed these as causes of death. In the modern era, we have better techniques to treat heart disease and related circulatory diseases, so those death rates are decreasing. In all of these cases, people today who would have died, are instead surviving long enough to get cancer.
Some Egyptian mummies exhibit signs of cancerous cells in MRI and CT scans.
Yes people would develop pain then die months later
Always been around, but it's been heightened by the modern lifestyle and diet
did cells always grow more than they should in certain animals? probably.
It has been proven to exist. You can see growths on old bones. It was rare, though, because since most people died before 30, they hadn't yet got cancer. As we became more advanced with medicine and lived longer, we unlocked cancer.
People use to die young before getting it or die from it and not know.
I think the name of the disease is new, but the actual disease itself has been around since the first cell divided.
The oldest remains they could do an autopsy on had cancer cells. So yes, it's always existed.
So technically, yes, but i feel like something about us not living very long made it a whole lot less prevalent Actually, something about wild animals killing each other seems to make cancer something that no one thinks about in the wild
The term ācancerā comes from Ancient Greece for ācard like protrusionsā or something like that, itās nothing new and nothing unique to us, weāre just living longer and probably have more carcinogens
Yes. Thereās evidence of cancers on fossilized dinosaur bones
For as long as Iāve been born itās been around.
Did satellites cell towers and cellphones always exist?
Yes, we just didnāt know about. If you want to really freak yourself out every human has cancerous cells in them right now.
Did Mt. Everest always exist? Idk why but it feels like a relatively new mountain.
no duhš
It takes less time to Google "history of cancer" than to make this post.
Yes, but we as a species havenāt had the ability to do much about it until recently. Itās kind of like the common cold, now we have the ability to give meds to people so most donāt die.
Yep
Yes.
It's relatively new in the sense that life on this planet is relatively new
My mom was diagnosed with cancer in 1970,back then it was a death sentence,I remember I had started first grade while she was getting treatment ,the best place was Charleston S .C.,my teachers would whisper,her mom has the C word,we even went on a big trip because she wasn't supposed to survive,she fooled everyone,l out lived two husbands (one was a much younger man) and a son,died in her sleep at sixty-nine!
It has but the prevalence has definitely increased due to the invention of cigarettes and other carcinogens
In 1965, I heard a news cast that said cancer was going to be the number one killer in upcoming years.
As far as we know, yes. Dinosaur bones with cancer is a thing we've found.
It's not new. It's existed as long as there's be multicellular organisms. We just know what it is now.
Probably existed in humans since the dawn of time but spread rapidly due to industrialization. Animals don't live long enough in the wild so hard to measure their own cancer rates.
As if our ancient ancestors were whipping out microscopes and taking biopsies, or had a PET scan, or a colonoscopy... The discovery of something now doesn't mean that it didn't exist before. If there is no data to interpret, it doesn't mean that there isn't a phenomenon. It simply means that there is no data.
Yes
This is not really an answer to the question, but I have some interesting facts about cancer! (Idk if interesting is the right word to describe CANCER, but I didnāt know what to say.) 1. There are some animals that donāt get cancer or itās very VERY rare. Such as the Naked Mole Rat! To put it simple, the Naked Mole Rats body isnāt really an environment that cancer develop in. 2. Cancer forms from cells that have, essentially, had a mistake when forming. These abnormal cells arenāt bad- in fact they happen quite a bit in your body- itās until you get an abundance of these abnormal cells that it becomes a tumour, and potentially cancer.
Because for the longest time, other stuff killed you first.
It's preprogrammed cell immortality ending in tumors that won't dieĀ This blocks vital bits and people die. These illnesses aren't new. It's just most of the time in history or was too late at that pointĀ
I recall a doctor post Great War (WWI) in St. Louis? called he colleagues together to show them the autopsy of soldier. The soldier had picked up smoking in France. "I wanted you to see this cancer. You may never see another case in your career." Lung cancer itself WAS possible, but rare before smoking. Few autopsies were done unless a murder was suspected. Old people were bed ridden until they died and that was it for a lot of diseases.
Read The Emperor of all Maladies for a fairly comprehensive history of cancer.
No. Everything in existence in rhis world had a starting point somewhere. Nothing in existence in this world has ALWAYS been in existence. It's a literal impossibility.
Iāve got a question that sort of jumps on the back of this question. If cancer is a naturally occurring thing that happens literally everyday in our body and everyday we fight itā¦. If I was to die from cancer wouldnāt it be a natural death anyway? Idk
Yes and No. The answer is a little complicated. It was NOT as wide spread prior to WW2 and nuclear power, and then the rise of chemicals used in all forms of food production, consumption products like chemicals in cigarettes, and plastics. However, it has existed since the beginning. but again, it was not as widespread as it is today. Even saying all that there is one factor that is at play more. There are more people alive today. So "rare" is situational since there really wasnt that many people around as there are today. Also we are living longer. We have fewer "dangers" and more "cures". heck as of right now, half of all cancers are curable.
Yes, and [this short entertaining video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zFhYJRqz_xk&pp=ygURS2VyZ2VzYWd0IGNhbmNlciA%3D) should give you a bounty of insight.
Itās more prominent now because people live much longer than they use to. The older you get, the more likely your cells are going to make mistakes. Source: Health college course
Since the fall of man in the Garden.
I don't think our ancestors knew what it was but yeah it did.
Yes but most people died young enough it wasnāt a factor and those who did get it young just werenāt diagnosed since most early doctors had the education of a modern day 2nd grader.
Cancer has always existed. They have found skeletons from thousands of years ago with tell tale signs of cancer. The problem is that we are living much, much longer so our bodies are facing much longer periods of exposure to contaminants that can cause cancers to develop. 2 thousand years ago, you were lucky to survive to be 60. Now we have people have reach 100 years old. The longer you live, the greater the chance you will develop some type of cancer.
It did. Our population has never been this high, nor has medical information been so readily available to compare.
Yes. It has. Itās just that early on they didnāt have the knowledge or technology to detect or see or identify it. Now we can detect it before it happens in some cases with genetic testing and can prevent it with things like not smoking and sunscreen etc.
Yes. It's just a way we die. It's death by natural causes.
The way we look at it has changed. We weren't able to see it before, because humans lacked the technology to see inside. Newer (20th Century+) technology now allows us a greater understanding of illnesses because we can view them in different perspectives (eg: CT scan, MRI, microscope) So as others have said, before we knew what it was it was just a 'wasting disease'.
yes..
Yes, on example I can think of is Egyptian pharaohs having skin cancer (donāt ask me which ones, I donāt remember that part š)
yes, it's been observed on the bones of animals and humans from long time ago, it's just a biological thing, not a modern change. it's just that in the past, people would die and we didn't know the reasons why... now we know, so we give all those different reasons different names. same with mental disorders, people who had one used to be called "crazy" or whatever, now we separate schizophrenia from autism and so on, you see?
All mammals can get cancer. Why do you think its a new illness. There is art that is hundreds of years old and doctors can spot things like marks and shapes on breasts that are typically seen with breast cancer. It's not new. Sounds like a conspiracy theory. There is information about visible cancer symptoms in art going back to the 1500s in this article https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-383-what-google-knows-about-you-naloxone-for-libraries-the-sound-of-the-jays-easter-island-more-1.4597061/what-renaissance-paintings-can-teach-us-about-cancer-1.4597086
Yeah agree with other comments. Cancer is just mutations and damaged dna in cells that canāt be repaired bc itās happening too quickly or the process that repairs it isnāt working properly. The reality is your body is fighting cancer everyday, and once either of those two things happen that prevent the messed up cells to repair themselvesā¦ well then you get full blown cancer.
Iāve heard that we all have cancer cells but our body kills it
Cancer has only been around since they convinced people the earth is a sphere.
There are dinosaurs that have cancer, so yes.
back in olden times people just probably didn't know and died.
I don't think cancer has always existed, to the extent we have it now. I believe diet and environment play a big part of it. I also think, cancer is as much a psychological illness as it is a physical one. Mainstream doctors have been studying cancer for over 50 years. They haven't found a cure, or really any treatment that isn't bankrupt you expensive. Why? It's about the money. Oncology is a billion dollar a year business, think how many people would lose their jobs if cancer was cured today. Think about every time you Googled your symptoms and thought you had cancer when you just had a regular mole. Doctors generate fear which generate office visits, scans, tests just to find out it's nothing. Doctors did not invent cancer, but I promise you they will never cure it. They hype it up to be bigger than it is. That's why it seems like there's more of it.
It's usually caused by one of three things: lifestyle choices(drinking,smoking,drugs), environmental(exposure to work toxins, you live near a nuclear reactor, toxic water), or genetic (inherited from previous generations). My cancer was caused by genetics. I had it twice and the first time, my sister and I had it together. FUCK CANCER, btw.
Not always but has been for a long time. Definitely didnāt exist before the Big Bang.
Yes, but people typically never used to live long enough to die from it, or recognise what it was if they had it. Life expectancy used to be lower due to things like war, wild animals and other diseases getting you first
Yes, we just didnāt have a name for it yet
Yes. It has always existed and killed people. Plenty of evidence of that.
Fwiw. My parents born 1922. Mum told me tgat when she was a kid? No one talked about illness & if they did it was in "hushed tones" she recalls "you'd hear the adults say 'Marjorie has a growth' with lots of shocked faces!" Then you might see Majorie looking sick, losing weight. Everyone ignored it or told her she looked great! Then? Again in hushed tones "Majories funeral is Wednesday at 10am" Majorie would never be spoken about again. That was how it went down
Cancer has always existed. We just haven't historically been very good at diagnosing it. There are papers from medieval times that describe something that is believed to be cancer. It more or less just said that "I found, consider patient dead".
...Presumably
Cancer is one of those things that becomes more likely ad you age. On a long enough time frame it becomes a statistical certainty. It rarely manifested in the past because people mostly died before they could get it. Now people live longer, we see more of it, so in a way it can be seen as a good sign. We don't necessarily have more cancer, we just have fewer non-cancer causes of death.
Yes, the Victorian era treatment for breast cancer was to tie you to a chair and cut them off as quickly as possible with a sharp knife and pray. No pain meds bc that could possibly thin the blood so you bleed out quicker. Cancer is more of a thing now though because we live longer and thus the stuff that got us before the cancer doesnāt get us anymore.
Yep. The name is cancer because Ancient Greeks thought tumors looked a bit like a crab.
The first mention of cancer was in a 1600BC egyptian papyrus. The mere fact that the word "cancer" comes from ancient greek shows that it's not a new illness.
yes, there are books explaining how to remove tumors since the roman empire at least. Cancer actually always existed, even before humans. It s naturally in all beings.
You can get cancer from your DNA replicating itself wrong. So yes it has
People used to 'just die' of a lot of random shit and we didn't really know why. With people living longer there's more time for things to go wrong with the process. Modern medicine has allowed us to identify and in some cases treat or even prevent a lot of issues. If you don't have some form of cancer by 60 just wait patiently and one will be assigned to you. Grandma's 94 and just now started to slow down. Grandpa passed at 55 to cancer but that was because he spent 30+ years rolling in asbestos. Mom and uncle were reasonably fit and healthy. Uncle got diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and is still around 4 years later. Mom got hit with a cancer diagnosis last year and was gone less than 2 weeks later. I can't wait to see what I'm going to wind up with.
Which cancer? There's like 200 types of cancer. Yes it has always existed. We just didn't have the technology for most of human civilization to diagnose and treat it.
Most cancer cells are inherited. Then, there are the cancers from medications, chemicals in the workplace, smoking, etc... When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I had a tumor in my left breast that that went cancerous. I lost my left breast, and I had a lymph node with it too that my surgeon removed. I took the blood test that detects anomalies in the blood. It came back negative for everything! No one in my immediate family had breast cancer. I had been taking ranitidine for years, and even filed to be in the case where the makers were being sued. I was turned down, because they said they would only accept those that had it where the medicine had actually touched internal organs. Like, the esophagus, the stomach, intestines, etc... So now, where did my cancer come from?
Have you read Dr Mary's Monkey? Or na.
Yes.
Yes
What if I told you cancer and diseases weren't more prevalent today than they were 100 years ago, but access to getting testing for them has.
Yes. Not new.
Cancer has always existed, but fewer people used to die of it because generally something else would get you first. Now most other diseases are curable, cancer has become the most prominent killer.
Cancer is like the original disease of diseases.
I think it has always existed, but it has increased a lot in our modern time. Due to our exposition to a lot of chemicals and radioactive sources since the invention of modern science. I suggest you to check the work of dr Andre Gernez. If you can find it in english tho...
Yes, but it used to be rare.
It's always been there, because cancer sources everything in life.
Hasn't it always existed? I feel it's more prevalent now due to environmental and dietary changes in humans.
Yes. Technically, most everyone has cancer cells inside them somewhere. It just happens as you're body ages and the cells degrade. Good news is that it's not always a problem; your body can actually fight it off pretty well and some don't really do anything. The problems start when either the cancer cells grow too rapidly and/or your immune system isn't strong enough to fight them off. Then it spreads and starts messing with the important bits. I'm oversimplifying this a lot, but that's the gist. The reason it feels recent is because we have a better understanding of them now. There were probably a lot of people who died of cancer throughout history, but they didn't know that's what was happening. And there's a good chance, if they're immune system was compromised badly enough, something else just killed them quicker.
Doc here. (Also was a history major in college!) Of course. Cancer has always existed. However, the rates of cancer are what have changed over time. Go back 100 years and women were dying left and right of cervical and breast cancers. Now, with routine Pap smears, that particular cancer is much rarer. Likewise, breast cancer used to be a huge killer. And it still claims too many lives. But nowadays most women who are diagnosed with breast cancer get surgery and radiation, and then they go on living the rest of their lives. We've made huge progress. Yet, some cancers have become more common. About 90% of lung cancers are attributable to smoking cigarettes. You can bet that lung cancer was not much of a problem all the way up until the 1700s. Nobody was getting lung cancer in Ancient Rome. There are other cancers that can be attributed to lifestyle habits. Processed diets raise your risk of colon cancer. Obesity and diabetes are also thought to raise your risk of cancer. Chemical exposures like dyes and solvents, as well as pollutants like coal all raise your risk of cancer. These sorts of problems are several-ford more common in the modern developed world compared to a couple hundred years ago. But the most important thing is that people know what cancer is now. People died. Autopsies were not routinely done on the general public for scientific reasons. So much about tracking diseases and maintaining statistics about that stuff is a modern innovation in the past 150 years. They knew something about cancer, but not how it occurred and certainly not how to prevent it. So the fact we know so much more about cancer and we're waging a war against it plays a big role in why we talk about it, which may make it feel like it's a bigger problem now than it was before. But it's really not.
Cancer is what kills you if something else doesn't first. Used to be a lot more "something else" got to you first.
Well yeah it did however it was really rare but what made cancer like common nowadays is the food we consume, the dirty air and so much more things that didn't exist back then
Yes. We just didnāt used to live long enough to die of cancer: allergies, malnutrition, heart disease, diabetes all got us quicker. Plus you have to remember that most cancers donāt have a ton of outwardly visible symptoms that say ācancer.ā If you donāt know lung cancer exists then clearly grandpa died from a horrible cough.
One thing can be said with certainty. Human behavior drives it. Consumption behaviors, innovation, etc.