Stewart declared God was puzzled over his question. “I have already given you the answers. Why do you keep asking me for them?” A dedicated researcher, Nathan Stewart has dedicated his entire career to finding a drug that would end the disease that has taken away from him his younger brother. For twenty years he had come up with nothing but dead ends. If the answer was in the test tube in front of him, he did not see it. During the next seven hours, Nathan Stewart was given the insight into understanding that you might not need a drug to make it to 100. “You can’t find this miracle in a test tube.” says God. We have such wonderful bodies that if we even come close to following an optimal diet, and properly exercising and resting, we will have a high likelihood of protection from illness, and thus potentially from cancer…

Can you believe The Poly let me publish this parable? I do, however, want to make clear to you that yes, I did just imply that living “more healthily,” whatever that means, might be nearly good enough to battle cancer in some way. And yes, I did just use Him as a way to get your attention, and I might end up in Hell for it.

With that said, I want to say that I find it imperative to condemn humanity at this point for the deplorable way it’s been going about the issue of cancer and for the way in which we all take care of ourselves. Instead of looking at why cancer has become such a widespread problem to begin with, we seem to rush ahead boldly, using slash, burn and poison techniques without knowing what the results are going to be. We seem to be forgetting about cancer prevention. And while some therapies have increased survival rates, the problems seem to come back, albeit stronger a second time around. Are we curing cancer? It seems like we’re just treating the symptoms. It seems like we are demonizing the tumor to be the cause of the cancer itself.

One pessimistic reason for this might be that some of us are blinded by the billion-dollar efforts to find a drug cure to really think about the causes of cancer and ways to try and prevent it. Ironically, we are risking enduring the agony of radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy later on in life rather than follow some simple health principles that might help our bodies prevent illness naturally. Furthermore, there is little to no profit to be gained from prevention efforts in our money-driven society, and we might have fallen into thinking that it is natural for our bodies to succumb to cancer.

Are some types of cancers preventable? Can our immune systems help fight cancer? My goal in writing this column is to just get people to think a little more critically about cancer. So, please, please, please don’t send me nasty messages.