Cancer and mental processes

Cancer is a term that causes an emotional impact that is very difficult to avoid. In fact, statistics show that one in five people suffer from a cancer at some point in their lives. Importantly, the word cancer, it is no longer for Western society, a mysterious and fatal disease, but advances in science have reduced the mortality rate or it may be said, have increased the chances of survival, in the sense that today 40% of patients with cancer survive at twenty he was diagnosed with the disease, when about twenty years ago, survived a much smaller percentage of people. And, although the general opinion gives more reliable, biochemical and cellular studies over any other type of study, it is undeniable that a key factor in its appearance and development, mood, and cultural conditions, ie the psychic conditions. An example is found in studies that tell us about a clinical depression, which may affect the immune system and then you can accelerate the growth or the appearance of a tumor. On the other hand, a person may have atypical processes, without necessarily producing a cancer is, in the same way Koch bacillus that without no tuberculosis, the presence of the bacillus is not enough to produce it. That is, although the necessary conditions are not sufficient to to declare the disease. It seems that cancer is closely linked to the lifestyle that an individual carries on as a culture, then the claim to cure, in the classic sense or restore things to their former state, is a nonsense.

The cancer process neither begins nor ends in the visible or histologically demonstrable tumor. Cancer, being as it is a way of life, not only transcends the boundaries of a tumor, but the limits of what can be considered an individual and extends in a society. Their routes of infection are those we know in the case of diseases due to bacterial organisms vrulencia, but those that beyond a biological inheritance of a predisposition, are, say a structured cultural heritage, that is, as language and therefore the treatment of cancer and its prophylaxis, starting beyond the individual, within a society, group or family. Each society, according to their habits and lifestyles, leads to a disease or other ailments and generates risk, for example, heavy smokers or intakes that lead to morbid obesity and its attendant diseases, sometimes fatal. We can say that in all its forms, cancer is paradigmatically associated with death. Cancer is what kills, that's the feeling. As old definitions of cancer found in the sixteenth century treaties that cancer is all worn, corroded, corrupted or consumed slowly and secretly, or is said, that melancholy is a tumor that eats body parts.

The literal definition is the oldest of an excrescence, lump or bump, and the name of the disease, from Greek and Latin karkinos cancer, which means crab, according to Galen was inspired by the resemblance between the swollen veins of an external tumnor and legs of a crab. The psychosomatic concept is in the history of medicine since its inception, and although it is accepted more or less luck in different eras and cultures, the etiopathogenic cause is the oldest. Galen argued that melancholic women were more likely to get cancer than those of sanguine temperament, coinciding with this view, I remember a psychological study of six thousand women with cancer had an increased incidence of the disease as early invasion in patients with prolonged emotional instability. If it comes to treating cancer, treated is a broader term irradiation, surgery or injections. Organicist image of a destructive element that evolves in a more or less indifferent, is built entirely in our culture, and perhaps, we must consider that things do not always have to be. Furthermore, all conditions that throughout history have meaning sacred or cursed disease, cancer is most likely the one with a more remote from any connection with the psyche and yet it is difficult to find a word to mobilize more emotions and the emotions involved that much.

Death has always been felt by the man CPOM accident, as an external event that short life. A phenomenon that at times is inexplicable reason, and if we are not able to conceive the psychic factors, we leave the explanations to the will of god or gods, depending how you look. Biologists, Freud says, should move as they can. Us too we must advance. Someday we'll find it.