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“But what caused it?” my patient asked, referring to the failure of her bone marrow to make the blood cells the rest of her organs craved. She was profoundly anemic and seemed to tire from even asking the question.
Dozens of my patients have asked the same thing. Even a dozen dozen.
I think the question reflects a human desire to revisit events that occurred over a lifetime, and speculate whether a change in course could have avoided an untoward outcome.
In truth, though, except in very rare cases, it is almost impossible to say that a specific environmental exposure triggered a given person’s cancer. The majority of cancers arise randomly, as if thumbing their nose at our collective need to find a cause.
I’ve had patients who describe working in shoe stores where they would take an X-ray of a customer’s foot as a gimmick to measure them for the perfect-fitting shoe, without a lead vest for protection. Or of being employed by a tire manufacturer and soaking, day in and day out, in a vat of benzene, a chemical we now know to be a potent carcinogen. Even my uncle once revealed to me that the acne on his back was treated with radiation in the late 1940s. He died of leukemia a few years ago.
Is it possible that these exposures, which occurred decades earlier, could have initiated the cancer that reared its head in my septuagenarians and octogenarians?
Read full, original post: Wondering What Caused the Cancer
