Is this the actual order and growth of the Universe?
Is this the way things unfold themselves in life? Could this be it? Only by random?
Could this be explanation in medicine to the toughest question that a patient with cancer can ask you: Why? and Why me?
This concepts troubled me for a while now and I wanted to share something with you from the medical field so I can steer away of the philosophical side of the concept and keep you awake for the next 5 minutes.
Christian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein, cancer scientists at Johns Hopkins University, published a study in 2015 that added more fire to this issue in which they were saying that, in cancer, randomness plays a bigger role we thought it did. What they alleged basically is that many cancers are caused by random mutations that happen when healthy stem cells divide.
Tomasetti and Vogelstein suggested looking at cancers in two categories, those that are primarily due to genetic bad luck (randomness), and those that are due to that unfortunate roll of the genetic dice plus environmental or hereditary factors. Hereditary factor,s in general, account for only 5-10% of all the cancers. So, they determined that melanoma, ovarian cancer, many brain cancers, lung cancer among non-smokers, the most common leukemias and bone cancers, for example, are pretty much out of people’s control. They’re the result of the random mutations caused by the stem cells dividing in these tissues — bone, blood, ovaries, brain and skin — and in time becoming malignant and out of control. For these cancers, changing your lifestyle or trying other interventions to stop the cancer from occurring in the first place won’t help much, they say. But being watchful about screening, and picking up the first signs of trouble early, can be life-saving and it is very well-advised.
For the others cancers, basal cell carcinoma, lung cancers in smokers, liver cancers and colorectal, changing your lifestyle, quitting the bad behaviors are critical and worth pursuing. Two cancers are missing from this study, breast cancer and prostate cancer, and this is because the studying of the stem cell population in these tissues is not so extensive and leaves room for too much speculation.
The most positive outcome of this study I think is that it can help reduce stigma and comfort some cancer patients who blame themselves for their illness. This is huge with some patients. These findings also suggest more cancers will appear simply because aging increases the number of stem cell divisions and this will lead in time to tumors and cancer. Aging that leads to more random mutations in time.
Randomness? Bad luck? Good luck? Are these fundamental notions that provide good answers to whatever happens in your life? Could this be it? I would like to think and hope that there is more than this. But to truly debate this we need to introduce the notions of God, spirits and life purpose and this would be beyond the purpose of this posting.
