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Sunday, February 26, 2006In 1972, Heather Crowe came to Ottawa as a single mother with little money. Over the years, she worked in half a dozen restaurants, sometimes pulling three shifts a day to support herself and her daughter. She has never smoked a cigarette, but after 40 years of serving up eggs and coffee in the blue air of pre-smokefree restaurants, she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in 2002. Did working in the restaurants cause her lung cancer? Who knows? Even pristine lungs can develop lung cancer, just as pristine livers can develop cirrhosis. We have a very real problem with this concept in our society. Manys a time a patient will tell me she doesn't need to have a mammogram because "there's no breast cancer in my family," or that there's no need for colon cancer screening because there's no colon cancer in the family. But genetics is only one of many factors in the genesis of these two cancers, just as inhaling pollutants is only one of many factors in the genesis of lung cancer. It's an important, but lost nuance. posted by Sydney on 2/26/2006 09:51:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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