Roupen Odabashian: Why is Cancer Incidence increasing?
Roupen Odabashian, Hematology/Oncology Fellow at Karmanos Cancer Institute, shared on LinkedIn:
“Why is Cancer Incidence increasing?
As an oncologist, I see patients with one primary goal – to treat them. But we face a concerning reality in cancer care that few discuss.
When seeing patients, we’re confined to strict timeframes to diagnose cancer, determine treatment plans, and address their questions about this overwhelming diagnosis.
What’s missing? The thousands of oncologists worldwide rarely have time to investigate potential causes – patient diets, exposures to specific ingredients in foods or skincare products, environmental factors. Our medical system isn’t built for that level of investigation.
Day after day treating cancer, I wonder: What caused this patient’s cancer? What contributed to it?
The unfortunate truth is that medicine trains us to link treatments to diagnoses, not to investigate underlying causes.
There’s no funding for investigating cancer pathology – all resources go toward developing new treatments. This remains one of the most frustrating aspects of oncology practice.
Take a lung cancer patient who was perfectly healthy before diagnosis. The natural question is ‘why?’ Yet we lack systematic tools to analyze their lifestyle, occupation, environmental exposures – factors that may have increased their cancer risk.
We know cancer incidence is rising, but we don’t have the time, resources, or tools to properly investigate why.”
-
Challenging the Status Quo in Colorectal Cancer 2024
December 6-8, 2024
-
ESMO 2024 Congress
September 13-17, 2024
-
ASCO Annual Meeting
May 30 - June 4, 2024
-
Yvonne Award 2024
May 31, 2024
-
OncoThon 2024, Online
Feb. 15, 2024
-
Global Summit on War & Cancer 2023, Online
Dec. 14-16, 2023