Chapter 3 – Symptoms, Detection and Treatment

Symptoms

It is a terrifying experience for most people when they find out they have cancer; however, it is much better to know about it sooner than later. The sooner it is detected, the more effectively it can be treated. Following is the list of general symptoms from the American Cancer Society.

• Unexplained weight loss
• Fever
• Fatigue
• Pain
• Unusual bleeding or discharge
• A sore that does not heal
• Thickening or lump in breast or elsewhere
• Change in bowel or bladder habits
• Indigestion or difficulty swallowing
• Definite change in a wart or mole
• Nagging cough or hoarseness

Specific symptoms for different types of cancer are listed in Appendix II.

If any one of these warning signs manifests itself, you should bring it to your physician's attention.

Early detection

If you aren't able to prevent cancer from developing (which you should be able to do with a good cancer prevention program), the next best thing is to detect it as soon as possible. Unfortunately, quite often by the time it is detected, it is too late. Many people are under the mistaken idea that detection is the closest thing there is to prevention. Detection is just that, detection. Prevention, on the other hand, ensures that cancer is not "detected" when tests are done to you – because you don't have it!

There are many exams that people should undergo on a regular basis in order to make sure they do not have cancer or that they do not have precancerous conditions that can lead to it. We list some of the basic exams that everyone should undergo depending on their age.

* It is controversial whether it provides more potential harm than good.
** If you have many moles or birthmarks, you should check them to see if any changes have occurred to any of them. One way to do this is to take pictures of them and compare the pictures to the current state of the moles.
*** Performed by a dermatologist – consists of looking at your moles to see if any of them look potentially dangerous. Recommended for fair-skinned people that have many moles and for individuals that received much sun exposure in their younger years. If you have few moles, and you are willing to check them every 6 months to a year, you probably do not need the clinical mole exam every year.

There is another test for those that are a little paranoid. If you want to be really sure, there is a test known as the AMAS test (Anti-Malignan Antibody Serum) that measures the amount of an antibody your body produces when cancer cells are present. The test is up to 95 percent accurate, which makes it much better at detecting it than any other test. It boasts detecting cancer up to 19 months earlier than any other screening method. This test is only good in the early stages because once the cancer is more advanced, your immune system has either become used to the malignan or has been compromised by the disease. However, if the cancer is advanced, you would probably have other symptoms and there would be other tests that could confirm it, at which point the AMAS test would be redundant anyway.

The greatest drawback of the AMAS test is that it cannot tell where the cancer cells are, so even if you know that you have it, your doctors might not be able to do much about it. There is also the chance of getting a false-positive result. This means that the test provides a positive (you have cancer) result when you in fact do not. If you have a false positive, which could happen, you will think that you have the disease. If it is in its earliest stage, your doctor might not be able to find it, so you might not know for a while whether you really have it or just had a false positive. If the test results tell you that you have cancer when you in fact do not, the mental anguish you go through could be very emotionally harmful. So think about it before choosing to go for the test. Before making a decision, do some research on the Internet on AMAS.

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