Colorectal Cancer (Carcinoma)

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Colon and rectal cancers are increasingly common killers.  The risk increases with age and any factor that compromises digestive health. 

As with all cancers, the best means of avoiding bowel cancer is in fact prevention and early detection. Prevention, in the case of the rectum, promoting a healthy condition in the bowel with good diet and habits, and clearing up all irritating and inflammatory disease processes, including hemorrhoids, no matter how mild, when they occur. Early detection means having a complete examination at the first sign of trouble.

Together, prevention and early detection are the ways to protect yourself against the very deadly but “quiet” cancers of the lower digestive tract.

To help with early detection, here are some of the signs that should cause you to seek a qualified examination……

1. Constipation or any change in bowel habit
2. Bleeding, no matter how slight, especially if repeated
3. Pain, soreness, burning sensation
4. Heaviness in the rectum
5. External swelling
6. Any departure from the normal feeling around the rectum. The normal feeling is actually an absence of feeling except, of course, at time of stool.

Constipation deserves special mention as an underlying cause of colorectal cancer, as it is one of the most common disorders in developed nations today. Indeed, its high degree of prevalence often gives the ailment the status of normalcy and even respectability. Many doctors have the opinion that daily regularity of bowel movement is simply unnecessary, but this reflects what has become a “typical” health status, rather than what is truly normal – good health.

Please read further about constipation to understand how and why it is a major contributor to rectal disease, including colorectal cancer, and how we prevent it. 

Even if the disease process is allowed to continue and cancer does develop, early detection again is a life saver.  In many cases, colorectal cancer can be cured in its early stages. 

Only recently has the rising incidence of these cancer types gained any media attention.  They lack the political glamor of other cancers like lung cancer, with its controversies about the harm caused by cigarette smoke, whether to allow smoking in public places, and so on. 

The media and medical industry silence about colorectal cancer is finally lifting, due to the steadily rising number of cases.  Quietly, colorectal cancer has become one of the nation's foremost cancer killers, the number of new cases increasing each year. An estimated 160,000 Americans will develop cancer of the lower bowel in 2004. 52,000 who already have this disease will die. The number of stricken individuals has nearly doubled between 1969 and 1985 and has continued to rise. At last, cancer of the bowel has broken through the customary mask of stony silence traditionally covering these ailments as newspaper headlines spelled out the reason for the illness and death of some of our elder statesmen. Recently a number of articles on this form of cancer has appeared in popular magazines.

The rising trend is a deep concern to the healing profession and focuses our attention on two main reasons for this increase.

1. The understandable but all too frequent failure of the patient to respond to warnings of things wrong in this region of the body such as bleeding, pain, change in habits of the bowel, etc., which should alert him to seek an examination.
2. The prevalence of unskilled or inadequate examinations. A qualified doctor with experience in this area should be sought.

In a recent televised address, the head of the American Cancer Society mentioned the increasing existence of cancer of the lower bowel and the fact that a sigmoidescopic examination is not possible in every doctor's office. This observation is a huge step in the right direction, because ultimately, only an alerted and informed public can reduce the rising trend of colorectal cancer as they have with other cancers, in cooperation with the healing profession. 

For example, a past success – the death rate from female reproductive cancers has dropped continuously during the past decade. Women are going to their doctors, usually at the very first signs of malignancy, and they also go for periodic exams as a means of prevention and early detection. During the same decade, colorectal cancers have risen.

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