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This is not obvious to literally anyone.

You've never met or heard about a perfectly fit person in the prime of their life getting a stage 4 diagnosis of something or other?

sure have. my cousin is a personal trainer who ran a gym studio from his garage. Was in great external physical shape. And his house reeked of mold. Absolutely insanely smelly. My wife warned him for years because she's sensitive to the odor, and he just completely refused to accept that there was mold in the house or that it was a problem or that there was any smell at all.

he was later found to have stage2 cancer.

just because he looked good, was he ACTUALLY good?

no. sleep apnea. aching joints. a random bout of shingles at the age of 39. the list of "things" goes on, and most people have lists like this that they refuse to examine or consider as building blocks of a potentially encroaching larger issue.

again, because of fear.

The problem is you're treating these like signs of cancer when they aren't. People with mold in their house don't necessarily have cancer, people who get shingles don't necessarily have cancer, aching joints is less than useless as a measure for cancer. You're working backwards, now anything that's incorrect with someone is proof if they ever develop cancer while ignoring everyone who doesn't.

Somewhat tangential question, can someone briefly say how mold is related to cancer?

Also isn't mold somewhat common in American homes?

You could blame it on anything you want because you're not using science. You could say it was radio waves, vaccines, processed foods, or micro plastics. You would never be wrong because the ones who haven't gotten cancer just didn't get enough exposure yet.

Well, I think what the parent comment is trying to say is that we’ve made it socially acceptable to live in an unhealthy way and many of the “obvious” conditions that are precursors to serious disease like obesity, over medication, chronic inflammation, etc are just accepted.

However, we should be making it clear that unhealthy lifestyles result in bad outcomes.

This was all very obvious before we started to muddy the waters with our blank check acceptance of bad choices (fat acceptance, etc).

I don't disagree with the premise we've issued blank checks for unhealthy lifestyles, but I disagree that's what the parent comment was saying.

Asking people to self diagnose inflammation is a lot different than understanding that being overweight is unhealthy.

It would be obvious to you if your esophageal cells started producing TTF3? What would that feel like?

I absolutely agree that people should try to "know their bodies" and develop their intuitions as far as possible. It can make all the difference in terms of spotting a critical illness in time (not always, but sometimes).

However, health/medicine is a field rife with misinformation, rife with questionable ideas about what "intuition" can really tell you, and the dividing line between the true and the confidently incorrect can be hard to pin down.

And what really sets off alarm bells, to me at least, is proposing that it should substitute these intuitions for professional expertise, or should be understood as being at cross-purposes with it. I think the best case for valuing our intutions would come from a place of treating them as complementary to professional expertise.

> it makes "something doesn't feel right" highly impractical sadly.

What kind of doctor would a person go to for something like that?

although down voted, controversial, not generally provable, and possibly condescending

this perspective shouldn't be discounted

Yeah, very true. Obviously you can't do everything yourself, but a lot of people have gone the other way, and given away responsibility for their health to the professionals and the numbers.

The numbers don't tell the whole story, and the professionals are looking out for themselves as well as taking care of you (at minimum!)

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. This is 100% correct.

It's an ambiguous rant, that's why it's getting down-voted. No specific message. No sources. No data. Just an empty lecture on "listen to your body!", but no substance to explain how, why, what to do etc.

The core steps to paying attention to yourself:

- notice

- fill in the picture

- use it to inform your decisions

For example, my oral health fluctuates based on what I eat. Too much sugar or sweet carbs, and my gums start feeling itchy and sore. Having that self-awareness helps, because when it starts becoming a problem, I can take corrective action, and fix my mouth before I get a cavity or lose gum tissue.

Now, this is exactly what a dentist would say - brush and avoid sugar. What self-awareness helps with is knowing how much is too much! I'm not flying blind, I know what "good mouth" and "bad mouth" feel like.

Which works fine for something simple like "if I eat too much sugar I get a tummy ache". It's harder to do with something that is hard to detect, like pancreatic cancer, or a symptom that could be caused by a huge number of things, like feeling tired. The first problem is the one that's trying to be solved by the solution in the article.

Yeah, that's a simple example. Pancreatic cancer would be at the other end of the scale:

- it's internal

- nobody really knows what their pancreas is supposed to do anyway

Plus the normal problems with self-analysis:

- distinguishing signal from noise

- going around looking for a problem means overpowering whatever signal there was with conscious attention

Still, I think someone with a stable routine, who has practice teasing out subtle signals, could pick up on something like that. Once you have enough experience with how your body "should" work, any deviation is noticeable.

At best they could determine something was wrong, maybe that they were tired more than they should be, and would have to go to a doctor for answers. I very much doubt anyone could go "Yup, I have pancreatic cancer." It's really hoping that someone could pick up very slight symptoms, and I don't think that they'll always be as apparent as you'd hope. It almost feels like victim blaming to say that if they'd just been more in touch they could have detected the barely detectable. Are there any examples of someone detecting pancreatic cancer early on their own?

Likely because, similar the other thread about obesity, this article is referring to direct evidence of genetic changes rather than observation of ones differentials or symptoms.

Just a guess, I know very little about this subject.

Because they didn't read the article.