From the first moment my wife discovered
she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even
ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have
received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than
mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started
this blog…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for
answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The
following entry appeared June of 2012.
Doctors harp on
exercise and this is the last time I’ll harp on it at length, too!
Despite the
harping – or in my case, perversely because
of it – I avoid exercise like the plague.
Even so, as I read
more and more sites promoting the “exercise makes you better if you have breast
cancer” meme, I found that almost none of them give any kind of evidence as to
WHY exercise fights cancer and promotes healing.
So I dug into the
sites and finally found some evidence supporting this wild, “Do this one weird
thing…” kind of meme.
1) “The
complicated nature of the physical activity variable, combined with lack of
knowledge regarding possible biological mechanisms operating between physical
activity and cancer, warrants further studies including controlled clinical
randomized trials.”
Translation?
We haven’t got a
good, clear idea of why exercise makes some kind of difference because we can’t
quite dig deep enough or look small enough into the Human body to really
understand this.
It seems clear
that we know a few things: exercise gets rid of fat cells that make estrogen
and estrogen drives cancer cell growth; exercise makes insulin more effective;
exercise reduces the amount of leptin (which gives cells more cancer receptors)
in your blood because you have fewer fat cells to make it; exercise suppresses the
production of LH, FSH and “other ovarian hormones” like estrogen and
progestogens. At MUCH lower levels, exercise can mimic the effect of the
anti-cancer drug, tamoxifen; exercising means that more fat is metabolized and you don’t need
as MUCH of the hormone to do the work of fat destruction so there are fewer
hormones to drive cancer cell growth; exercise decreases the markers of
inflammation; exercise boosts
the immune system by circulating more wbcs and T cells, lowers the chemicals
that cause swelling, lowers the number of fat cells which make estrogen which
strengthens breast cancer cells and keeps the immune system working like this
LONGER; and lastly, even the exercise of DAILY MOVEMENT can increase the
effectiveness of insulin in those who are insulin resistant.
So we know that
exercise is helpful in preventing and recovering from breast cancer. I guess
that’s a big “duh” for me. Of course keeping the body healthy would prevent and
fight breast cancer.
But now we know
the HOW – and that’s been my goal all along!
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