Investigative Reporting

Upstream

For a good doctor — and the fight I wish we talked about.

Yesterday I learned that the doctor who cared for my family when I was a child has been flown home. He'd been serving a medical mission in Chile, and now he's come back so his family can hold him close before he passes. Cancer.

I sat up late searching the web for something — anything — I might offer to comfort the people who love him, and I just cried and cried. This is a man our whole community loved. A healer. And there is something that cuts especially deep about watching a healer be taken this way.

I've watched cancer take people I love before. My aunt survived breast cancer, only to lose a later fight with bone cancer. Our brother-in-law died of colon cancer — barely into his thirties. If I could go back and hand my younger self everything I've learned since, I would. 

So let me be honest with you about something. When my feed fills up every October with "Race for the Cure," part of me goes quiet and sad — and part of me wants to holler. Not because hoping for a cure is wrong. Of course we want a cure. But because there's a whole conversation almost nobody wants to have out loud: how much of this is preventable, and who benefits from us never asking that question, and who benefits from no cure. 

Years ago, Sierra magazine ran a piece of investigative reporting called "Cancer, Inc." (Sharon Batt & Liza Gross). I'd ask you to go read the whole thing, because once you see how tangled the money is, you can't un-see it. A few of the things it documents:

• The very company that founded and bankrolled Breast Cancer Awareness Month also profited from the cancer drug it sold and manufactured carcinogenic herbicides and fungicides.
• The American Cancer Society has seated chemical- and drug-industry executives on its board, and officials have long revolved between the "war on cancer" and the companies that profit from treating it.
• One public-health expert called it a conflict of interest with no parallel in the history of American medicine.
• Only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of chemicals in everyday use have ever been tested for safety — and dozens are recognized human carcinogens.
• When Israel banned three of these pesticides in the late 1970s, its breast cancer death rate — which had climbed for twenty-five straight years — actually fell.
• A woman's lifetime risk of breast cancer went from 1 in 20 in 1950 to 1 in 8.
• Rachel Carson saw all of this coming. She warned that chasing a single miraculous "cure" can blind us to the cancers we might have prevented in the first place — that it's a disservice to hold out hope of a solution arriving all at once. She was dying of breast cancer when she wrote it.

That's the part that keeps me up at night. Not because I've lost faith in doctors — please hear me on that — but because we pour oceans of money downstream, into treating sickness after it arrives, and almost nothing upstream, into keeping it from arriving at all.

The fight we can actually wage

This is why I do what I do. It's why I care so much about clean, real food — food grown without the poisons — and about getting toxic junk out of our homes, our water, our personal-care products, the air our kids breathe. I can't fix a broken system by myself. But I can tend my own home like it matters, because it does. I can feed my family in a way that stacks the odds in their favor.

And I won't pretend prevention is a magic shield — it isn't. Good people who did everything "right" still get sick, and that is a grief all its own; if that's you, please know I am not wagging a finger. But reducing what we're exposed to and nourishing the bodies we've been given is a fight we can actually wage — today, in our own kitchens. I'd rather wage it than wait.

It's where my giving goes, too. I don't send my dollars into the big pink machine. I support work trying to clean up the food supply at its source — organizations like the Institute for Responsible Technology. That's the fight I believe in.

Now, please don't mishear me. I am not telling you to turn away from your doctor. How could I? The man I'm grieving tonight is a doctor — a good one, who gave his life to caring for others. If you or someone you love is facing a diagnosis, lean on your medical team, ask the hard questions, and get the care you need. Prevention and good medicine were never enemies. All I'm asking is that we stop treating prevention like an afterthought — that we finally take seriously what we put in and around our bodies, long before anyone is in a hospital gown.

Our bodies are a gift — on loan, sacred, worth protecting. I believe that with my whole heart. Tonight I'm holding this dear doctor and his family in my prayers, and I'm holding you, too. May God comfort every family sitting in a waiting room or a hospice room right now. And may we find the courage to go upstream.

With love and a heavy heart,

Steffanie

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Nothing here is medical advice. If you are facing a diagnosis, please work closely with a qualified healthcare provider — the ideas in this post are about reducing risk and supporting overall health alongside medical care, never in place of it.