Report says there will be a 40% increase in cancer patients by 2030

According to a report cited by the Globe and Mail, Canada's hospitals will see an increase of 40% a year in the number of cancer patients they treat by 2030. The article claims that

By the year 2030, an average of 277,000 new cancer cases are expected to be logged every year, up from nearly 200,000 this year and about 155,000 a decade ago, according to Canadian Cancer Statistics 2015, an annual summary of cancer figures and projections published Wednesday by the Canadian Cancer Society, Statistics Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The difficulty for the medical system will be how to deal with the sheer number of new cancer cases, driven by an aging population of baby boomers. A particular difficulty will be what to do with those patients who are too frail and elderly to endure the usual highly toxic and debilitating cancer protocols. The article and the report recommend advance planning, with "more oncologists, specially trained nurses, diagnostic services, cancer centres, cancer therapies and palliative care."

If I may beat my little drum here, what the system needs, in particular for those frail elderly patients whom chemotherapy would devastate, if not kill outright, is more specially trained energy healers. As I've pointed out in this blog many times over, energy treatments trump conventional ones for giving patients peace of mind, quality of life, and even added time. They are less taxing on the patient and less expensive to deliver. Perhaps by 2030 someone in a position to change things in the healthcare system will figure this out, for all our benefits.

Iatrogenic disease - part 4

This is a topic that just keeps giving. This morning's haul is an article in the National Post, entitled "Inside Canada’s secret world of medical error: ‘There is a lot of lying, there’s a lot of cover-up’." It was published in January, but I just ran across it. It begins with a story containing a shocking verbal image: a woman whose eyeball literally pops out her eye socket because botched eye surgery caused a build-up of blood behind her eye. The same woman had a few months earlier mistakenly received a hernia operation instead of having a cyst removed from one of her ovaries. She is in continuing pain from the unremoved cyst and she now has a prosthetic eye.

The article continues with a litany of other hospital errors before citing a frightening statistic: 13% of people coming into hospital in Canada will experience some kind of adverse event, and that includes the possibility of iatrogenic death. A 2004 study showed that 7.5% of adult patients entering hospital, or approximately 185,000 Canadians a year, experienced a serious adverse event. The percentage for children was higher at 9.2%. Up to 23,000 people a year die in Canada as a result of preventable hospital error. According to Hugh McLeod, chief executive of the Canadian Safety Institute, "With the pace, the increase of new technology, new drugs, new approaches … the probability of risk and incident has grown."

If you have a strong stomach, read the article in its entirety. It will inspire you to do everything in your power to stay out of hospital.