As a person living with cancer, I get suggestions all the time to look at non-medical treatments. By this, I mean mainly nutritional or holistic approaches that are meant to directly replace the use of “Western” medicine. Each suggestion comes with an anecdotal reference to someone who was “cured” by these methods, which range from the clearly bizarre to sensible health choices. Digging deeper, of course, reveals that every verifiable success story includes the use of early surgery or extensive chemo and radiation therapies.

And none of them, so far, have applied directly to my particular brand of cancer.

It doesn’t bother me so much to

get suggestions for alternative approaches. I’m a lifelong skeptic on just about everything, and the medical industrial complex is no different. However, having known a few physicians over the years and making more than casual acquaintances with research scientists, I feel fairly safe in saying that there is no conspiracy to keep a cure for cancer away from the paying public. Considering the financial rewards for finding a cure, especially those individual rewards for anyone who could achieve this process, there is far more fiscal incentive to cure cancer than to hide a cure. Conspiracy whack-jobs aside, reasonable people who look at the facts and take the time to understand how research institutions work (and more over, the motivations of the researchers) will all conclude that this is a Golden Age of Cancer Research and that there has never been a better time to receive the diagnosis.

Now, I’m not saying there is ever a great time to be diagnosed with cancer. It’s just that, now, and going forward into the future, science has provided more hope for a cure than ever before. When researchers talk about breast cancer being virtually downgraded to a mere chronic disease, it does not mean that they don’t take it seriously as a life-threatening condition; rather, they are so excited about not only the survival prospects of women (and ocassionally men) with breast cancer, but also the higher quality of life and overall longevity of that life. There is hope that lung cancer will soon share that same perspective. You can have it, we may not be able to fully cure it, but you CAN LIVE with it and you CAN LIVE WELL with it.

But you cannot ignore treatment. And you should not ignore science.

While I fully plan — and expect  —  to beat this cancer thing, I know that I will benefit from having science on my side. Sure, I’ll juice a few carrots and I may eat stuff that has been anecdotally linked to cases where people have outlived their cancer cells, in reasonable and healthy amounts. I’ll try other therapies, too, where they won’t jeopardize my success by conflicting with the breakthroughs of the past decade or encouraging outright stupidity. But one thing I absolutely will not do is reject new ideas, especially those coming from impassioned scientists at the top of their field.