Journal of Tumor Medicine & Prevention

Cancer and the Science of Denial –with Breast Cancer/Long Island Breast Cancer

Author: Lawrence Broxmeyer MD*

Published: July 14, 2017

DOI: 10.19080/JTMP.2017.03.555563

Abstract Content: The word ‘cancer’ is of Latin derivation and means crab. By the turn of the 20th Century organized medicine had come to the conclusion that it was not a matter of whether infectious disease caused cancer, but which one. Then, in 1910, certain American medical powers did a 180-degree rotation –abruptly deciding that cancer was not caused by a microbe. This flew in the face of over two hundred years of research in which a cancer germ had been discovered and rediscovered. Of all the infectious possibilities for cancer, unquestionably the one class of microbes that has been long recognized to most consistently mimic and imitate ‘cancer’ at both clinical and tissue levels were the mycobacteria of the family Actinomycetales of which tuberculosis and leprosy are premier examples. The association of TB with carcinoma was initially described about 200 years ago by Bayle who considered the lung malignancy ‘cavitation cancereuse’ to merely be one of the various types of tuberculosis. Ever since, almost as if in reflex to the obvious –the potential association between TB and subsequent development of cancer has drawn active investigation.