Description
Since 1940, a woman’s chance of developing breast cancer has doubled, increasing in tandem with prostate and childhood cancers, but more significantly, coinciding with the rise of the chemical and nuclear industries. Countering the message that cancer is all genetic, professional chemist and medical doctor Janette Sherman offers a landmark study on the toxins in our environment that cause cancer–chemical carcinogens, ionizing radiation and endocrine disrupters–and shows us how we can protect ourselves. The realities are hard to ignore: Asian women have a remarkably low rate of breast cancer, but it increases dramatically when they move to the West. Mammograms, the mainstay of early cancer detection in the U.S., use ionizing radiation that in fact intensifies a woman’s cancer risk. The hot new drug tamoxifen, widely touted as a cancer preventer for women at high risk, actually causes a rise in breast tumors that are resistant to chemotherapy. A bracing account that challenges current medical thinking, “Life’s Delicate Balance” makes urgently clear that winning the war on cancer will not be accomplished by physicians, scientists, pharmaceutical corporations, epidemologists, and geneticists, nor by the thousands employed in government agencies and universities at home and abroad. It will be won by people who understand the connection between the loss of personal health and the unchecked boundaries of worldwide pollution.
