Reasons to raise awareness among young people about cancer
It is common for young people and adolescents to see the risk of cancer as something alien to themselves and that is why raising awareness among young people around cancer becomes so important.
It is the responsibility of doctors, educators, and parents to try to educate young people about overall health, about optimal care and knowledge of their body in order to avoid diseases such as cancer.
Unfortunately, we cannot say that children and adolescents are exempt from cancer because it is not the reality.
There are many who face it today and perhaps they would have liked to know how to prevent it before.
Cancer prevention should be a subject in school and a topic of free conversation at home
But since it is not yet, I have the responsibility as a medical oncologist to transmit information in the hope that it will reach more and more homes.
Cancer prevention is not such a complex task, we just want to get young people to improve their habits and customs of their routine, to become healthy beings and aware of avoiding long-term consequences.
This is what cancer awareness achieves, effective healthy habits in the future
Due to the lack of awareness today young people do things that affect their body and increase the risk of cancer without knowing it, it is important to bring information that helps them find the right way to take care of themselves for the future.
As adolescents, they go through physical and psychological changes that are a great opportunity to forge actions that prevent cancer.
How can we get young people to prevent cancer?
Raising awareness about cancer is a simple task, it just requires talking openly about what it is, how it is suffered and how it is prevented.
If you have a child or adolescent in your family and want to bring them information about cancer prevention, I invite you to share the following information.
What is cancer?
Cancer is the exaggerated growth of our cells that gradually group together until they become tumors, this affects the functioning of the organ where it is formed and in some cases it can move to different organs becoming metastasis.
Cancer has too much negative information around it that generates fear and blockage in families to talk about it, but the reality is that current advances allow many patients to recover.
The complexity of cancer will depend on how advanced it is when treatment begins, which brings us back to awareness about prevention.
If we build a cancer-safe population, then we prevent cancer.
How is cancer treated?
The symptoms will depend on the type of cancer that develops.
At this point, it is important to know the family history and share it with the young people in our family, so that they can identify the symptoms and even have prevention protocols.
How is cancer prevented?
There are generalized actions that can help us prevent any type of cancer and these are:
- Eat a healthy diet, rich in fruits and vegetables, avoiding dairy, sausages and processed foods.
- Have a physical exercise routine or practice a report regularly.
- Have a safe and stable social environment that keeps children and adolescents away from stress and/or suffering.
- Avoid tobacco and alcohol consumption.
- Avoid harmful chemicals.
- Limit childhood radiation exposure from medical procedures.
- Raise awareness about excessive sun exposure.
- Try to get the HPV (Human Papillomavirus) vaccine.
All of these actions can help young people grow into healthy, cancer-free adults.
However, there is always more to do
- Inquire and learn about the family's health history.
- Create a preventive health routine with regular health screenings.
- Talk to future women about their feminine preventive care.
- Talk to prospective men about their male preventive care.
Each of these actions together can help keep young people and adults healthy, prepared to face any complications in time.
The most important thing to know about cancer is that no one is exempt from suffering from it, children, young people or adults of any age and/or physical condition can develop cancer.
The most efficient way to fight it is with prevention, a patient who stays aware of cancer and detects it early is more likely to recover quickly than a patient who realized it late.
Therefore, it is important to raise awareness in young people so that they develop a positive idea around cancer prevention and preventive health screenings.
Don’t be afraid to talk about cancer, you can save lives just by preventing.
