Hi everyone,

We have a lovely lady who is a valued member of this furum who chose to nickname herself Hope. I love this nickname.

HOPE is only a four letter word but is pehaps one of the most important words next to love in our language. Hope can be likened to a life raft we are desperately clinging to when we are given a cancer diagnosis and are trying to swim against the tide that is threatening to engulf us.

I am very hopeful for the future and there are several reasons for this. Cancer Research now state that 50% of people now survive cancer, up from just 25% a few years ago. They also state they hope this figure will improve to 75% in the next ten years and that would be a fantasic accievement. I'm no medical man but I am very hopeful this can be achieved and part of the reason is figures realeased recently by Macmillan that show there are two and a half million people now living with cancer in this country; an increase of five hundred thousand in the past five years. At first glance these figures look very frightening. But there is always two ways of looking at things. I believe that a large part of this increase is due to publicity  and advertising syptoms of differnt cancers by various charities and the goverment. I believe that because of these campaigns, more people are going to their doctorors earlier and as we all know the earlier a diagnisis is made and treatment started, the better the chance of a sucessful outcome for the patient and also less cost in the long term to the N.H.S.. Once the statistics regarding these earlier diagnisis start to filter through, I feel it will improve long term survival rate quite quickly. I also belive that is one of the reasons why we lag behing Europe on survival rates as people over there do seem to presnt themselves to their G.P. earlier than we do in part due to better education about cancer.

My other reson for Hope, is there is so much being learnt about cancer everyday. New drugs are appearing each year with new radiotherapy machiens coming on stream slowly that can target tumour much more accurately meaning less damage to surrounding tissue. Also increasing publicity about how by making life style changes we can reduce the risk of getting cancer in the first place. All these things when combined together will I feel make a big impact overall and gives me great HOPE that one day most cancers will be curable. Brian.