In an article published in the Globe and Mail last week, national president and CEO of the Canadian Cancer Society, Pamela Fralick, discussed the two biggest issues prevalent to treating cancer in Canada. The first issue addressed was the huge economic impact the disease has on society. Fralick writes, “In 2000, cancer cost $2.6-billion in direct health care costs and $14.8-billion in indirect costs due to lost productivity and premature death. In 2013, an estimated 187,000 cases of cancer will be diagnosed, and 75, 500 Canadians will die from the disease, overwhelming our already bursting-at-the-seams health care system.”
The second issue brought up in the article is that of prevention. “The evidence clearly tells us that half of cancer cases are preventable,” Fralick writes. “So governments need to create policies to protect the health of Canadians and to encourage us all to embrace healthy lifestyles in order to drive down the rate of new cases of cancer.”
While we at AIM agree that a focus on a healthy lifestyle should be bred in the bone, we also know that our whole body MRI scan for early cancer detection is a solution for the problem of late diagnosis. Cancer is treatable when caught in its early stages; not so in those tragic cases where cancer remains unknown until it reaches the third or fourth stage.
But imagine a Canada where everyone had access to an annual or semi-annual AIM full body MRI check-ups to screen for the early signs of cancer or other health issues. We at AIM are confident that this could be a solution not only for the large numbers of Canada’s population dying unnecessarily from cancer, but that it would also offset the billions of dollars thrown away by the government at a problem they are, as yet, nowhere close to solving.