english / italiano
"It is estimated that in Italy there are 373,300 new cancer diagnoses every year, around 194,800 (52 %) among men and about 178,500 (48 %) among women.
During the course of life, about one man out of two and one woman out of three will get cancer ».
(source: Airc)
When I was a kid there was a taboo in my family, something nobody could talk about. A word that could not be said at all. My mother, a rebel by nature, pronounced it anyway, distorting it aloud with the disgusted air of someone with a bad taste in the mouth. Sitting in front of my pear juice on Sunday morning, I watched her talking to her sister: "What did he die of? But of a "cancraccio", of course ».
In general, however, it was not the subject of conversation, as if it was a shame that have to be hidden and at the same time something tangible, which could materialize behind you in a moment of inattention. If it appeared on the television screen, it would embarrassed me, like in front of a sex scene: something that I should not have seen but that still stood in front of my eyes; I stared elsewhere while someone beside me hurried to change channels. For shame, if we really had to name the unpronounceable enemy, it was called by his attenuated, respectable name: "did he get a tumor too? Poor fellow. " On the other hand, certain acronyms had no secrets for me, and computerized axial tomography was my tongue twister when I fellowed elementary school..
Due to the ‘unnamed one’ my father, my uncle, my aunt, my grandmother and my grandfather died - speaking only of the closest family members. The blood, the brain, the lungs, the kidneys, every organ we offered to the mocker who was walking around unfeeling in our house. As a child, I knew that the monster was sleeping under my bed, patient, and waited for the right moment to jump out and grab me: it was only a matter of time.
Then it happened that my father distracted himself for a moment and ended up in the clinic to have a kidney removed without saying anything to anyone, simulating a business trip to make everyone believe, and first of all himself, that he nothing was happening. He paid doctors – cash - full of promises (but with little results) 23.000 euros. It was nothing but the beginning.
Like any self-respecting enemy, it stealthily arrives, it doesn’t announce itself.
a trivial stomachache, a sudden weakness, a swelling under the skin that didn’t bother you, all this push you to do a check-up. Just the moment after, you are locked in a machine that inspects your body, full of terror and radiation, forced to get in line to book other exams and then, if successful, to face the cures, which burn - yes - more than the harm you didn't know you had.
He, the Mute King, is the second leading cause of death after cardiovascular diseases but, more than any other disease, he has something terrible inside him. It triggers inside us ancestral fears and we react with the oldest and most fallacious illusion, control: for this reason we are willing to pay any amount to recover but, above all, we are willing to believe that that liquid, that substance, that instrument will save us.
If in the western culture the faith in otherworldly divinity has dissolved into an indifferent agnosticism and almost disappeared, not so did the mad belief in the thousand possible healings. Whether it's the goat serum or the truth machine of the inventor of Scientology, the straightening of the vertebrae or the orgone energy accumulator of the Freudian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the number and scope of treatment for tumors which, at least for a period, were considered valid by the scientific community is amazing.
But that’s not all. In 1955 the American Cancer Society, the control authority of cancer treatment methods, catalogued the failed attempts as "unproven": in 1991 they became "questionable" and today they are even defined as "alternative and complementary". What happened? Who decides what is valid and what is useless or even harmful?
According to an investigation made by the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, which has analyzed sector publications and farce medical conferences for months, no longer exists a real independent monitoring tool that evaluates the scientific validity of a cure; so it happens that a method "works" if the promoter has the means to spread it and have it published on specialized magazines. Publishing on reviews is fundamental for a researcher that aims to be accredited in the scientific environment: what was once a place where almost all of them ran aground, today it has become a slide towards an easy academic career.
They are called "predatory publishers" and they are apparently almost 9.000 all over the world: unscrupulous people who publish (paid) on alleged scientific journals studies and medical experiments that have never faced peer review, the control of experts. It is estimated that it has been reached the number of 400.000 uncontrolled articles - where one can read, among other things, that the tumor can be treated with propolis or amanite phallide.
The imaginary, as we know, is stronger than reality: a thing becomes true if I can convince you that it is. The fact that it actually works is then a secondary element, because faith - the need to have the monster under control - turns water into wine and shows things that do not exist.
In an age like this, in which the phobia for vaccines is spreading and the belief that homeopathy destroys virusesbetter than antibiotics do, why should we be so surprised by Orgone's method? Now that every certainty vacillates and everything is bought, in an age of fake news where source checking has become a fussiness, what happens if health is also bent to economic interests? If scientific studies are published – behind payment - and cures adopted independently of a proven validity?
Research has actually made big progress in recent years: the cure rate for some cancers has increased significantly and prevention has made great strides. But how you can distinguish these results from sorcerers' filters if you find them offered on the same shelf in science discount stores? The monster laughs from under my bed, where it has remained since the ‘70s.
We have not beaten the crazy cell, but on the other hand we have multiplied the charming sirens that distract us from the final goal, losing precious time. Health is no longer worth even the money we can pay: in the future, once public health care will be removed in Europe, we will pay only to make us cheated, while the cure will become a Russian roulette - and lucky will be the one that won’t get the fatal bullet .
As for me, more than forty years after the death of my uncle at the age of 36, the first in order of appearance in my family, I believe I have never yet pronounced the word cancer out loud.
translated by Chiara Vittone