OVERLOOKED Signs of Cancer, DO NOT IGNORE

Many cancers are not caught as early as we'd like to see, not because the body wasn't trying to warn you, but because the early signs got blamed on something else. And by the time someone finally takes these signs seriously, the cancer may have had a year and sometimes 2 years to develop. And sometimes on a cellular level, it could have been happening for 5 or 10 years. That's one of the hardest truths that we've learned over 2 decades of helping so many patients in our center. I'm Dr. Dino Prato, founder of Invita Medical Centers. For the last 25 years, my team and I have treated thousands of cancer patients, many of whom were told there was nothing else that can be done from some of the top cancer hospitals across the country. And one of the patterns we kept seeing over and over again is that their body was whispering something of early signs, but the whisper got explained away as something else like stress or fatigue or hormonal imbalances or just digestive upset or something of that nature. So in this podcast, I'm gonna walk you through what's overlooked, the signs that people need to look at that get ignored. That help you point to maybe there's something else going on here and you need to get checked. In fact, if you look at some of my other videos, I go into exactly how you should be doing early screening with blood tests that look at many signals and then go from there to imaging and diagnosis. So you can catch a cancer very early because sometimes you'll get no symptoms. But in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through what you might need to get checked out. Before you do anything, make sure you're always working with a doctor and let's get started. The first thing I wanna say is this. Most people do not miss these signs because they're lazy or not always paying attention. They do not miss them because they're stupid, and they're not missing them because they don't care. They miss 'em because there's an alternative explanation for the problem. Almost like you have heartburn, but you're in the middle of a heart attack type of idea, right? It sounds reasonable, but until you get closer examination of the heart and you can see that it's ischemic and blood's not getting to it, you could see there's a heart attack in progress. It may feel like heartburn. Well, in oncology we have the same thing. So let's look at some of the straightforward telltale signs that almost every doctor's gonna ask a patient. If you have unexplained weight loss, maybe you think it's because of stress, you know, or you just started losing a lot of weight and you just notice it's unexplained. That can be a sign. If you see severe digestive changes that don't have an explanation, you might think, gee, this could be something else. And it might be, but it's worth taking a look and getting that checked out. If you have unexplained pain that doesn't go away, or you might feel a gland or a lymph node that's swollen, but it's not painful. Painful and kind of hard, that is also something you need to check out. So if you see these spots, maybe a spot on your skin that's looking irregular borders and so forth, you need to get a dermatology check. This is how we look at early detection, at least from the symptom side. My favorite way of doing early detection is by doing a peripheral blood draw, and then we can test 50, 70 cancers all at once. If we see something there, it doesn't mean we have cancer, it's a signal. Then we'll go to imaging, and if the imaging's there, then biopsy, and then we can get a true diagnosis very early. I really think people need to be starting to do these in their 20s, but many don't. And this episode, we're going to focus on these symptoms. And there's a huge gap between the interpretation of these symptoms and what they could be causing. So let's go through some of these signals. Number 1, tiredness that sleep doesn't seem to fix. You're just tired and you might look paler and you might not look as energetic. And it's happening gradually, almost like if you've ever lost your vision and you didn't think you need glasses. And then one year, second year, and all of a sudden, or months, then all of a sudden you're like, gee, I think I need glasses. It's in that type of fatigue. It's sneaking up on you. Everyone gets tired. Sure, everyone has stress and that could be causing you to be tired, but this is an unexplained fatigue. And if you're getting some sleep and you're eating okay and your energy's still not recovering, that's also giving us a sign that, hey, there could be a thyroid problem, hormonal problem, but we also want to make sure there isn't a cancer there. That kind of thing makes sense. If it persists, it hangs around, you feel heavier, that's that kind of fatigue we want to look at. But after 2.5 decades of working with late-stage cancer patients and our team, these are things that patients usually had as symptoms before the cancer. That doesn't mean you're developing the cancer. So even if you're not developing or have cancer, you are aging faster and it might be causing disease in other parts of the body. So we want to pay attention to these symptoms. So the question is, why does cancer cause this? Well, because the body's under tremendous amount of strain. The immune system has to do a lot more work. There's more inflammation. Sometimes anemia might be involved, internal bleeding. And so these all can bring about fatigue. And sometimes you have to really understand that the disease itself is diverting energy from your body to try to heal. So that's something we want to pay attention to. So when do you act? If the fatigue is new, persistent, or out of proportion and not improving after a few weeks of real good recovery and health, taking care of your nutrition, eating properly, then you want to pay a little more attention to it. You might say, I am having persistent fatigue that's not improving with rest, and I want to understand why. That's the kind of thing you want to ask your doctor. That's a better conversation. Number 2, a patch of the skin that won't heal or a spot that won't stay the same. You may have irregular borders or it's not healing correctly. This is a big one because it's visible. People see it, but they actually don't always do things. You might have your hair covering. It might be an area of your scalp. So this is why it's good to get dermatology exams and just find these things early so they can be removed. And they're usually benign if they're removed early. They don't cause disease. But we want to look at things like moles or spots that are changing in size, color, shape, irregularities, rough edges. Look for these. Pay attention to your body. Don't just wash over it. Look through your feet, between your toes when you're taking a shower, wherever you can. Legs. Maybe have a spouse or a loved one look at your back and just quickly pay pay attention, especially if you have birthmarks. You want to see if they've changed in any way. Let's move on to number 3, persistent changes. And this is what I'm talking about, digestive health in particular. This is one of the biggest categories people delay on because they think it might be gas, and it could be appetite changes or irregularity to stools, or the food is sitting differently in their stomach, or they eat some that upset their stomach. Here we want to pay attention. Obviously, if we see blood in the stool, you're going to go see a doctor. Most patients will. I don't think they're going to ignore that. And if you see dark stool, that could mean blood coming from the upper part GI tract. So those things all need to be reviewed. So people need to pay attention to their digestion. Yes, stress can affect your digestion. Travel, eating the wrong diets, and even supplements can create gas and bloating, irritable bowel syndrome with stress. But we need to make sure we're paying attention to the gut lining and really healing our gut. And I've done other episodes on this where you can take a look at gut microbiome, fermented foods, things that we need to do that help improve our immunity and reduce our risk for cancer. But here I'm not looking at somebody who has a digestive problem for one day or even a week or even a couple weeks. But it's consistently there and the pattern is unchanged. We want to get that reviewed. We want to make sure we're not having problems like our bowel habits are changing so differently, what they might call pencil-sized thin stools, these types of things, blood in our stool. So we want to pay attention to that. We might be swallowing differently or feeling like our esophagus is narrowed and it's consistent and sudden. These are the things that we want to get examined and make sure that they're not persistent and we want to resolve them because if there's something there, we can find that. And you can tell if you're not feeling yourself. And if you're not and it's a little bit persistent, then go and see the doctor, get an exam done. Number 4, weight coming off too quick. As I mentioned earlier, this is a big one because you can have, you know, unexplained weight loss is one of the most common questions you'll hear from a doctor. And it's not because you were on a diet or changing the way you ate in any way or doing changes with your dietary patterns or because you've been stressed or too busy or eating less, just unexplained weight loss. So this is something we want to look at because that's one of the things that can affect people when they have cancer is unexplained weight loss. And from there begins the testing, you know, and differential diagnosis to rule out cancer. These combinations, that is really something we need to get examined. It doesn't mean you have cancer. I don't wanna scare people, but this is the type of symptoms that we want to look at, especially if you're not dieting, taking in less calories. This moves us to number 5, pain that's quiet and persistent. It keeps showing up in the same place. This is, can be subtle. And of course people have pain all the time when they exercise or strain themselves, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about like pain that's there, been with you for a while. It's not from you slept wrong, you worked out, you had a posture problem, an old injury. Hormonal imbalance has inflammation that can be systemic. This is just pain pattern that is worst pain that you've ever had in your life. It could be extreme pain and it could be persistent pain. These are the things that we don't want to ignore. And usually this will get people to the ER, emergency room, so it's unlikely you're going to ignore it. But if you have pain that's just persistent and strong, don't ignore it. Get it checked out because that could be cancer. Sometimes it isn't. It could be muscle or some other injury, but these are things we want to take a look at, especially if it doesn't connect to a specific injury you've had and it doesn't resolve with ordinary rest, physical therapy, et cetera. So we also want to look at things like abdominal pain, pelvic pain, bone pain. See, these are the cancer type things we want to look at that are persistent. New headache patterns that don't go away with moving your shoulders or neck, pressure sensations that keep returning, discomfort. These are the types of things that we want to pay attention to. So don't ignore that pain that keeps showing up in the same place and it becomes very persistent or very very painful, get it seen. Because you don't want to say, gee, I have pain, it's going to go away. And sometimes it does, but if it's persistent, get it checked out. That's one of the things you can do to help early detection, at least in the symptom side. So like I've said before, I love people doing blood tests to screen for cancer, but these are the symptoms that people can pay attention to. Number 6, bleeding that doesn't have a reason. This could be one of the clearest in the list, like blood in the stool, in the urine, between the cycles, menopausal, or coughing up blood, blood on the nipples or on a mole of the skin of a lesion. These are the things you definitely want to check out. It doesn't automatically mean you have cancer, but you want to look into these because you don't want to postpone bleeding. Bleeding could be definitely something you want to look at. People might think, gee, it's a UTI or hormonal changes, or they scratched a spot on the skin, or they have heavy cycling, and all that could be true, or a little irritation. But we want to check that out because uncontrolled bleeding in these areas is definitely something that we can rule out. And you don't have to be scared because most of the time it may be nothing. But if we find something early, again, early detection oftentimes can be curative if we remove it. Let's move on to number 7. This is a little more battle. Changes in appetite. People can have a change in appetite where they don't want to eat as much, and that could be from grief and other things, and that would be explained where they just don't have a desire to eat. But sometimes the appetite goes away when people have sickness, and it could be all kinds of different sicknesses, in particular cancer. In fact, one of the symptoms we see when patients are improving under treatment before you see imaging is their appetite returns. They're getting their health back. People like to say, gee, I can't explain this, but I lost my appetite. Food doesn't sound so I fill up fast. My body feels different. My energy and appetite have changed. I'm weaker and I don't want to eat as much. See, these are those telltale signs. They're vague, but if you pay attention to them, they're telling you something. You want to get a doctor to take a look at these things, check it off, make sure it's not a problem. And there's so many tools today. We can get full body MRIs now that can spot cancers, or at least give us the beginning of imaging that later we can biopsy. Or like I like to do these blood tests that can look for many different cancer types. And if that signal is there, then do the imaging and then the biopsy, and you can find things so early, especially with today's technology. So these are symptoms that some of you might say, gee, I'm watching this. This is hopefully encouraging you to get screened. I just want you to know that this is a point of awareness. This is a point where you're paying attention to patterns in your body and you're helping identify those things that might be there quietly, but you need to get your health up. And even if they're not related to cancer, you want to improve these symptoms because they could be related to other issues where you want to restore your vitality, your health, your energy. And so if you pick up these signals, you know, praise God, maybe they're not cancer in any way. We want be able to return these so you can get back to your health. So don't be scared, don't be fearful, don't put your head in the sand. Pay attention to your body, it's speaking a language to you and it'll help you. Don't get trapped in this ignoring, don't get trapped. Yeah, I don't want to go see a doctor and be paranoid, because if you're working with the right doctors in precision medicine, you can spot these things early. And oftentimes, if there's something there, it can be removed very quickly. So the right move is to be calm, get the right testing like I've mentioned, and pay attention to your body. If you do those things, you'll get the best prevention possible from the perspective of early detection. If you're hearing about signs where people are missing things in cancer, yes, it happens. I've seen this over 2 and a half decades with our team. But the key is for people to pay attention to their body and work on early screening and good preventative measures to keep your health. That's the bigger lesson here. That's really what we're talking about is finding the patterns in our body and helping them actually improve so we're healthier. And at the same time, pay attention to the symptoms that are occurring. I hope you found this helpful, and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.