Introduction: Cancer belongs to chronic diseases that are the most expensive in terms of treatment and impact negatively on patients’ everyday life.
Cancer’s medical treatment goes from the prevention to the follow up and a gap in the process of its health care can aggravate the patient’s health and impact negatively on their life.
About 20 million people in the world suffered from cancer in 2021 and 10 million died of it. The WHO declared even if all the kinds of cancer can be treated and some recovered there are many of them that can be averted.
Methodology: Results of this article came from a documentation based study.
Results
- Changes of daily behaviors are related to cancer’s occurrence risk. 40% of most of them are due to alcohol, feeding imbalance, overweight and obesity.
- Territorial inequalities in the metropolis and between it and overseas departments and social inequalities too concerning prevention, screening access and diagnosis delay increase cancer’s damage.
Most people are aware of these factors involvement in cancer’s occurrence risk but they still risk their lives in exposing themselves to the risk factors. The problem could be at the health professionals’ level because up to now there is no concrete evidence that links alcohol for example to cancer occurrence. In my opinion, in the future there’s need to strengthen sensitization on cancer’s occurrence risk awareness linked to some daily habits like alcohol, feeding imbalance or being overweight. We should work on getting evidences so that the community could be more aware and to identify components that make e.g. alcohol carcinogens and to work on solutions to address to the community because there are some daily’s community behaviors that can’t completely be banished but we can show them what is wrong with some behavioral patterns and propose changes to ensure they are no longer dangerous.
Cancer affects rich and poor people. So, if we facilitate its health care to rich people only this will no longer be public health promotion but a business. There should be equality of health care for everyone despite their socio economic levels. To prevent this inequality due to the difference of socio economic levels of people and as cancer’s treatment is so expensive, we should educate the population on good habits to observe because this doesn’t require money and so we will prevent them from reaching the stage of medical treatment by succeeding the in the stage of prevention. At this level we could only use all the tools we have from our scientific background to reach everyone we could in order to succeed at the sensitization campaign.
Conclusion: Most of the gaps that can occur in cancer’s health care are related to carelessness of patients or people’s complaints and daily’s behaviors in prevention, diagnosis, seeking medical treatment and follow up.
References
Philippe pépin, .Epidémiologie des cancers en Ile-de-France, juin 2006.
OMS, Rapport 2022
Article written by: Jonathan METRE, Benjamin KASOMO, and Mathilde MUHASA. Jonathan METRE is a pharmacist graduated from University of Bukavu in Clinical and Community Pharmacy. Highly motivated volunteer with agencies in public health. Researcher in Psychopharmacology, Toxicology, Pharmacotherapy, and Pharmacokinetics. He is the former focal point of DRC Pharmaceutical Students’ Association. Public relationships officer of DRC Pharmaceutical Students’ Association.