How Do People Get Cancer?

Series Summary

Cancer is a class of diseases in which a group of cells is somehow altered so that the cells rapidly divide and invade organs in the body. Nearly all cancers are caused by abnormalities in the genetic material of the transformed cells due to carcinogens, such as tobacco smoke, chemicals or infectious agents. Cancer can affect almost all parts of the body, including the skin, brain, lungs, breasts, prostate, liver and blood. In this free video series on cancer, a doctor explains how cancer develops and is spread throughout the body. Get information on what can cause different types of cancer, including skin cancer, lung cancer and colon cancer. Learn how cancer moves throughout the body, leaches nutrients from organs and causes death. Find out how to help prevent cancer and how to treat different cancers. Cancer can be a scary diagnosis, but with the right information, many fears can be calmed.

Video Transcript

"Hello I'm Dr. David Cathcart and I work for Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, Missouri and today we are going to talk a little bit about cancer, what it is and how people get it. Cancer is formed when something in the nucleus of the cell goes haywire and reprograms the cell to divide rapidly at an abnormal rate. What that does is it causes this uncontrollable growth of cells in a particular area that by sheer size of the growth of that can put pressure or adjacent organs or other systems or even some of those cells can break off and move to other areas and that is the damaging effects of cancer and so essentially cancer is an error in the genetic makeup of a cell, either by some external cause, even perhaps some programming gone haywire inside the cell itself. Most of the time these cells because this happens all the time every day in our bodies, most of the time these cells can fix that. Our immune cells will recognize that and fix that and in some cases it can't and when it goes on to divide at a rapid rate then that is when we call it cancer. So I'm Dr. David Cathcart and thanks for joining me a little bit while we talk about cancer."