Video: Cancer Signs

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The signs of cancer can vary from being obvious signs on the body to subtle symptoms that feel similar to everyday illnesses. Find ways to identify cancer in the body with medical information from a practicing oncologist in this free video on cancer prevention.

Video Transcript

Hi. I'm Dr. Kenneth Fink. I'm a medical oncologist at Zimmer Cancer Center at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, North Carolina. Signs and symptoms of cancer are very important. Quite often people are quite fearful because there's sort of perhaps some knowledge that cancer may not have any symptoms or signs. Unfortunately there's some truth to that. But quite often people can, if they're a bit sharper in thinking about it, can actually do a lot for themselves to think about the signs of cancer and get medical attention if they occur. Some of the things that are pretty obvious to us are we can look at ourselves and look at our skin and we may see a dark bump or something along those lines on the skin. Certainly a dark pigmented spot on your skin is something you want to be looking for yourself. And if you see something like that you want to get that, get some attention to that. If you see something like that, that you're not too worried about but you just kind of remember that and keep an eye on it, that's another good idea. So looking at yourself is any important part of it. If you feel something going on, a lump or a bump perhaps in your lymph nodes. Lymph nodes of the neck or the lymph nodes under the armpits, this is another place that often a doctor might say "well I feel a lump or a bump there in your lymph nodes up in your neck or under the armpits." This is another sign that there might be cancer. If that's going on that's a sign that cancer may have spread already into the lymph nodes and attention needs to be given to that right away. Unfortunately people come in with more advanced signs of cancer. So a person may come in with some pain. Perhaps pain in their stomach or pain in the abdomen or pain in the bone. This could be a very troublesome problem. Of course those kinds of symptoms occur with benign diseases as well so folks are often kind of confused. But if a pain is different, if it's changing, if it's just not going away say after several weeks, this is a time that people need to come in a get checked. For abdominal pain this is a real common problem because folks can have that just from eating some kind of bad food or having a gastroenteritis. But again if that kind of symptom persists and goes on for a week or two and other symptoms are persisting, lets say diarrhea or nausea or some weight loss, again, all of those are signs of cancer and need to be checked into. So keeping a good eye on yourself and getting your symptoms checked out if they're persisting for more than a couple of weeks is the primary way to think about the signs of cancer.

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Cancer Signs

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