Opinion
By Panagiotis Kaparis
“Grand, empty words…” cry out the “witnesses” of harsh cancer, along with all their relatives, whenever they hear talk about cancer prevention. At those infamous, “sinful” gala dinners, dignitaries and others loudly proclaim that prevention is the primary goal, yet no one explains how such prevention can actually be achieved. They list a long series of prohibitions, forgetting that a person wants first to live and only then to die.
Every doctor, from first to last, begins by advising patients to get rid of stress, as if the suffering and worn down have a switch they can flip to make stress disappear. Then come the “orders”: stop smoking, stop drinking, restrict countless foods, exercise by force, along with many other commands. Some doctors, while giving these orders, smell of cigarettes themselves and are hardly examples of restraint in their own bodies.
The most “cunning” part is the attempt to shift responsibility and burden patients with guilt: “I’m telling you what to do, now do as you like. If you don’t follow it, you’ll die.” They forget that “fear breeds hell,” and life experience shows that prohibitions and fear tactics bring only temporary results, from Prohibition to threats of visible and invisible enemies.
“Wherever I travel, Greece (Cyprus) wounds me…,” we might say, paraphrasing the Nobel laureate poet Giorgos Seferis. Experts say that around a thousand people in Cyprus die each year because of air quality. Put simply, when you drive, you produce dangerous exhaust fumes that people breathe in. These fumes accumulate in the lungs and often turn into cancer.
The irony is that most emissions are produced when cars start up. In other words, stop and go driving increases not only fuel consumption but also emissions. For this reason, Germany adopted legislation decades ago requiring drivers to turn off their engines while waiting at traffic lights. Later, technology followed, and cars now shut off automatically when idle. In large, well organized cities around the world, most roads are one way to reduce accidents. Traffic lights are removed wherever possible to ease the burden on drivers and reduce pollution. The best example is Athens, where the metro and new roads without traffic lights helped clear the smog and reveal the “magical” blue sky of Attica.
It would be good if, at those “sinful” gala dinners, alongside grand declarations about cancer prevention, some more grounded truths were included about reducing stress and simplifying life. Traffic chaos quite literally kills, both psychologically and physically. Unnecessary bureaucracy is just as exhausting, even in an age when we claim to have artificial intelligence. Papers upon papers are required just to prove the obvious. As a result, many people do not even dare to apply for state support.
The most tragic example is the real applicants for the Minimum Guaranteed Income, who beg relatives and friends to help them complete the mountain of paperwork. Many small businesses also avoid public tenders out of fear of bureaucracy, leaving the field to large players. The simple logic you hear in coffeehouses insists that all this exists to discourage citizens from applying and to keep the “chair bound mandarins” undisturbed.
Beyond all this, there is also the saying of Saint Porphyrios, which captures many truths about cancer:
“I too have studied cancer and found several elements. Cancer mainly appears in troubled souls, in anxious people, in those worn down by life events, in the repressed. When something happens to you and they tell you it is cancer, you must give yourself over to the love of God. Calm down, become still, love the world, love everything. Be filled with love and praise for God so that your soul may be sanctified. And when your soul is sanctified, when you cling to God and find peace, the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems and all the body’s systems will calm, and then the cancer, if not cured, will at least remain where it is…”
