A new Johns Hopkins study finds “luck” as a major cause of cancer.

This is a great example of how medical research turns social conditions into inevitability and writes ideology (the order of things is given and unchangeable) as if it were science.

While there is talk of personal responsibility as a possible cause for cancer (“behaviours”), there is no talk of social responsibility (which might have something to do with changes in the environment over the last few generations). The only known cause of thyroid cancer is radiation. Other cancers are well known to be environmentally caused. So if, as the article says, we know cancer is caused by a combination of “luck, environment and heredity,” and the luck is more important than we thought (duh), then the logical conclusion is that if we are concerned about the spread of cancer, we ought to be thinking about the environment.

Sure, I’m all for fatalism as an explanation for why I have cancer and the person who experienced the same conditions doesn’t. But since we know certain cancers –including mine–are greatly increasing in the population overall (at least in the US and Canada, I don’t know worldwide statistics), we might actually want to go looking for explanations and solutions.