Turning the Tide Lifestyle Medicine and Breast Cancer (Part 6) – South Coast Herald

Dr David Glass - MBChB, FCOG (SA)

Today we celebrate our 100th blog on the subject of lifestyle medicine making wise choices in the area of diet, exercise, rest, sunlight, fresh air, water, relationships and spiritual connection. This is one area of medicine that seems to permeate all others. It is becoming increasingly important as diseases of poor lifestyle choices affect more and more people around the world resulting in rising incidences of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, auto-immune diseases, cancer and dementia.

ALSO READ : Turning the Tide Lifestyle Medicine and Covid 19

Of course our minds are daily preoccupied with Covid-19, and so should they be. We are facing one of the most devastating challenges to health care and the economy the world has seen this century. Two weeks ago I presented a lifestyle approach to this pandemic, because we know that the virus is particularly aggressive in people who suffer chronic lifestyle diseases.

Today we will get back to our topic for this series breast cancer. Unfortunately Covid-19 doesnt make all the other diseases, to which we are so prone, go away. As mentioned before, this series is based on Dr Kristi Funks book Breasts: The owners manual. This week we will be looking at uncontrollable risk factors.

Next week we will briefly look at some of the interventions on offer in terms of treatment and screening to complete the series on breast cancer.

Stay safe, isolated as much as possible in your home. May you use this time for building family relationships and getting life priorities right. It is good to have some forced time for reflection when we are faced with the prospect of our own mortality or that of our friends and family.

Dave Glass

Dr David Glass MBChB, FCOG (SA)

Dr David Glass graduated from UCT in 1975. He spent the next 12 years working at a mission hospital in Lesotho, where much of his work involved health education and interventions to improve health, aside from the normal busy clinical work of an under-resourced mission hospital.

He returned to UCT in 1990 to specialise in obstetrics/gynaecology and then moved to the South Coast where he had the privilege of, amongst other things, ushering 7000 babies into the world. He no longer delivers babies but is still very clinically active in gynaecology.

An old passion, preventive health care, has now replaced the obstetrics side of his work. He is eager to share insights he has gathered over the years on how to prevent and reverse so many of the modern scourges of lifestyle obesity, diabetes, ischaemic heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis, common cancers, etc.

He is a family man, with a supportive wife, and two grown children, and four beautiful grandchildren. His hobbies include walking, cycling, vegetable gardening, bird-watching, travelling and writing. He is active in community health outreach and deeply involved in church activities. He enjoys teaching and sharing information.

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Turning the Tide Lifestyle Medicine and Breast Cancer (Part 6) - South Coast Herald