When Serge Benhayon predicted a rise in breast cancer in 2000, was he stating the obvious or was he suggesting something more subtle?
I remember that at the time, predicting an increase in cancer would have been easy: the population was and is ageing and people contract many more cancers as they get older.
If, however, you had predicted that the chance of individual women getting cancer during their lifetime would rise, then you would have been very brave indeed. This would have represented a rise in the rate of cancer, when medical science was spending billions every year to find a cure or a prevention for cancer. Predicting that the efforts to prevent the incidence of cancer increasing, would have been worse than useless; in fact would have been quite brave.
For the years immediately following, you would have also been wrong, as this excellent science article shows. The evidence for this is that from 1992 to 2001 more and more menopausal women took hormone replacement therapies (HRTs) which were then discovered to cause breast cancer. As a result usage of HRTs plummeted and one big reason for breast cancers was eliminated (Million Women Study Collaborators, 2003).
In other words, medical science found that one big cause of breast cancer was … medical science! Eliminating that cause decreased the rate of breast cancer.
By 2016, however, a number of longitudinal studies on women had been running for a long time and these showed that alcohol, obesity and lack of exercise are all instrumental in causing breast cancer. As women get older, they get better at reducing their alcohol consumption, but until their late 60’s, they keep putting on weight and they are much more sedentary.
Hence we know now, that the rate of breast cancer, that is the statistical probability of a woman contracting breast cancer in her lifetime, is actually increasing. This increased incidence is on top of an already very large increase in the number of cases of breast cancer, driven by the ageing of the population.
The chance of a woman getting breast cancer in her life has risen from one in nine to one in eight – that is quite a big increase! Science doesn’t know why women put on more weight and move less – science knows only that they appear together (De Cocker et al., 2010). In hindsight it is quite plausible that a lack of self-care or nurturing leads women to have lifestyles that increase the rate of breast cancer.
To have said that in 2000, however, would have been quite a different matter. To repeat it in 2002, with women abandoning HRT in droves, would have sounded foolish, but as it turns out, Serge Benhayon, who did exactly that – predict a rise in the rate of breast cancer – was right.
DE COCKER, K. A., VAN UFFELEN, J. G. & BROWN, W. J. 2010. Associations between sitting time and weight in young adult Australian women. Preventive medicine, 51, 361-367.
MILLION WOMEN STUDY COLLABORATORS 2003. Breast cancer and hormone-replacement therapy in the Million Women Study. The Lancet, 362, 419-427.
