I've wanted to be a doctor since I was seven years old. It's really all I ever wanted to do.

I had this idea of

helping and I got the idea of curing. Helping by curing and it propelled me through school, through
college, into medical school where I was then confronted with a question. what kind of doctor should I
be I could have gone for the sexy kind of ophthalmologist, dermatologist ,plastic surgeon, fixed a lot of
problems that way but I came across cancer care and I immediately knew that I wanted to be an
oncologist. I wanted to cure disease and I wanted to cure a difficult disease. I wanted a challenge and I
really wanted to help people more than anything. let me fast forward a little bit. I think that caring
cancer treating cancer and helping people live with cancer is an invaluable asset .it's something that we
need more of today but I think I might have been misguided. I think there's something more important
than curing cancer and that's preventing cancer. how about preventing disease where did all of us go
wrong in medical school with the idea that we had to fix the problems and not really get enough
attention on how to prevent them in the first place. when I look back I don't think I was really taught any
serious prevention. I was taught well you should move your body, you should eat less, good advice but
there's no real course in prevention and if you look at doctors today we don't get paid for prevention,
you can't go in and use a code for prevention except for children. for adults a preventative check up is a
diminishing item. so now how do we prevent cancer and why is it so important. let me give you a story
about some of my patients. I take care of a lot of women with breast cancer and you might know it but
breast cancer is really curable. of course the word cancer strikes fear in your heart right away but ninety
eight point six percent of women who get diagnosed with stage 1 or stage 2 breast cancer are going to
be cured. yeah now a couple of things about that it will be inconvenient, it will be uncomfortable the
surgery ,the key mode the radiation, and you know what else it's going to be expensive but you'll be
cured that's a good thing right but here's the worst part here's the rub. my patients who are cured are
never totally comfortable in their body anymore, they don't trust themselves, they're insecure with
respect to their own bodies, they don't know if low back pain is from too much exercise or is it cancer
coming back, they don't know if a cough is just a cough is it my cancer coming back. that insecurity is a
huge driver for me and my own patients to do more in prevention. I was at the annual oncology
meetings, a huge assembly of cancer specialists in Chicago. happens every year about five years ago I
was there and I had these ideas of prevention in my head and I recall I was walking to a prevention
conference and if you've ever been there it's this huge conference halls connected by link ways and I
was going across the link way to a world health meeting on global cancer prevention and non
communicable diseases and literally every single other person was going the opposite way. I have never
felt like I was swimming upstream so viscerally and I'm also confident that everyone who is going the
other direction was going to the exhibition hall, we're going to a meeting to hear about an important
and statistically significant advance in metastatic disease. I really don't make light of this adding a few
more months and significant cost is still important because of the trickle-down effect but it's a huge
amount of money where I was headed was to learn about tobacco and obesity and diabetes and
sedentary lifestyles and how those lifestyle factors affect our risk of not just cancer but heart attack
stroke and Alzheimer's.