DNA Testing and You

DNA Testing and You.

Recently, the NY Times published a fascinating article about a healthy 28 year old woman who, like most of us, was concerned with her health because her family had members had had heart disease, arthritis, cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease. Being intelligent, she opted to send one saliva sample to each of three independent accredited medical laboratories.

After spending hundreds of dollars and waiting two months, her results came back. As you might imagine, they were totally different from one another in predicting her disease predisposition. So what’s new?

Forgive me, but I am still lost as to what my father’s diseases have to do with me. Dad was a wonderful man, but his adult lifestyle and mine are 180 degrees different. I know that I look and sound more like my dad everyday as I age, but at my age, dad had lost a leg to cancer, was wearing a pacemaker, had prostate disease and was taking medications. My physical features, not my physiology is most likely determined by dads DNA.

Yet, I see crazy money being raised by well meaning lay groups, which truly trust that magic pharmaceutical pills will be developed that will alter a sick persons DNA quickly and cure his/her cancer. The truth be known, I find that cancer tumor markers are synonymous with fungus markers. I know that the PSA test is a test for fungus, not cancer. I learn that diabetes, a supposedly genetic disease, can be induced in laboratory animals by injecting them with fungal mycotoxins! I’m so lost! The article did raise my eyebrows however, when it stated; “But the major issue, experts say, is that the causes of most common diseases remain unknown. Genes account for just 5 to 20 percent of the whole picture.”

And the cause will forever remain unknown until they study fungus. But with medicine controlling 1/6 of America’s economy and yet by their own admission, they do not know the cause of diseases, ignorance is huge money. Why change? Will we continue spending billions of dollars researching DNA?

Of course we will! This is just my take, but I believe that our doctors and researchers trust that DNA is a mysterious and seemingly solid science; throwing money at it creates the illusion that something is being done to curb our ever-increasing American disease rates. As this young woman will soon learn, she looks more and more like her mother with each passing year, but what her mother eventually dies of will have little to do her own DNA.