Anger, Depression Management Causing Breast Cancer?

— -- Question: Could the way I handle anger and depression have caused my breast cancer?

Answer: Most of these articles simplify a very, very complex biological, emotional relationship. And by doing so, they run the risk of causing women to fear, in some that they are to blame for their illness.

I think that this is an important thing to pay attention to. We do not have good evidence or very little evidence, for that matter, that women can't, in some sense through their emotional status, affect their risk of the onset of breast cancer.

The field of psycho-immunology is investigating the complex relationships between emotions and immunological status. But at this point, we can make no clear conclusions about those relationships in terms of cancer onset.

So, a woman needs to be careful that they don't begin to, in some sense, attribute blame to themselves for their disease in a way that is not supported at this point by the scientific literature.

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