How Our Heroes Can Help Fight Cancer

Everyone has a hero today, most who do are children, but adults belong in that group too. The hero is generally someone so famous he is known all over the world, or may be a family member of close friend. It is a normal practice to respect someone and wish to emulate that person.

Looking up to a hero is a characteristic that many children learn from their parents. There is nothing wrong with that. When we have someone to respect and want to be like, it gives us the nudge to improve ourselves. If our hero can be that cool, maybe we can too if we only work at it.

The usual hero material is a well-known celebrity, which should come as no surprise. When looking from the outside in, that celebrity has it all - the ginormous annual income, the yacht, the house in Bel Air and people to take care of it all. To those of us non-celebs, this sounds like heaven.

Tabloids and magazines publish so many articles and pictures about celebrities, because to most of us, they are fascinating and we love seeing what their lives are like. Being able to go anywhere you want and do anything you want is a luxury that many of us find absolutely intriguing. And yes, it's true too that we sometimes love the drama in celebrities' lives and that it feeds our need for gossip.

Celebrities are everywhere we go whether watching television or reading publications, yet very few of us have actually met any of them. It is rare for people today to idolize someone they have actually met.

So why would you look up to someone you have never met? I think the people who could best answer that would be the people treated at Cancer Treatment Centers of America or the children who are patients at St. Jude Children's Hospital. For someone living with cancer the people they often look up to the most are the researchers and scientists fighting to find a cure for cancer.

Thousands of people every day are diagnosed with cancer, many of them children. Those who have not been one of cancer's victims will never know how devastating the diagnosis of the disease can be. We don't have to be stricken with the disease to understand the excruciating pain it brings to its sufferers and that we don't want any part of it ourselves. Scientists have been working for decades to find a cure for cancer and have made much headway toward that goal.

Fifty years ago, being diagnosed with cancer was practically a death sentence. Little was known about cancer and its various forms back then. Now, thanks to the hard work and dedication of scientists and doctors around the world, cancer victims can fight back.

These professionals have given the lives back to millions of people. For them, these hard working researchers toiling to find a cure for cancer are heroes. Next time you are in a discussion about heroes or choosing one of your own to look up to and respect, you couldn't do much better than selecting someone who has made the lives of millions so much better through their dedicated work to find a cure for cancer.