Question 1 Julie is a 42-year-old white woman who eats a typical American diet of cheeseburgers and other high-fat foods

Question 1: Describe the stages of illness, and analyze which aspects of this scenario correspond to these stages. Defend your answer using details presented in the case scenario along with evidence from your textbook. 

Following a diagnosis made by needle biopsy, a procedure that utilizes a thin, hollow needle and a syringe in cell extraction, fluids and tissues from a suspicious lump for examination in a laboratory to determine the cause of the lump (Shen, 2017), evidently shows that Julie was diagnosed with a first stage of breast cancer. The first treatment option normally advised to breast cancer patients which in this case, Julie took it as an option for her first fight against breast cancer is lumpectomy. Lumpectomy is the removal of cancerous or noncancerous lumps on a human breast. Despite it being used by doctors to treat small and first stages of breast cancer in women, it is a major surgery with significant risks and it is mainly opted for patients who have tried other treatments options with lesser risks and it proved not to be effective. The effectiveness of lumpectomy is followed by a chemotherapy course where Julie is now half way through it. The chemotherapy is a follow up radiation treatment to kill cancerous cells and to reduce the chances of cancer returning although its side effect of nausea proves to be giving Julie a hard time to cope with it (Okada & Fujisawa, 2019).

Question 2: Evaluate whether this patient can best be said to be using traditional medicine or alternative medicine. Defend your answer using details presented in the case scenario along with evidence from your textbook.

Julie being a typical American with her typical response on her health issue, it is evident that she is using traditional medicine or other alternative medications. On this scenario, she has felt pain on her breast for three months and instead of seeking an examination from a doctor she keeps ignoring it since to her it did not seem to be an emergency according to her. She is a typical indoor person who only goes to her work place and comes back to her house and does not engage in doing exercises to keep her body healthy. Her diet of cheese-burgers and high-fat foods which according to the U.S department of health and human services, typical American diet consists of fast foods such as the cheese-burgers (Al-Lahou, 2020) that Julie likes, and are high on calories and fats. Julie performs a self-breast examination and she feels a lump on her breast and instead of seeking a doctor’s advice, she decides to call her friends that had a cancer panic before her for advice on the lump she had found out about on her breast. Its proof enough that Julie seeks traditional treatment as she sought opinions from friends who are not professionals.