Carcinogens that don’t create cancer cells but rouse them

Wow. That's great to hear. 25 years ago I was in the midst of losing a close family member to multiple myeloma. I'm glad that the prognosis has improved so much since then.

Outside of the CNS (which does its own special things with dopamine), dopaminergic compounds generally just increase cellular metabolic rate — which basically translates to any given cell (that has a dopamine receptor) doing "its job" faster: consuming resources and producing waste faster, and thereby doing more of whatever chemistry those resources are consumed to drive. (If you think of a cell as a control system seeking equilibrium, dopaminergic-receptor activation forces the cell to take in, through endocytosis, more input chemicals to some of its key internal reactions than it's "ready" for, throwing it out of equilibrium — so it then tries to quickly react those chemicals away to get back to equilibrium.)

IIRC, independent of CNS signalling, liver cells exposed to dopaminergic compounds produce more bile per second; muscle cells gain more contractile tone (which is why digestive peristalsis speeds up, and also why you might start stressing your jaw muscles); and a number of other things.

Replication (i.e. cellular division) isn't the inherent "job" of any single cell within a multicellular organism. Cells do divide, but they don't inherently divide — they do it in response to specific chemical messengers from the greater organism letting them know that it is in need of more of that kind of cell within the tissue that cell is located in. (Cells not waiting for these signals to divide, is in part what cancer is!) So I wouldn't think that there's any (diploid) cell in a multicellular organism that reproduces more when prodded with stimulants. Haploid cells (gametes), maybe — but even those only divide on command, IIRC.

Bacteria, on the other hand, aren't just cells, they're single-celled organisms — where they use their metabolism not to passively obey orders "from on high", but to actively attempt to grow and distribute their genetic material. So it would be intuitive to me if making them metabolize faster, made them do organism-level things like reproduction faster. But I don't know for sure.

I do know, though, that most parasites, e.g. tapeworms, are complex enough that they respond to dopamine pretty much exactly the same way humans do: dopamine triggers CNS signalling within them, which increases their level of behavioral arousal, which in turn motivates them to use more of their organism-level resource stores over the short term in seeking to eat, seeking to reproduce, and in doing anything else they care about doing.

I recently had a very strong course of antibiotics for a resistant infection. Completely destroyed my gut flora. Had two weeks of terrible, Chron's-like digestive issues afterward, before things settled down. Whatever grew back is very likely brand-new colonization, not regrowth.

Before I got sick, if I didn't have at least a certain amount of sugar per day, I'd start to feel inflamed all over my body—especially in my face and my joints. I drank a lot of soda throughout the day; ate chocolate to "feel better" each night before bed; etc. Any time I was travelling away from access to these foods, and so eating "better", I felt worse.

After getting sick + taking the antibiotics + re-seeding my gut, the "demand" my body had for sugar seems to have completely evaporated. Coke/Pepsi, which just tasted "good" to me before, now tastes horribly saccharine-sweet, to the point that I can barely stand it. Less-sweet stuff still tastes fine — sugar isn't inherently gross to me now, it's just suddenly gross in large amounts. And so I find myself consuming a lot less sugar now, to seemingly absolutely no ill effect.

I considered, but left out Cyclosporine, Tacrolimus, Mycophenolate Mofetil, and glucocorticoids as examples of medications that potentially increase cancer risk due to immunological effects. I was thinking more along the lines of chemicals with unknown immunotoxic effects ex: environmental exposure, but medications are still a good category to identify.

> In the United States, about 10% to 20% of lung cancers, or 20,000 to 40,000 lung cancers each year, happen in people who never smoked or smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime

Straight from the CDC.