The importance of prevention

Prevention is much easier than treatment. This is even more true of cancer than of most other health problems.

Prevention happens on a day-by-day basis, on a second-by-second basis, even on a microsecond-by-microsecond basis. By applying these prevention strategies, you can help to stop each new individual cell from turning into a cancer cell or developing into a increasingly active cancer cell. All these optimizing strategies can help to rebuild your health. As such you can use them in combination with whatever therapy you choose to follow and improve your chance of recovery.

           

It has frequently been stated that approximately two-thirds or 65 percent of cancers are diet-and lifestyle-related. This is a figure that is commonly bandied about without any real evidence-based suggestion as to the cause of the other 35 percent. There are now suggestions that the figure is as high as, or possibly even higher than, 90 percent. There are also suggestions that only 10 percent or less of the incidence is genetic or viral, and that even genes can be modified by an improved lifestyle.

If diet and lifestyle play such an important role in the etiology of the disease, then you are in a very powerful position. By changing your diet and lifestyle, you have the potential to make a huge impact on your reduction of risk and the prevention of a possible cancer.

Cancer is a process

The cancer process can be a lengthy one. It can last for many years until the final point, the discovery of a tumor, is reached.

Since no one is in absolutely perfect and total health right down to the cellular level, everyone can be considered to be in Phase 1 - or, to put it another way, in the precancerous phase. It may seem strange to imply that if you do not have cancer, you are in a precancerous stage. Current figures as to the risk of developing cancer vary, depending on the source, from one in two men and one in three women, or approximately 40 percent, and up to as high as 70 percent for people born now. Taking the average, you have a fifty-fifty chance of developing cancer. These are not great odds. When deaths are aggregated by age, cancer has surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death for those younger than age eighty-five since 1999. This being so, it behooves you to do as much as you possibly can to avoid cancer and to stop yourself from becoming one of the side of overcaution than to put your head in the sand and simply hope that cancer will never happen to you.

           

You may be in reasonable health; you may even think of yourself as being totally healthy. Or you may have a variety of health problems, many or all of which may be predisposing you to developing cancer healthy cells into cancerous ones.

The evolution of health care - Part 2

When two views coincide

There is another aspect to this history, and it concerns two French-man of the nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp.

A major area of difference between the drug approach to health care and the natural remedies approach is the way these two men viewed the activities of microorganisms and their impact on health. In the middle of the nineteenth century Louis Pasteur and publicized information about the presence of bacteria and other pathogens at the site of infections. He then made the mental leap required to claim that the pathogen had caused the infection. Antoine Bechamp also French and of a similar age, observed the same phenomenon but took the reverse view. He considered it was the breakdown of the terrain, the person's weakened or previously damaged tissues, that caused the disease and that the pathogens arrived later and were opportunistic beneficiaries rather than causative agents. Bechamp stated that this explained why one person succumbed to a particular health problem while another, in the same location or situation, did not.

The two men had many debates during the course of their professional lives, but it is Pasteur who, at the end of his life, changed his mind and acknowledged, 'It's the terrain that is important.'

Unfortanately, the initial ideas of Pasteur were seized upon by the many drug companies of the day, and this continues to the present. It is easy to focus on finding drugs that are patentable and profitable and that will kill specific bugs or bacteria. Whether or not that ensures long-term health is debatable. On the other hand, it is impossible to make and patent profitable ways of improveng the individual's terrain, for this depends on good diet, a healthy lifestyle, and, if necessary, the use of nutrients, herbs, and specific phytonutrient-rich foods, none of which can be patented. Thus the ideas of Bechamp were largely ignored, even though, in the end, Pasteur came around to them and embraced them.

Your health is linked to your terrain

CAM therapists follow the hypothesis put forward by Bechamp and whatever your health problem, they work to improve the terrain; your body. This is why CAM therapists work the whole body rather than focusing on a specific symptom or target tissue. It is also one of the reasons why CAM therapists put so much emphasis on diet, digestion, the avoidance of nutrient deficiencies, and the removal of toxins - factors that are enormously important if you are to recover from cancer.

The evolution of health care - Part 1

It is interesting to consider a very brief and simplified overview of the way health care has evolved through the millennia. In ancient times it was the wise men of the tribe, the witch doctors, who provided the ancient wisdoms and had the most dramatic effects on the health of the tribe. They healed the body and the spirit, often in dramatic ways. However, it was the women, working away quietly in the background, who came to understand the benefits of different foods, herbs, and other plant and animal substances, as well as remedies in the treatment of day-to-day health problems. Over the centuries the witch doctors evolved and subdivided into the church leaders on the one hand and the medical or drug doctors on the other, the latter being deemed, rightly or wrongly, to involve technical, scientific, and appropriate activities for men and to be worthy of respect. The women's role with nutrition and herbs evolved into nutrition and domestic science on the one hand, and health care using natural remedies on the other; both were considered 'soft' subjects, suitable, in a politically incorrect age of macho superiority, for women. This in part explains the placing of drug medicine in the universities and the CAM therapies on the outer edge in collages that are only gradually becoming recognized within the educational system.

The evolution of health care - Part 2

An alternative approach

                     

Cancer is the greatest health fear in the minds of most people. It may even be more feared than hearth disease, terrorism or senility. It is so feared that, all too often, people are unwilling to test for any early warnings signs - the vital signs we will be talking about here - assuming that if positive signs suggestive of cancer are found, they will be subjected to be a barrage of unpleasant medical procedures with little hope of a successful outcome. You will learn that there is much that you can do to avoid cancer and, if the early warning signs are there, there is a great deal you can do to help reverse the process before a tumor forms.

Do you have cancer? Have you had cancer? 

If so, you are not alone. According to Cancer Research UK, there are approximately 289.000 new cases of cancer diagnosed with cancer every two minutes, day and night, 365 days a year. The statistics vary with the source, but you have a greater than 35 percent chance of developing cancer at some time in your life, and the risk is rising. The incidence of cancer has increased by 25 percent since 1975. About 75 percent of cases occur in people aged sixty and over. Around 1 percent of cancers occur in children, teenagers and young adults. However, children who survive cancer have a greater risk of another cancer later in life than do children who have not had cancer. The most common forms of cancer are breast, lung, bowel and prostate and these together account for over half of all new cancers each year.

According to US figures made available in 2007, cancer now happens to approximately 50 percent of men and approximately 35 percent of women. In a June 2009 statement, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in US forecast that, on present indications, the number of new cancer cases diagnosed each year in the US will increase by 45 percent over the next twenty years. Even more alarmingly, they anticipate that there will be significant increases in high-morality cancers such as those of the liver, pancreas and stomach.

Cancer is one of the most preventable diseases. Remember, given that the majority of cancers are caused by faulty diet and lifestyle, and environment al factors, this prevention is largely within your own control. You may not be able to change everything about your environment, but you can do a great deal, and you can certainly improve your diet and change many harmful aspects of your lifestyle. Thus you can improve your overall health and increase your ability to protect yourself from much of what you cannot change.

There are many strategies you can use to reserve both phases of the cancer process, and the sooner you start adopting these strategies , the healthier yo can be, and the greater your chance of avoiding cancer, recovering from it or preventing a recurrence.

How Modern Medicine Contrasts with Naturopathy

Modern medicine, the MDS approach, offers little in the way of prevention. Although it has had some notable successes with some of the blood cancers, it has achieved relatively little in the treatment of solid-tumor cancers, when the hype and smudging of statistics is set aside.

Some sobering figures come from a recently published book. the cost of cancer drugs, worldwide, is 40 billion dollars per year, second only to medications for heart problems, but rising at double the annual growth rate. This is despite the fact that 'in most (nonblood cancers) chemotherapy is remarkably ineffective.'

A study of American and Australian data has shown that the survival rate is 63 percent, but that chemotherapy contributes only 2 percent to this. It showed zero effect on multiple myeloma, softtissue sarcomas, melanoma of the skin, and cancers of the bladder, kidney, pancreas, prostate, and uterus.

Two examples are given; lung cancer kills 150.000 Americans a year and costs 40.000 dollars per person, and treatment extends a person's life on average by two months (plus the cost of the side effects, which can be brutal). For metastatic breast cancer the figure was 360.000 dollars per person.

the economics are disturbing on another front. The authors state that oncologists are among the highest-paid doctors; their salaries are increasing faster than those of any other specialists, and more than 50 percent of their income comes from selling cancer drugs. Yet, 'the age-adjusted mortality rate for cancer is essentially unchanged over the past half-century.' This is in spite of the huge increase in funding and research during that same time.

In another report chemotherapy has been shown to increase the five-year survival rate by only 2.3 percent (Australian figures) or 2.1 percent (U.S. figures)

In contrast to the CAM approach, the MDS system;

• First, does do harm - there is no medical drug that does not have some harmful side, or toxic effect.
• Largely ignores nutrition and the possibility of nutrient deficiencies, even though that is the fuel on which the body runs
• Almost never incur ports any detox strategy in its treatment programs, and often incurases the body's toxic load, even though many of these toxins are carcinogens.
• Focuses on the symptom, not the whole body; hence we have specialists who focus only on the digestive tract, the heart, the kidneys, and so on.
• Frequently suppresses symptoms without correcting the underlying cause. Examples include the use of drugs to lower blood pressure, block pain, block inflammation, or suppress a temperature without correcting the cause. In fact a temperature is an essential part of boosting the immune system so that it can deal with the problem.

What is CAM approach?

In the CAM approach, cancer is recognized as being a systemic problem that affects the whole body. CAM therapists are used to taking this view. They are familiar with working with the whole person, not just the organ or system  that is faulty. Therefore, the help they offer someone with cancer will be systemic rather than aimed specifically at the tumor. 

What is MDS approach?

In the MDS approach, cancer is identified by the presence of a tumor, as in the case of blood cancers or early cervical cancer, by the presence of transformed, altered, or faulty cells. It is a localized problem, residing in the tissue in which the tumor or altered cells are found. In this approach the treatment is aimed almost totally at eradicating these cells or destroying the tumor. Once the tumor has been removed, or if it is thought that all the cells have been destroyed, or if the surgeon 'got it all' the problem is deemed largely to have been solved. Little thought is given to the reasons why it started and, therefore, to how a recurrence can be prevented.

Cancer is unique among health problems

In heart disease it is your heart and arteries that are unhealthy and need to be treated; their structure and function need to be corrected. In asthma it is your lungs and bronchial tubes that are unhealthy and need to be treated. In diabetes it is the management of your blood glucose level that is faulty and your cellular response to insulin's to be corrected. In indigestion the function of your digestive system needs to be corrected.

But cancer is different. It is not a disease of a single organ or system. You do not have prostate cancer because your prostate is not doing its job properly or breast cancer because your breasts are not fulfilling their function. In cancer you do not have a disease of an organ or system, you have disease in organ or system.

It is very important to understand this when it comes to both prevention and recovery. You can prevent heart problems by appropriate dietary modifications that benefit your heart and arteries. You can prevent asthma by avoiding allergens and supplying the nutrients needed by your bronchial muscles. you can prevent digestive problems by relaxing while you eat, eating correctly, and avoiding allergens and toxins. 

These are, of course, very much simplified suggestions, and a lot more can be done, and may need to be done, in the treatment of the health problems mentioned, and of others. However, the common denominator in all of these problems is that the solution is aimed at improving the structure or function of the organ or tissue that is faulty.

When you think in terms of treating cancer, you do not in general think of treating the organ in which the cancer is situated. You do not aim to improve the function of your ovaries or uterus if you have ocarina or uterine cancer. You do not aim to improve the function of your kidneys if you have kidney cancer or of your lungs if you have lung cancer.

So what do you do, and on what basis?

This is where the two types of health care practiced today divide. We have the establishment approach that focuses almost entirely on the use of medical drugs and surgery. We can call this the medical-drug-surgery, or MDS approach. We have the natural-therapies approach, in the broadest meaning of the words, which is based on an understanding of human metabolism, nutrition, herbal medicine, homeopathy, structural therapies such as chiropractic and osteopathy, and different forms of energy medicine. Much of this approach is based on a clear understanding of the biochemistry and metabolic pathways in the body and their correction. This is variously referred to as alternative medicine or complementary medicine. We can call this the complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM approach.

What is MDS approach? -- Click for information

What is CAM approach? -- Click for information