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

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.