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

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