Healthicine

We are constantly reminded that obesity¹ is associated with many different diseases, from high blood pressure and heart disease, from cancer and diabetes, to ulcers, skin infections, gallstones, gastritis, gingivitis, glaucoma, and gout – to name just a few…

Why is obesity associated with so many diseases?

Every disease is caused by one or more deficiencies or excesses. Every disease that is associated with obesity has a cause. Obesity is NOT the cause.

Is obesity a disease? According to Scott Kahan, writing for the Huffington Post, it is a disease. Scott bases his article on conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, his stated cause of obesity, “consumption of more calories than are “burned off” by movement and metabolism” is not just simplistic, it is simply wrong.

Many expects do not classify obesity as a disease.  Wiki notes that obesity is associated with many diseases, but does not call it a disease – at this time (Wiki is subject to change over time). Wiki gets the cause wrong as well, but is a bit more careful, saying “At an individual level, a combination of excessive food energy intake and a lack of physical activity is thought to explain most cases of obesity“.

What are the causes of obesity?

Some simple diseases are caused by single deficiencies.  Each Vitamin was identified as ‘vital’ because deficiencies result in specific diseases. Deficiency of water results in dehydration and deficiency of food results in starvation.  Although we don’t call starvation a disease, people who are suffering from starvation suffer a cluster of ‘related diseases’, because they are suffering from many deficiencies.

Other simple diseases are caused by single excess. All foods are toxic in excess, and people have died from drinking too much water. Children can easily get diarrhea from eating too much fruit. Adults don’t usually make that mistake (again). Many foods from nature contain toxins, designed to fight insects and other pests, that can cause illness when consumed excessively.  Many of our supermarket foods are treated with pesticides and preservative chemicals, which are also toxic in excess.

It’s easy to assume that people who are obese are suffering from many excesses.

A useful assumption.  But like many assumptions – only partly right. Partly wrong.  People who are obese suffer from many excesses. They eat too much of some foods, and these excesses cause obesity and can also cause many associated diseases.

But… People who are obese also suffer from deficiencies. Obesity is not just a disease of excess.  It is a disease of imbalances. It is also a disease of malnutrition, a disease of deficiencies.What deficiencies do obese people typically suffer from? There are few studies – even though it is well known that obese people are often malnourished. Wired magazine reported that “A new survey finds that one in three homeless people in Boston are clinically obese,” in an articled titled “Homeless and Overweight: Obesity Is the New Malnutrition.” Poor, malnourished people are more likely to be obese than healthier, wealthier people.

Does obesity ’cause’ disease?  No it does not. Obesity is associated with many other diseases.  The causes of obesity, excessive consumption of some nutrients, and deficiencies in other nutrients cause unhealthinesses, which grow more and more serious until one or more diseases are diagnosed.

We might learn something by flipping the question: Do the diseases that are associated with obesity cause obesity? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Does heart disease cause obesity, or does obesity cause heart disease? Or is it something else?

Does diabetes cause obesity, or does obesity cause diabetes?  Or is it something else?

Does cancer cause obesity, or does obesity cause cancer?  Or is it something else?

It is clearly ‘something else’. 

Not all obese people get heart disease, diabetes and cancer.  Not all people with cancer, diabetes and cancer are obese.

Some factors that cause heart disease can also cause obesity. Some factors that cause diabetes can also cause obesity.  Some factors that cause cancer can also cause obesity.  Or you can write it the other way.  Factors that cause obesity can also cause heart disease. Factors that cause obesity can also cause diabetes. Factors that cause obesity can also cause cancer.

But which factors?  Which deficiencies and which excesses that cause heart disease also cause obesity? Which deficiencies and which excesses that cause diabetes also cause obesity? Which deficiencies and which excesses that cause cancer also cause obesity?

Our medical systems prefer to treat ‘medical conditions’ and ‘diseases’, not causes. For many medical conditions, this approach is more efficient and effective. If your child breaks a leg on the playground, treat the condition. The cause is only relevant when you are designing playgrounds. If you are infected by a parasite – attack the parasite. The cause is only relevant if you want to prevent these parasite attacks. But for some illnesses, treating medical conditions is the wrong approach.

In the case of ‘chronic medical conditions‘, like obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer – attacking the disease is irresponsible.  Attacking the disease, without researching and addressing the cause in each individual case – simply allows more disease to occur.

Attacking heart disease with statins, allows the condition that caused the heart disease to continue – and might make it worse.  Attacking cancer with chemotherapy allows the conditions that caused the cancer to continue – and can make them worse.

So why do our medical systems attack chronic disease with medicines that ignore the cause?  Because it’s quick and easy.  And it is a money making proposition. Sell the “cure”, even if it doesn’t cure.  Sell the “search for the cure” as well.

Finding the cause of an individual person’s chronic disease is difficult and expensive. And it doesn’t pay.  It doesn’t make money for the doctor, nor for any drug marketer. It is very difficult to measure and evaluate the nutrient deficiencies of an individual patient. There are no medical tests that effectively evaluate overall nutrient healthiness. It is more difficult to analyze the 5 year, or 10 year diet of an individual.  I don’t remember what types of foods, in what proportions, 5 or 10 years ago. It takes 5 or 10 years to develop heart disease, cancer, diabetes – and obesity.  People don’t just forget what food they ate, they lie as well.

For a chronic disease – finding the cause, the ongoing cause, is critical for the patient’s long term health. When our medical systems attack ‘obesity’ without searching for individual causes, they are failing in their responsibility. They are attacking illness but ignoring healthiness.  Like attacking war, while ignoring opportunities for peace.

Obesity is caused by specific deficiencies and specific excesses.  But no one is identifying much less addressing the unhealthinesses that cause individual cases of obesity.

What are we doing?  We are blaming the patient.  You are overweight.  It’s your fault, go on a diet and get some exercise. Which leads to “you have heart disease, it’s your fault – buy some statins” and “you have diabetes, it’s your fault, buy some insulin” and “you have cancer, it’s your fault – buy some chemotherapy — maybe your insurance will pay for it.”

And in each case, the patient is allowed, even encouraged, to continue the actions that caused the heart disease, the diabetes, the cancer. Because no-one identifies the cause. We do the same with arthritis and many other chronic diseases.

Don’t confuse ‘blame’ with ’cause’.  There is lots of ‘blame’ for chronic diseases.  You’re overweight – you eat too many calories. You have diabetes – maybe it’s your genetics.  You have cancer?  Maybe it’s the pesticides, the bottled water, the GMO foods.  Blame, blame, blame.  Blame is not cause.

There are other types of illness associated with obesity.  Illnesses of the spirit, and illnesses of the community are poorly categorized and poorly understood by our medical systems.    Our medical systems stop studying the hierarchy of healthicine (genetics, nutrients, cells, tissues, organs, systems, body, mind, spirit, and community) at the layer of ‘mind’, ignoring SPIRIT and COMMUNITY healthiness and illnesses.  There are many genetic illnesses, cellular illnesses, kidney illnesses, and mental illnesses.  Illnesses exist throughout the layers of the hierarchy of healthicine – except the spirit and the community. There are no illnesses classified as illness of the spirit, nor are there illnesses classified as illnesses of the community.

Obesity and the well known associated diseases, are also with chronic depression – an illness of the spirit.  The medical community ignores illness of the spirit – so they call it an illness of the mind.   The medical community also ignores illnesses of the community.   Sociopathy (also known as psychopathy) is a community illness that has been found to be strongly linked to obesity.

It’s wrong to blame the individual, the patient for an illness of the spirit, or a community illness.  Expecting them to make the necessary changes themselves, “go on a diet, get some exercise you lazy bum…” is ineffective and nonsensical in those cases.

If you have cancer, maybe you think it doesn’t matter.  The cause doesn’t matter – you just want the cure.  You’ll walk for the cure, talk for the cure, run for the cure, make ribbons for the cure.

I believe the cure for cancer cannot be found by searching for the cure. It can only be found in searching for the cause.  By searching for health. The cure for obesity cannot be found searching for the cure, it can only be found by searching for the cause. There are general causes – you can find proof that anything and everything causes cancer. We need to search for specific causes, for each person, if we want to heal obesity, and cancer.

Cures for chronic illness can only be found by searching for health.

Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity are ‘chronic’ diseases.  There are no cures for ‘chronic diseases’, by definition.  They are caused by ongoing conditions – and as long as those conditions continue – the disease will continue to be, and to grow.

Only when we find, and fight, the individual causes will we defeat a chronic disease.

So, why is obesity associated with so many diseases? Obesity, and many chronic illnesses have common causes that persist over long periods of time. This allows unhealthiness to grow slowly, undetected.  Eventually, it seems like the illness ‘appears out of nowhere’.  He was perfectly healthy, and then he was struck down by cancer, a heart attack, a stroke.

If we can defeat obesity, will we defeat the associated diseases?  Yes, we when learn to fight obesity by tackling the causes.  When we learn to tackle the causes of chronic disease – we will learn to heal chronic disease before it is diagnosed.

There will be no need to cure chronic disease when we learn to pursue healthiness instead of pursuing disease.

Everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of healthiness.
to your health, tracy

Founder: Healthicine.org and Personal Health Freedom

¹ Note: in this post, I use the word ‘obesity’ although the material is relevant to excessive weight in general. I use the word obesity to simplify the text. It is also important to understand that guidelines for “healthy weight” are poorly studied, from a scientific perspective. eg. It has recently demonstrated that people who are ‘slightly overweight’ may actually be healthier than those who have a ‘healthy weight’ according to government guidelines of the US FDA and Health Canada.

There is no war on cancer.

There is a war on cancer patients. More victims are dying every year. Even if your doctor issues a death sentence “you have three months to live”, you cannot choose your method of execution. You can only choose to wait, or to accept the treatments your doctor is allowed to use. This is a war on all cancer patients – not just generic cancer patients (which don’t usually die from their cancer).  But it does affect generic cancer patients as well.  Even if your cancer is not likely to kill you – you treatment choices are limited to those allowed by the so called “cancer war”.

There is a war on cancer doctors, they are not allowed to offer, or recommend, a non-standard treatment, even one they would choose for themselves or their family.  They are not allowed to investigate alternatives.  They are not allowed to speak their mind. Oh, they are free to speak about politics, and religion, but not about medicine – not when doctoring a cancer patient.

There is a war on cancer treatments. Many of them are illegal to make, to sell, and even illegal to give away. Information about them, their successes and failures is not published in medical journals.

If the best, most effective, healthiest cancer treatment was discovered today, it is already illegal.  Does that sound ridiculous?  sorry… It’s perfectly true. As soon as you claim, rightly or wrongly, that it cures any illness, it is classed as a drug.  And as soon as it is classed as a drug, you can’t use it until someone applies for, and receives, approval.  You can’t even use it in a clinical study until someone applies for and receives approval.

If the cure for cancer has already been discovered – you can’t buy it, or sell it.  You can’t manufacture it, advertise it, or even give it away.  Medical science is in agreement that chemo, radiation, and surgery do not cure cancer.  And medical science is in agreement that you, the cancer patient, are not allowed to make your own decisions, to buy your own treatment. 

If you are selling a natural food, like bitter almonds or apricot seeds, that contains chemicals used to treat cancer in some clinics – you are not allowed to state the cancer facts on the package, and if you do, your ‘food’ will be banned and confiscated.

“The war on cancer is a bunch of shit.” – James Watson, discoverer of DNA, Nobel Laureate.

President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971.  Statistics consistently show a steady growth in incidence, severity, and death from cancers since that date.  How can this be true?

Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War said “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. ” 

Many people have declared that the war on cancer is a failure, or a fraud. Few bother to ask what’s really going on.  Conspiracy theories abound. Cancer, it seems, fills us with hate.

PeopleAgainstCancer.com gives a list of reasons the war has failed – and continues to fail, from the failure of early detection, to failures of current treatments, and failures to find or recognize treatments that work.  But they’re missing the key point. We need to make peace with cancer.  We need to make peace with cancer patients, and other victims, like their family members.  We need to make peace with cancer doctors.  And we need to make peace with cancer treatments.  

We need to make peace with health. Not war with cancer.

Harold Varmus, former director of the NIH and current director of the NCI, held a town hall meeting in 2010 in which he outlined his priorities for improving the cancer research program, including the following:
-          reforming the clinical trials system,
-          improving utilization of the NIH clinical center
-          readjusting the drug approval and regulation processes,
-          improving cancer treatment and prevention, and
-          formulating new, more specific and science-based questions.

He also missed the key point. We need to make peace.

The site ‘The Best Years of Your Life: articulates many statistical errors, or sins, committed by those who are fighting the war on cancer.  But they also miss the point. We need to make peace.

In Cancer Research, a Super Fraud, Robert Ryan, B.Sc. tells us that cancer is increasing and that cancer is preventable, but misses the important detail. We need to make peace.

There are two important truths about the so called “war on cancer”. Everyone who does the least bit of research will see the first – few notice the second.  

• First: There are no wartime statistics. Therefore: There is no war against cancer.
  

If there is a war against cancer, where are the wartime statistics? Oh, we have statistics about cancer deaths, but deaths don’t indicate a war.  Not alone, nor do survivor statistics.    

Where are the friendly fire deaths? If there is truly a war, can there be a war without casualties by friendly fire? What is friendly fire in the war against cancer?

How many people are killed by the war, not by cancer?

Where are the statistics about people killed by cancer treatment?

According to Cancer.ORG, the American Cancer Society statistics, just over 570,000 Americans died from cancer in 2011.

We know that chemotherapy is toxic.  That it can kill patients. We know that surgery is dangerous – every surgery has a possibility of death.  And we know that radiation causes cancer.

How many cancer patients died from chemotherapy?  There are no statistics. This post on GreenMedInfo illustrates the fact that chemotherapy and radiation kills many patients, but their deaths are counted as ‘cancer deaths’: The Shocking History of Chemo as a Cancer Drug. 

How many cancer patients died from radiation?  There are no statistics.

How many cancer patients died from surgery?  There are no statistics.

Most important: How many people beat cancer? There are no statistics.

Where are the statistics? If there was a real war on cancer, we would have real statistics. The current statistics make it almost possible that all cancer deaths are caused by chemotherapy, or 50 percent, or 10 percent.  

We have no statistics that are useful for fighting, winning a war. We only have statistics designed to raise funds for ‘research’. 

Where are the statistics about cancer successes?

It’s not difficult to find people who were diagnosed with cancer, who refused to take the recommended treatments of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, who decided on their own treatment – and their cancer has disappeared.

Small studies have repeatedly demonstrated that people who simply refuse conventional treatments – live longer.

Where do these people appear in the American Cancer Society statistics?  They don’t appear.  They might be counted in the group of people who have survived for 5 years. But there are no statistics about different cancer treatments. And no statistics about cures.

The American Cancer Society statistics don’t recognize cures.  They don’t count cures. The American Cancer Society wants you to believe that no-one is cured, because cures hit their bottom line – fundraising. They only recognize ‘5 year relative survival rates’. If you do actually ‘cure’ your cancer – you will be dismissed by the cancer establishment as, at best, ‘anecdotal evidence’, or worse, a quack. Your story will not be counted, not published, not be investigated.  It’s official, according to the American Cancer Society, and the FDA, and Health Canada – “there is no evidence of a cure for cancer.”  Why is there no evidence?  Because no-one is keeping track.

There are several well known cancer clinics, just across the border in Mexico.  There are medical records in the USA and Canada, of patients who were diagnosed with cancer, and no longer have cancer, after treatment with unconventional techniques.  I’m not saying these clinics cure every cancer, or even a large percentage.  I’m saying that they count.  We need to count them. There are many statistics about the success rates of chemotherapy, but even those are full of holes and funny statistics. Overall, the success rate of chemotherapy is so low that the American Cancer Society tell us that the survival rate for most types of cancer is less than 5 percent, with a high less than 50 percent.

But records, and statistics, for patients who choose their own therapy, are nowhere to be found.  They do not appear in any official statistics. If there was a war against cancer, the statistics, all of the statistics would be recognized, and available for study.

• 2.      No one is fighting for peace.

If we truly have a war against cancer, where are the peacemakers? Working for peace is a difficult, complex task.  At present, there are no ‘peace workers’ in the cancer war.

Peacemakers?  Well, cancer might not know there is a war, but let’s be frank.  Cancer is winning.  It’s time to make peace with cancer.  The war is a failure.

In fact, it’s no longer a war. It’s become an occupation. The so called ‘war against cancer’, has become an occupation by the forces of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. Many people are searching for ‘better chemicals’ to fight the war.  But no-one is searching for peace.

We need to make peace with cancer. Not war against cancer.  We  need to make peace with cancer patients, their families, their doctors.  We need to make peace with cancer treatments. Our cancer war is killing more people every year, it’s clearly a failure.

It’s time to pursue peace.  “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

We often hear that we need to ‘find cancer earlier’. We know that finding cancers earlier leads to higher risk of misdiagnosis, higher risk of aggressive treatment when no treatment is required. 

Earlier diagnosis should be used to enhance our ability to make peace.

Now don’t get me wrong.  There are people who advocate peace with cancer. 

I’m not talking about “Making Peace with Cancer: A Franciscan Journey” a book that is, about making peace with terminal disease and death. That’s a different kind of peace.  I’m with Dylan Thomas – although he was talking about old age, dying at a young age from a cancer deserves the same quote “Do not go gentle into that good night…. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I’m with Dr. Isaac Goren DMQ (China) M.Ac. at the Tao House Healing Centre, when he says “I am wondering if it is time we looked elsewhere.  I am wondering if we should have a more holistic approach and sign a peace accord with cancer.  It is time we stopped fighting the disease and started helping people to heal their body, their heart and their spirit in a way where the result is the disappearance of the disease altogether.”

Dr. Goren recognizes that cancer is not just a disease of the cells, clearly seeing it as a disease of the body and the spirit.  In fact, cancer is a disease of the entire hierarchy of healthicine, as we learned in the second post on Generic Cancer: Part 2: Is “generic cancer” a disease of the cells, or a disease of the tissues?

But Dr Goren, and people like him, are voices in the wilderness. Ignored by the medical establishment – or drowned out by the legal fury of commerce, if he dares to raise his voice too high.

We need to learn to health cancer, not to kill it. We need early detection of cancer, so we have more time to learn how to health cancer. When we try to make the body too unhealthy for the cancer to survive – we often harm the patient more than the cancer. When we can make the body too healthy for cancer to survive, no war is necessary. 

“Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

When we war against cancer, we war against our bodies and our healthiness.  We need to make peace with our health – we need to make peace with all of our health and our bodies, cancer included.

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil, to one who is striking at the root.”  Henry David Thoreau.

The root of generic cancer is unhealthiness. We need to strike cancer by striking unhealthiness, by creating and improving health. We need a more holistic approach to health, more than a holistic approach to cancer.  We need a healthier approach to cancer, our sick war is killing too many innocents.

We can refer again to ― Sun Tzu, again, from The Art of War  “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Unfortunately, today, the enemy being subdued, without fighting, is the cancer patient.

It’s time to make peace with cancer.  It’s time to make peace with cancer patients, and let them choose their treatments, and refuse treatments they don’t want.  It’s time to make peace with cancer doctors and let them speak, and practice their truths, not the truths that are ‘allowed’ by the establishment.  And it’s time to make peace with cancer treatments.  If someone is dying from cancer, they have a right to information about all treatments, not just three.  They have a right to all information about treatment success and failures, not just the established three.  And they have the right to choose, and a right to buy the treatment they choose – which can only be assured if the seller is allowed to state the facts, and to sell the treatment.

Frankly, the current status of cancer treatments has progressed past the point of ridiculous.  We are at a point where someone who is diagnosed with a fatal cancer can legally buy a gun, and blow their head off, but they cannot legally buy cancer treatments. Whether the treatments will make them  better or worse makes no difference. And frankly- at present, no-one really knows if the treatment will make them better or worse, because the statistics are not gathered, not processed, not analyzed and not available. 

Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of healthiness.  Everyone has  a right to information about their cancer, information about cancer treatments, their successes and failures.  Every cancer patient has a right to choose and to buy the treatment they choose.

To your health, tracy
Founder: Healthicine.org

This post is the fourth in a series about Generic Cancer. You can see the first post, and links to subsequent posts, here: Part 1: What is Generic Cancer, Does Generic Cancer Kill?

In the book: “Love Your Disease: It’s Keeping You Healthy”, John Harrison, MD explains that disease is both self-created and self-cured.  ”To cure ourselves we need to take back the responsibility of loving and caring for our [selves]… from whomever we have entrusted the task.” John explains that in many cases, our disease arises from activities that are meant to be and are in some ways actually healthy.

We each have unique healthy activities, which change over time through drift or deliberate actions.  Our healthiness, our unhealthiness, and our disease arise, for the most part, from our choices and our actions.  What about generic cancer? 

In previous blog posts we defined generic cancers as:
- carcinomas – cancers of the epithelial tissues
- cancers where we do not know the individual cause
- cancers that are caused by environmental factors
- cancers that have not yet metastasized
- cancers that don’t usually result in death

In the second post, we recognized that generic cancers are diseases of the tissues, not diseases of the cells.  The progression of this disease was examined as it relates to the Hierarchy of Healthicine.

If you do any research into cancer you will find that cancer is often described as a cell ‘evolving’ in such a way that it becomes immortal.  You will even find reports saying things like “Darwin’s Principles Say Cancer Will Always Evolve to Resist Treatment.” Punt “evolution of cancer cells” into Google and you will find many, many articles and research documents describing how cancer ‘evolves’ from normal human cells.

But does it? What is evolution anyway?  Wikki defines evolution as: “the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.” Is cancer a change in ‘inherited characteristics over successive generations’?  No.

Does cancer develop because cells ‘evolve’ in a way that makes them immortal?  No.

Evolution is the natural process where organisms, not tissue cells, undergo constant change – and the survivors are generally those that are best adapted to the current environment.  The survival of the ‘fittest right now’.  Is it appropriate, is it accurate to apply this model to cancer cells? 

Cancer cells don’t survive.  They don’t get passed from human to human.  They ultimately die when the human dies.  There is no evolutionary advantage to being a cancer cell.  There is only a short term advantage – like a corporation that has a few quarters of huge increases in sales – followed by a crash and bankruptcy when the system is over-extended. That’s not evolution, it’s disaster.

Why is this important?

If cells naturally evolve into cancer cells, then there is not much we can do to stop the development of cancer.  All we can do is to try to kill those terrible cancer cells. That seems to be the current medical belief, and the current medical approach. But the clear facts are emerging – after 40 years of war on cancer – the techniques that aim to kill the cancer cells are not working, in many cases they are making things worse, not better.

However, if we clearly recognize that cancer is not a ‘natural evolution’ of tissue cells, then we can search for the cause.  And as John Harrison points out, we need to search inside ourselves for the cause.  

Generic cancers are cancers that have a cause. Most cancers are generic, and most cancers have causes that can be identified and tracked to personal choices. The basic cause of all generic cancers is ‘environmental’, and the environment for all cancer cells is the tissue where they live and grow. If we are to truly tackle cancer – we need to learn to health the tissues. To love our tissues.  To love our bodies – not just emotionally – we need to show our love for our bodies. 

There has been some research; even going back to the work of 1931 Nobel Prize winner Otto Heinrich Warburg, who suggested that cancer cells are ‘damaged’ cells, not evolved cells. He stated that “no cancer cell exists, the respiration of which is not impaired”. Specifically, cancer cells can only process sugar – not oxygen as processed by normal cells.  The Wiki article on Warburg confirms: “The concept that cancer cells switch to fermentation in lieu of aerobic respiration has become widely accepted.” Cancer cells also suffer mutations, in a process of malignant transformation, resulting in uncontrolled growth of cells – according to Warburg.

Recently, more light has been shed on these concepts. First of all, we need to understand that cancers don’t act like ‘normal’ cell mutations.  Cellular mutations happen often in the body – but they don’t survive. It is very unlikely for a cell to ‘mutate’ different genetics – and still be able to survive in the tissue.

Cancerous mutations survive.  Why?

We need to go back in time and study how our tissues developed.  When life first developed on the planet, it consisted of single cellular organisms. Some of these learned, through evolution, to cooperate and grow together into clumps of cells.  Then they evolved to create tissues of multiple cell types – lichens are one of the earliest examples of different cells that cooperate for the good of the whole. Eventually, tissues structured themselves into bodies, which developed sophisticated organs and bodily systems, as we progressed up the hierarchy of healthicine.

Today, our tissues, where generic cancer cells arise, are comprised of very sophisticated cells that have evolved extensively to serve our health. But, if you strip away all of that evolution – you arrive at a cell that knows how to build a community – but not how to contribute to your healthiness. That is – a cancer cell, only growing to serve it’s own local needs, creating tumor.  Recent research is beginning to demonstrate that cancer cells are cells that ‘lose’ part of this evolutionary advantage – and regress to ‘normal’ one-cellular animals, or clumping cellular animals – cooperating to get nutrients and get rid of waste products by subverting your blood supply.

Cancer cells are cells that are ‘disabled’.  They are unable to perform the function expected of healthy cells in the same tissue.  

When a developing tissue cell finds itself in an unhealthy tissue – sometimes it cannot grow into a normal healthy cell.  If it is damaged by toxins or radiation, it loses some of its genetic sophistication.  If there are not sufficient nutrients, it cannot do the job and cannot even reproduce correctly.  So, it does what it can.  It reverts to a simpler cellular state.  To survive. From a cellular point of view, this is the only way to health.  However, in this case, optimizing cellular health – for damaged cells – harms tissue healthiness. 

How does this happen? An article by P C W Davies and C H Lineweaver, published in the journal of Physical Biology provides some interesting information, and suggests a new way of looking at cancer. This article is a very interesting read if you want some deep thoughts about cancers and how they function. In summary, it says:

“carcinogenesis is here seen as a process of de-speciation, a radical lack of differentiation back towards the ancestral proto-cell. If this is true, given the right (or wrong) conditions, normal cells may regress to a more primitive, far more individualistic cell phenotype in an attempt to survive (if not thrive) within the biochemical/bioenergetic adversities characteristic of the sickened, cancer-prone body. ”

That is to say, if your tissues are very, very unhealthy, the only way for some cells to survive is to revert back, to de-evolve, into more primitive cells. These primitive cells are not shackled to serving the needs of your body – and are thus free to reproduce without constraints. Don’t confuse cancer cells with stem cells, they may look similar in many ways – stem cells are complete, healthy cells that can develop into many different types of cells.  Cancer cells are tissue cells that are damaged, stripped back to the point where they can barely survive.  They cannot develop into useful cells. 

This concept is also explored in a post on GreenMedInfo.com titled: “Is Cancer an Ancient Survival Program Unmasked”, which I blogged about in a post on Personal Health Freedom.com titled:  What is Cancer. A new Theory Emerges.

If these theories are correct – what do they mean for our fight against cancer?

We need to recognize that cancer cells are not ‘rogue cells that evolved into new cellular monsters attacking our body’, they are our cells that are disabled and no longer able to do the work required. 

What do we need to do?  How should we react to cancerous cells?

We need to love them.  Love them to death.  We need to love our cancerous tissues to healthiness.

When we view cancer as a dangerous evolution, we take actions to kill cancerous cells.  We poison them with chemotherapies; we attack them with radiation and surgery.  And what happens if cancer cells die?  Those cancer cells and the toxins are absorbed, eaten actually, by our body.  They are used to create new cells.

When we kill cancer cells with toxins – the toxins in those dead cells are re-absorbed into newly developing cells. And guess what – chemotherapy drugs cause cancer damage.  We are actually creating new cancers. When we kill cancer cells with radiation – we know that that very same radiation causes cancer. And when we cut cancerous tissues with surgery – we risk spreading the cancerous cells into other areas, including the bloodstream, where they can transfer to other parts of the body.  Each of the three main treatments for cancer – are treatments that damage our tissues, make them less healthy. 

When we learn to love our cancerous tissues and to love our cancer cells to death, our bodies will absorb the cancer cells and use them to build healthy tissue.

We need to health cancer, not to kill it.  Only fundraisers speak of curing cancer. Your doctor is not allowed to claim to cure cancer.

If you ask your doctor how to health your cancer, you will probably get a blank stare. And if your doctor does know how to health cancer – they will still be quiet. It’s probably illegal, or immoral for your doctor to speak of anything but the standard cancer treatments – chemotherapy, surgery and radiation.  Telling you how to health your cancer may be grounds for losing their license. 

So much for health – and health freedoms…

There is another reason your doctor cannot tell you how to health your cancer, or perhaps a few hundred of them.  Many experts believe that you need to have over 200 imbalances, or unhealthinesses to create and sustain a cancer. You are probably expecting, and your doctor is tasked with finding ‘a cure’ – eg. one thing that will fix you and cure your cancer.  If you have cancer – you have many serious unhealthinesses that need to be attended.  And you can’t afford to pay for your doctor’s time to find all of your individual causes – even if he could.  It’s up to you.

Our ‘health care’ systems ignore unhealthiness and focus on disease. It’s  easier to cure disease, and easier to sell disease cures than to understand and improve healthiness.  Only you can create your healthiness.

Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of healthiness.

to your health, tracy

This post is the third in a series about Genetic Cancer.  You can view the first two posts here:
Generic Cancer Part 1: What is Generic Cancer, Does Generic Cancer Kill?
Generic Cancer: Part 2: Is “generic cancer” a disease of the cells, or a disease of the tissues?  

Our medical system is schizophrenic with regards to generic cancer.  Cancers are classified by tissues, but treatments attack malignant cells and ignore – or worse actually decrease tissue healthiness.

Cancer Research UK, classifies cancers into carcinomas (cancers of the Epithelial tissue), sarcomas (cancers of the Connective tissue), leukaemias and lymphomas (cancers of the blood and lymphatic tissues), and gliomas (cancers of the nervous tissues).  In the previous post: What is Generic Cancer, Does Generic Cancer Kill?, I concluded that sarcomas are typically ‘generic cancers’.  

Cancer Research UK’s fundraising banners proclaim “RESEARCH KILLS CANCER”. They mean to say – “research kills cancer cells”. When medicine attempts to treat cancer, it does not attempt to ‘health’ the tissue; it simply attempts to ‘kill’ the cancerous cells via surgical removal, chemical toxins or radiation bombardment. And unless surgery is used, it leaves the dead cancerous cells to be ‘cleaned up’ by the body. Surgery, on the other hand, often leaves live cancerous cells, or takes huge chunks of healthy tissue in an effort to ‘get all of the cancer’. 

If cancer is a disease of the cells, the best way to tackle cancer might be to fight or kill off the ‘bad cells’.

Generic cancer is a disease of the tissues.  Killing the cells is like fighting the alligators instead of draining the swamp. If unhealthy tissues caused cancer cells to develop, and allowed them to flourish, then the unhealthy tissue will simply create more cancer cells.  

It gets worse. ‘Conventional treatment’ of radiation and chemotherapy, make the tissue ‘less healthy’ and are more likely to cause more cancers to arise.  But because of the slow development of cancerous cells – the cancers created by chemotherapy and radiation will often not appear until after the 5 year window is past.  So they are counted as ‘new cancers’ – which, I guess, is technically true. 

 Generic cancers are caused by ‘unhealthy tissue’.

 The Hierarchy of Healthicine gives us an important visual into the causes and effects of generic cancers. We can see that cancers are centered in the tissues – as medical textbooks agree. 

Causes of cancer are found in those elements that contribute directly to the health of the tissues: tissue genetics, tissue nutrition and tissue cells.  If any of these three elements are unhealthy – we will have unhealthy tissues. We can now see that it may be possible to have a cancerous tissue with more than one ‘primary cause’.  Eg. It is possible to have more than one type of ‘generic cancer’ in a single tissue. We might have some cells that are cancerous because of our genetics, others that are cancerous because of our unhealthy nutrition (remember that nutrition includes nutrients and toxins), and others that are unhealthy because of unhealthy cellular growth.

We can also see the progression of cancer, once the tissues are infected.  Soon, cancer advances to affect the organ that this tissue is contributing to – it might be a specific gland, the lung, or another organ.  It may also effect on the bodily systems that organ is  part of.  Cancers also subvert some bodily systems – most commonly the circulatory system – to provide nutrients and foster growth of the cancer. If you have lung cancer, the cancer will begin to affect your respiratory system.This will have an effect on your entire body, and will begin to prey on your mind as well. Your spirit will begin to falter, and your contributions to your communities will suffer.

We can also see that each of these elements might be secondary causes, or contributors to your cancerous condition.  If you are not of sound mind, your nutrition might suffer – leading to unhealthy tissues and to cancer.  If your community, or your digestive system does not provide healthy nutrients – a similar effect can result.

Unhealthy tissues lead to cancerous cells.  Cancerous cells infect unhealthy tissues and can also invade the territory of healthy tissues. Over time these cells can affect every aspect of our healthiness – sometimes leading to death.  Note: in our first discussion of Generic Cancer, we recognized that generic cancers don’t usually result in death. 

Let’s take a moment and define ‘unhealthy tissue’. If we examine a tissue, we can, in theory, measure the ‘healthiness’ of the tissue. We might plot the healthiness of the tissue on a percentage scale from 0 to 100 – where 100 percent is perfectly healthy.

Unhealthiness is the inverse of healthiness. Someone with a tissue that is 80 percent healthy, has an unhealthiness score of 20.

However, tissue healthiness is very complex to evaluate.  We currently don’t measure healthiness – medical systems are designed to detect and measure illness, not healthiness.  If we were to ask, for example, what healthiness factors are most likely to indicate tissue healthiness – there might be many suggestions, but no scientific agreement.  

What unhealthiness scores lead to cancer? What types of unhealthiness are more likely to lead to cancers?

Because we don’t measure healthiness on a scale, nor map it to a percentage – we (today’s medical technologies) also cannot measure unhealthiness. Measuring tissue unhealthiness that might cause cancer is complex. We know, for example, that smoking leads to lung cancer – sometimes.  And sometimes it doesn’t.  There are medical examples of lungs turned black from smoking – but cancer did not develop.  Clearly simple measurements of tissue healthiness will not tell us about cancer tendencies of the tissue.

It’s important to understand that our tissues, like all aspects of healthiness, are not static.  Healthy tissues are always growing, acting, changing.  If they are unhealthy, we have many systems that attempt to re-balance, to re-create healthiness, although sometimes those systems make mistakes. If we want to health our tissues, we need to assist this process.

What tissue healthiness factors might lead to cancer?  

Let’s begin with some simple measurements of tissue healthiness – nutrients and cleansing – food and taking out the garbage. Tissues are comprised of living cells, and those cells need nutrients and produce waste products. 

If the required nutrients are not available in the diet, or are not provided by a healthy digestive system and blood flow – nutritional deficiencies will appear.  Now we see that not only does everything seem to ‘cause cancer’, but also…. Not eating the right foods might also cause cancers to develop. Zinc is a key factor in natural cell death.  It is possible that a deficiency in zinc could lead to cancerous cells that do not die. Many tissue nutrient deficiencies might cause cells to become cancerous. This could be due to deficiencies in the diet, or due to deficiencies in the nutrient flow.  

The lymphatic system and the blood circulatory systems are responsible for cleaning up cellular waste products, as well as toxins arrive via many pathways.  If these cleansing processes are not functioning well – unhealthy tissue could get worse, leading to the development and growth of cancerous cells.  There are many indications that exercise prevents cancer. It makes sense.  Exercise stimulates the blood and lymphatic systems and helps make tissues healthier. 

Is it possible to measure the health of the blood flow to our tissues? Do we know how to measure the healthiness, or the healthy functioning or our lymphatic systems? An unhealthiness in either of these areas could cause some specific cancers. If we don’t learn to measure these tissue healthiness factors, we can’t measure their effects on cancer.

There are other theories about tissue healthiness.  There’s the sugar theory.  It’s an important one.  But there is controversy as usual.  The May Clinic says: “Sugar doesn’t make cancer grow faster.” But MedicalExpress.com reports a scientific study demonstrating a trigger between excess sugar consumption and cancer. It seems they ‘agree to disagree’.   Or perhaps to split hairs. 

Note: MedicalExpress makes the common mistake of saying “Sugars are needed to provide us with energy and in moderate amounts contribute to our well-being.” A ‘myth’ that is easily disproven by fasting and by diets that do not contains sugar.  So much for science.

Mercola reported recently that giving up all sugars and carbs that convert to sugar stops the growth of cancer cells.  The Mayo Clinic only talks about sugar and does not mention the fact that simple carbs are equivalent to sugar.  One way to cut sugar totally, is to adopt a meat only diet – and there are very few studies of an all meat diet, none that I am aware of that test effects on cancer. Another is to fast – some people recommend fasting to health cancerous tissues. 

There are many anecdotal studies suggesting that fasting, or an all meat diet can stop cancer tumor growth.  Unfortunately, medical science is not very good at evaluating anecdotal results, even when the evidence is strong. As soon as an event is identified as anecdotal, our so called ‘medical science’ throws out all of the babies with the bathwater. 

There are also suggestions that or body fluids can be more or less acidic – and that this contributes to cancer creation and growth. But these have not been tested scientifically. What tissue unhealthinesses contribute to cancer? Frankly, we don’t know, and no-one is searching for an answer.  There are many people studying what happens to the cells – but no-one studying tissue healthiness. Medical science removes cancerous tissues with surgery – and reports that the tissues not infected by cancer are ‘healthy tissues’.  If they are ‘healthy’, where did the cancer come from? Health is not binary. Your tissues are not ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, they are healthy and unhealthy. Unhealthiness is the inverse of the measure of healthiness.

How unhealthy do your tissues need to be to cause cancer?  Modern medical research suggests that the development of a cancerous cell is very complex and requires a complex sequence of cellular damage.  This suggests that in order for a tissue to develop cancerous cells it must be very unhealthy, and might require many different types of serious unhealthiness.

For a cancer to metastasize, many further steps are required, eg. the tissue must be even more unhealthy than required to develop a generic cancer. This is one of the reasons generic cancer doesn’t usually kill – generic cancer is a cancer that has not metastasized.  Some generic cancers can exist for decades without metastasizing and without threatening life.

Generic cancers are caused by unhealthy tissues. Our current  war against cancer cells, and similar attempts to ‘cure cancer’ are actually be making cancers worse – even when short term results seem to indicate some progress.

Fundraisers everywhere say they are searching for a ‘cure for cancer’.  There are big dollars to be earned in our current, misguided cancer war. We don’t need to cure cancer, we need to cure the cancer patients.  We need to health their tissues, not kill their cells.

Is anyone out there ‘healthing’ cancer?  Yes, I believe there are.  Why haven’t you heard about them?  Let’s suppose someone gets cancer, and then they do something completely different from all of the ‘kill cancer’ treatments.  Specifically, they do many things to improve their tissue healthiness – and the cancer goes away.  What will you hear?  The medical establishment will dismiss the incident as ‘anecdotal evidence’.  Doctors will shun the patient, for fear of their license. Media might pay attention for a moment – that’s the duration of their attention span – the time between commercial advertisements for cancer causing processed foods and cancer fundraisers.

It’s not difficult to find organizations that claim to health cancer. But it is difficult to find the truth.

We don’t need a war on generic cancer, we need to make peace.  We need to ‘health cancerous tissues’, so they can ‘kill cancer cells’. If you are searching for an organization to help you ‘health generic cancer’, don’t look for someone who advertises a ‘cancer cure’. People and organizations that advertise a cancer cure are usually selling ‘alternative’ ways to kill cancer cells. They are still marketing the medical paradigm.

We need a health paradigm to truly understand and health cancer. 

to your health, tracy

founder: Healthicine.org
This post is the second in a series where I explore the concepts of ‘generic’ cancer from the perspective of Healthicine.  The first post is: 

Generic Cancer Part 1: What is Generic Cancer, Does Generic Cancer Kill?

What is ‘generic cancer’? Is there such a thing as generic cancer? How common is it? What causes it? What is the best treatment? Can it be cured?

Modern medicine views cancer as a disease. It uses surgery to cut the disease from the body, chemicals and radiation to attempt to kill the disease. At the same time, modern medicine admits that it cannot ‘cure’ this disease called cancer. Medicine considers a cancer to be ‘dead’ if it does not recur for 5 years after treatment.  If it re-appears after 5 years – it is considered to be a ‘new cancer’. 

In this series of blog posts, I will discuss an alternative view of cancer, from a perspective of Healthicine – the arts and sciences of health and healthiness.  Medicine views cancers as diseases.  This viewpoint limits what medicine sees, how it sees, and what alternatives are tested and available for treatment.  Medicine declared ‘war on cancer’ more than 40 years ago – and cancer continues to win most of the battles.

I am not a doctor.  I cannot cure cancer and cannot tell you how to treat or cure your cancer. This blog is about health, and health freedom, not about cancer.

The reason medicine cannot cure cancer is too simple. Cancer is a symptom – and only the underlying unhealthinesses can be cured.

The US National Library of Medicine says “Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells in the body. Cancerous cells are also called malignant cells.” Is this uncontrolled growth a disease, or is it a symptom of an underlying unhealthiness? The Library of Medicine does not consider this question.

They go on: “Some cancers can be cured. Other cancers that are not curable can still be treated effectively. Some patients can live for many years with cancer. Other tumors are quickly life threatening.” 

Reading between the lines, they say “Most cannot be cured.”  They don’t bother to ask why.  But the question “why can’t we cure cancer?” holds the clue to a true understanding of cancer.

Why can’t we cure generic cancer?  Most cancers are generic first.

Our medical systems view each cancer as a bad tree.  Each cancer is attacked with all the force the medical system can muster.  But medicine doesn’t see the forest for the trees. The forest is generic cancer.  If we are to learn the truth about cancer, to beat cancer, we need to understand generic cancers.

What is generic cancer?

1. Generic Cancers are Carcinomas.

There are four basic types of tissues in the human body: connective tissues, muscle tissues, nervous tissues, and epithelial tissues. Eighty to ninety percent of all cancers are diseases of the epithelial tissues. These cancers are called carcinomas. Generic cancers are carcinomas. That’s the first clue to understanding generic cancer.

The other cancers are much less common than carcinomas and may be fundamentally different in type, cause, and other factors. We need to study generic cancers first and best.  They are the most common.

2. We don’t know the cause of Generic Cancers.

There two types of cancers, cancers where we know the cause, and cancers where we don’t know the cause.

We can compare generic cancer to a cola-drink where you don’t know the manufacturer. You know it’s a cola. It has the name of the local store, but they don’t make cola. Generic colas. We don’t know who or what created them.

 It’s actually more complicated.  Every generic cancer has at least two causes. If you’ve ever watched a legal proceeding abut a car accident, you have learned that truth has many sides and each accident can have many causes.  Many cancers have more than two causes.

Every cancer has a trigger cause – the trigger that created one or more malignant cells.  And a growth cause – that allows these malignant cells to live and reproduce.   A bit like a slippery road – and an unprepared driver.  Which is the cause?  One is the trigger – the other is a failure to react properly to the trigger.

A generic cancer is a cancer where we don’t know the cause(s). A cancerous cell only develops when a normal cell is damaged in a number of ways.  Eg. It actually takes many causes to create a single cancer cell.

If we know the cause, it’s not a generic cancer. When I say we ‘know the cause’, I mean really, really know. When there is no question about the cause, it is not a generic cancer. Sometimes there is a ‘single cause’ and anyone who studies the specific situation agrees about the cause. These cancers do exist. They exist in research projects – where we create cancers in lab animals to study them. When many people are exposed to high levels of radiation, and they get cancer shortly afterwards, we know the cause. Virtually everyone who is exposed to that level of radiation gets cancer shortly afterwards. Smoking, on the other hand, does not cause cancer reliably. Your lungs might be black from years of smoking – but cancer free. What’s up with that?

The US National Library of Medicine admits that “the cause of many cancers remains unknown” In most cases of cancer, we don’t know the individual causes. We may have some clues – but often these are just guesses. Doctors don’t look for causes. Once a cancer is found, our medical system moves immediately to ‘treatment’. Patients don’t look for causes – they want a cure.

I believe we need to use an illness view for specific cases of cancer, but we need a health view to understand cancers from an overall perspective. If we want to find the most effective treatment for a specific cancer, we need to identify the causes in order to find the best treatments.  Early detection is currently used to promote ‘early killing’ of cancer.  It should be used to promote earlier identification of the causes – to determine if addressing the cause(s) can cure the cancer.

GreenMedInfo recently reported that inflammation is a cancer trigger.  Without the ability to create inflammation – mice were unable to create breast cancer cells.  We might ask “Is inflammation the cause of generic cancers?” NO.  Normal inflammation is a symptom of healthiness.  Inflammation arises when our body tissues are attacked – or believe they are attacked.  If our tissues cannot become inflamed – they are unhealthy. This presents an interesting challenge for our understanding of inflammation, cancers, and causes of cancers.

It is also important to distinguish between the ‘creation’ of cancer cells and the ‘uncontrolled growth’ of cancer cells.  It may be that inflammation (or the cause of the inflammation) ‘creates’ cancer cells.  But we don’t know if it helps them to reproduce or not. 

3. The cause of Generic Cancers is Environmental.

There is one more thing that’s important about generic cancers, although we don’t know the specific cause of an individual generic cancer; we do know the cause of most generic cancers in a general sense. The cause of generic cancer is ‘environmental’.

According to the book Cancer Mortality and Morbidity Patterns in the U.S. Population: An Interdisciplinary Approach , “The term environment refers not only to air, water, and soil but also to substances and conditions at home and at the workplace, including diet, smoking, alcohol, drugs, exposure to chemicals, sunlight, ionizing radiation, electromagnetic fields, infectious agents, etc. Lifestyle, economic and behavioral factors are all aspects of our environment.”

In other words, everything causes cancer.  Or did you already know that bit of nonsense?

Actually, the statement ‘cancer is environmental’ is easily mis-interpreted.  Cancer is caused by unhealthiness of the tissues, and the symptoms of cancer are malignant cells. Our cells don’t see the ‘the environment’.  Our cells only see what is next to them, in our bodily tissues.  That’s their environment, day in and day out.  Our tissues are the environment where our cells live.  Healthy tissues, healthy cells.  Unhealthy tissues, unhealthy cells. How healthy are your tissues?  How can you tell?  What can you do about it?

There are lots of opinions about how to health cancer.  Eat a healthy diet; minimize toxic foods, toxic air, exercise.  But really: what does science have to say?  What diet is healthiest for your tissues?  What research exists measuring the health of your tissues?  What research measures the effects of ‘healthy’ diet on your tissues? To be honest, I don’t know of any.  I’d love to be enlightened.

4. Generic Cancers have not yet metastasized.

Cancer starts as a single malignant cell.  Because all illness has a cause, it is very likely that the cause(s) that created a single malignant cell created more than one malignant cell.  Cancer doesn’t happen by accident. If a tissue is unhealthy enough to create a cancer cell, it is unlikely that it will create only a single cancer cell.

A cancer cell reproduces without restraint and creates clumps of cancer cells – called tumours.  If the cause created many cancer cells at once – there may be many cancerous tumours. Your body might detect many of the cancerous cells and remove them, leaving fewer cells to develop into tumours.

The cells in a tumour sometimes change again – in a way that releases them from the tumour and lets them to migrate through the body.  This is metastasis and these cells are called CTCs or Circulating Tumour Cells.  However, many cells that detach from the tumour are not likely to result in other tumours. “It is estimated, in fact, that among the cells that have been detached from the primary tumor, only the 0.01% can form metastases”, according to research published in the American Journal of Cancer Research.

Metastasis is hard for cancer. Most cancers never reach this stage. Generic cancers are cancers that have not yet metastasized. Most cancerous tumours do not kill.  Cancer does not usually kill until it metastasizes. Therefore:

Generic cancers don’t usually kill.  

Can that be true? Can it be true that generic cancers don’t usually kill?  If we define generic cancers as cancers as carcinomas, where we don’t know the cause, that have not metastasized, then they don’t usually kill.  However, we need to recognize that:

a)      Many people die from cancers.
b)      Most people who die from cancers die from cancers that have metastasized
c)      When people are diagnosed with cancer – 60 to 70 percent have cancer that has metastasized.

Researchers at Louisiana State University ”looked at more than a thousand autopsy cases and found 250 cases of cancer. Of those, 111, or 44 percent, had undiagnosed or misdiagnosed cancer tumors. Fiftyseven of the deaths were due to the cancer.”

That is to say, only 57 of 250 cancers ‘killed’ the patient. Most, over 77 percent of the cancers found, were cancers that didn’t kill. Even of the diagnosed cancers, only 41 percent of the diagnosed cancers were the cause of death.

So, in summary, generic cancers are:

- carcinomas – cancers of the epithelial tissues
- cancers where we do not know the individual cause
- cancers that are caused by environmental factors
- cancers that have not yet metastasized
- cancers that don’t usually result in death

Each cancer is individual. But in order to study generic cancer, we don’t need to study trees – we need to understand the forest.  The forest is the tissues of our body, where cells, and cancerous cells, live and grow.

I believe the only way to defeat cancer is to make the forest healthier – not try to kill selected cells – by making the forest, our tissues, less healthy.  We have an unhealthy view of cancer – that’s why we continue to fail in our cancer war.  We need to adopt a healthy view of cancer – to learn to create healthiness.

We need to health our bodies, instead of trying to ‘kill cancer’. We need to wake up our health, instead of trying to drug, hibernate, or kill our diseases.  

To your health, tracy
Founder: Healthcine.org

This post is the first of a series of posts about Generic Cancer as viewed by Healthicine.

The most common misconception about nutrition is that we actually know a lot about nutrition.

Fact: no-one studies healthy nutrition and diet in a serious, scientific fashion. 

We have lots of theories, lots of errors, lots of contradictions, but little true scientific testing in search of truth.

Virtually all of the scientific research into nutrition is ‘illness based’, not healthiness based.

This bias creates a lot of knowledge about specific diseases but little understanding of health.  When we research ‘illness’, we search for specific causes and specific cures.  Did you ever wonder why everything seems to be bad for you, and almost everything seems to be good for you as well?  This is a result of researching illness and ignoring healthiness.  Illnesses are ‘specific’.  Healthiness is general.  Lessons learned by studying illness are poor teachers when trying to attain healthiness.

As a result, we have many theories about nutrition that are repeated over and over, but are simply, clearly wrong.  Others are simply myths.  I distinguish between myths and wrong ideas in this post – although I suspect I have not done so in previous posts.  Although many people use the word myth to describe ‘wrong ideas’, I will use the word Myth for ideas that are widely believed, but not proven, and Error for ideas that have been proven wrong.

Some of the wrong theories include:

1. Error:  ”Calories in = calories out“. The truth – poo burns.  Normally, it contains about 20 percent fats, but we don’t have much research into how eating more, or less fat changes that ratio. Poo contains calories. So does sebum. So does urine if you are diabetic.  Both contain more if you have specific illnesses or if you consume specific diets.  Calories in = calories out math simply doesn’t work.  If we use it to estimate the weight based on averages in calorie consumption increases in the past two decades – the average weight would be about 900 pounds.

This Error is often stated differently: “Cutting calories will cause weight loss.”  Experiments have clearly shown that cutting calories, but consuming the wrong foods (eg. high in carbs) will continue to increase obesity.  Cutting back on the wrong foods does not make a difference to a poor diet. Unfortunately, figuring out what are ‘the right foods for you’ can be a huge challenge.

2. Myth: “Vegetarianism is a healthy diet” – vegetarianism is an ethical diet, marketed as a healthy diet.  It has been studied (a bit) to determine what illnesses might result, and what illnesses might benefit, but it has not been studied from a healthiness perspective.  It is very easy for someone who is not a vegetarian to switch to vegetarianism and choose a very unhealthy diet without realizing it.

At the same time, there has been little study of an all meat diet, because it is not seen as an ethical diet. There have been some studies – which found an all meat diet can also decrease illness and may improve healthiness in specific cases.  But the studies are so few and so limited – that, as most studies conclude “more study is required”.

3. Myth: “Breakfast is the most important meal.” There is no significant evidence to support this, nor any other eating pattern for optimal healthiness.  Of course it can always be said that breakfast is the most important meal – when we recognize that every meal ‘breaks the previous fast’, even if our lunch or dinner is actually our ‘beakfast’. For some people, breakfast is essential to get started, for others, breakfast can easily be left aside until lunchtime or later. Nobody has attempted to measure which of those ‘types’ are healthiest, nor if their healthiness is caused by their eating patterns.

We don’t scientifically test eating times and their effects on healthiness.  Hospitals provide food ‘when it is convenient’, not on a schedule to improve or maximize healing or healthiness. When we truly know which eating patterns were healthiest, hospitals will want to know, and senior’s homes might need to change their schedules.  It may well turn out that simple eating plans are not as healthy as more complex, diverse eating plans.

4. Myth: “Drink eight glasses of water a day for health” Where did this myth come from? You might find the answer here “The mysterious origins of the “8 glasses of water a day” rule“, where the author reports: “The origins of the “8 glasses of water a day” rule was explored by Dr. Heinz Valtin in a 2002 article and Dr. Tsindos  in a 2012 article. After extensive searches of the published literature, they found absolutely no scientific evidence for the idea that most people need to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day.” How much water should you drink? At the very least, you should listen to your body and let it decide.  If you are suffering a headache – the morning after, you are probably suffering from dehydration as your body tried to remove toxins by urinating.  Drink some water.

5. Myth: “Vitamins are dangerous.”  More people die from drinking too much water – than from taking too many vitamins.  Vitamins are called vitamins because they are essential to health – but then it gets complicated.  Really complicated. All vitamins are studied in isolation – studies of combinations are much more difficult.  Scientific studies of vitamins are tested against illness – to determine if they cause, or cure illness. Many nutritional studies were designed to ensure that prisoners don’t get sick.

There are no vitamin studies that test changes in ‘healthiness’. Because of the focus on illness, much vitamin research is ignored.  For example, a deficiency of Vitamin C results in scurvy (in theory) – but this research ignores that fact that a diet of meats alone does not result in scurvy, even though the Vitamin C consumed is much less than required to prevent scurvy on a carb diet.

Many so called ‘vitamins’ are actually chemicals created to ‘act like’ natural vitamins – and these are poorly studied with regards to healthiness and illness. It is certainly possible that some of these vitamins are dangerous.

The Food Myth, is the common myth that eating the right foods will provide all the nutrients required for optimal healthiness.  It is simply, a myth – that has been disproved by science many times, and will undoubtedly be disproved again and again.

When we are truly interested in learning about healthiness of vitamins and minerals, we will study which vitamin combinations improve healthiness the most – and study their relationships to different dietary regimens.

6. Myth: “Lean meats are good for your heart” - there is no scientific evidence that lean meats are healthier than fatty meats.  The same goes for other low fat foods (milk and cheese).  If anything, the science demonstrates the opposite. The avoid fat concept is simply a misunderstanding on how fat is created in our bodies – fat is created from sugars. The lean meat myth was created by the American Heart Association, and is actively maintained by them in full view of much scientific evidence to the contrary. It has become fundamental to their fundraising operations – and it is unlikely they can change without losing a lot of face – and possibly a lot of money. Most people who restrict themselves to ‘lean meats’ compensate with high glycemic foods like bread, pasta, and sugar. These foods are far worse for your heart and circulatory system than fatty foods.

7. Error: “Fiber is an essential nutrient for health.”  Fiber is not an essential nutrient – in fact, it is not even a nutrient. It is likely that fiber is important for specific dietary regimes, or specific purposes, but is completely useless in other diets.  We simply don’t know and there is little scientific research that tests the fiber theories across different diets.  Fiber is typically suggested to resolve illnesses that cannot be clearly diagnosed, not to improve healthiness.

8. Error: “You need to consume sugar for your brain to function.” This is a misconception that is proved wrong by the simple act of fasting. Your blood supply runs out of dietary sugar in less than a day. Your brain has no problem functioning for weeks.

9. Error: “Fasting is unhealthy.”  Short term fasts are prescribed for blood tests, etc, but many doctors claim that fasting is unhealthy or simply does not enhance healthiness.  The simple truth is that we don’t test overall healthiness, we don’t measure overall healthiness, and we don’t know the facts about fasting either. Sleeping, frankly is fasting. And it’s healthy.  You might wonder how long someone can fast ‘safely’?  The answer is simply, ‘it depends’.  There are different types of fasts, and different people.  If you ask Google, you might think that the longest fast is just over 40 days.  But no. Here is a scientific report of a therapeutic fast that lasted 382 days.   The patient started at over 400 pounds and emerged a healthy weight of 180 pounds.  Fasting can be unhealthy – so can crossing the street.

10. Myth: “Toxins in foods are not at levels dangerous to your health.” Many foods contain toxins.  We know this.  Many foods contain ‘natural toxins’ that the plants develop to fight insects. What the toxins do to our bodies, whether they build up or are excreted is poorly studied.

Toxins come in many forms and might be natural, coming from nature, or unnatural, created by man.  Many GMO ‘foods‘ contain designer toxins.  So do most patented medicines. Every day, more chemicals are created and used on foods and in our environment.

Studies of toxins are extremely weak.  We don’t even have scientific agreement on simple questions like ‘is fluoridated water healthy, or unhealthy?’ We have many studies on the toxicity of fluoride and very few studies that suggest it may prevent dental caries. But no studies on healthiness of fluoride.  However,  in many communities – fluoride is routinely added to drinking water.

Conclusions:

a) Simple rules are not so simple, and often not accurate. Take all advice with a grain of salt – I recommend natural salt. But I also recommend that you make your own decisions.

b) Studying illness to create healthiness is a poor choice, resulting in many simple errors.

c) If we want to learn about health – we need to study healthiness.

to your health, tracy
Healthicine

This post is based on my answer to a Quora question “What should everyone know about nutrition?” Click the link if you wish to see my initial response and other responses to the question. But be warned – many people who replied to the question repeated the errors and myths listed here. These myths are well established.

If a super-intelligent alien was to visit our planet and search for a scientific theory of illness, she might conclude the our prevailing theory consists of “sell the drugs” and “damn the consequences”. She might also know that the scientific theory of illness consists of:

Illness Theory #1: Every illness has a cause. 

Definition: a PRIMARY or SIMPLE ILLNESS is an illness that has a single cause.  A non-primary illness is an illness with more than one cause.

Definition: an UNHEALTHINESS is an imbalance (a deficiency or an excess) in healthiness that is not severe enough to be classified as an illness. 

Definition: Healthiness is the opposite of unhealthiness. When healthiness increases, unhealthiness decreases.  When unhealthiness increases, healthiness decreases.

Does our medical system have a theory of illness?  You might be surprised to learn that there is no prevailing scientific theory of illness. There are many so-called theories of illness, but none that achieve the simple theoretical reality of a scientific theory.  Illness seems to be everywhere in practice, but it is nowhere in theory.

Why is there no scientific theory of illness? 

eNotes says: “Anthropologists often divide theories of illness into two broad categories: personalistic and naturalistic.  In a personalistic system, illness is believed to be caused by the intervention of a sensate agent who may be a supernatural being (a deity or dead ancestor) or a human being with special powers (a witch or a sorcerer)… Naturalistic theories of disease causation tend to view health as a state of harmony between a human being and his or her environment; when this balance is upset, illness will result.”

Neither of these classes of theories of illness contains the simplicity and clarity required for a useful scientific theory of illness.  And neither is recognized by the medical establishment as a clear, useful theory of illness.

“Personalistic” theories are basically superstitions that might be used to explain anything – but not in a scientific manner.

“Naturalistic” theories are closer to being useful, but as defined above are quite limited.  For example,  they do not consider that illness can come from failure of internal harmonies, not just harmonies with external forces. They also tend to measure illness as binary – either balance is maintained, or balance is upset.  But illness can clearly exist as a state of balance, and a balance that one person considers to be healthy might easily be judged as an illness by another.

You might find the book: Theories of Illness: A World Survey, by George Peter Murdock, which claims to be “An important contribution to medical anthropology, this work defines the principal causes if illness that are reported throughout the world, distinguishing those involving natural causation from the more widely prevalent hypotheses advancing supernatural explanations”.

But this book is not about illness.  It not a scientific exploration of ‘theories of illness’, it is, instead a ‘history (anthropology) of the many theories of illness throughout different societies throughout history’. We can quickly see from a scan of the chapter titles that this book does not aim to represent any single theory of illness, rather it presents as many as the authors can discuss. It is, as stated in the forward: “a landmark of comparative studies”.

If we are to have a scientific theory of illness, we need a theory that is independent of the opinions of specific patients, with specific illnesses, and independent of specific doctors with specific cures.  The theory of illness needs to be independent of any theories of treatments or cures.

This brings up an interesting question:  Who decides if you have an illness?  Can you decide?  Can your spouse, your friends, or your priest decide? Or does it require a doctor to identify the illness before it exists as an illness?  And what if two doctors happen to disagree?  Is there a court that decides if you have an illness or not?  We don’t really have much need for a ‘judge’ to decide based on arguments from two (or more) sides, but it is clear that deciding who has an illness is not a trivial question.

In this discussion of illness and the theory of illness, I will use the assumption that you have an illness when a doctor issues a diagnosis of a medical condition. That is the definition that is in primary use in the medical system.

Now, let’s put the definition of an illness aside, and ask a simpler question.  Assuming you have an illness, what are the most important questions to ask about that illness? Which of these might speak to an overall ‘theory of illness’?

If you have an illness, the first questions you will want to consider are: “am I going to live” followed by “how bad is it?”  Neither of these questions speak to a general theory of illness – both are personal and answers are different for every individual illness.

The next question is “what is the best treatment for this illness?”  This question, and the answer do not provide a theory of illness. The best treatment may depend on many factors, not just the type of illness present.

Finally, you might ask “what caused this illness?”  So that you, and your family and your communities, might avoid this illness in the future.  Knowing the cause might also indicate what treatments will be most effective. Again, each illness has a different cause, and the same illness might have a different cause in different circumstances.

We can find the beginnings of a theory of illness in the last question.

“what caused this illness” – implies an underlying awareness that illness has a cause. This gives us the first theory of illness.

Illness Theory #1: Every illness has a cause. 

It is interesting to note that this simple theory encompasses virtually all of the theories of illness, from the ‘germ theory’, to all of the ‘personalistic’ and ‘naturalistic’ theories. It might be argued that this theory is too simplistic. However, this argument quickly becomes moot when we use this fundamental theory to move forward in our understanding of illness. This theory is the foundation theories of illness. This theory is simple because we need a simple, solid foundation to build upon.

When we look at causes of illness – in general as opposed to specific illnesses, one thing quickly becomes clear. Illness can be caused by deficiencies.  Illness can also be caused by excesses. Many theories of illness and of healthiness strive to maintain ‘balance’.  Balance lies between deficiency and excess. There might be deficiencies or excesses of nutrients, of exercise, of sensations, of many many factors.  They might be, if you believe in personalistic theories, caused by an excess of bad wishes from someone who wants you to be sick.