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.
Pingback: Generic Cancer: Part 2: Is “generic cancer” a disease of the cells, or a disease of the tissues? | Healthicine
Pingback: Generic Cancer Part 3: Love your cancer – love it to health! | Healthicine