Cancer: what you can do

Latest figures show that almost one in two men and one in three women will contract it in their lives (this does not necessarily mean terminal cancer). Whereas the media continue to trumpet endless "breakthroughs", fed to them by the drug industry and charities with an interest in keeping the pot boiling, the picture still remains fairly bleak. Apart from one or two select cancers, such as childhood leukaemia or testicular cancer, survival rates have improved hardly at all in over a century.

The problem is that the medical profession has been going at it the wrong way. While ever the standard of treatment is to blaze head on at the disease with destructive surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, there is little hope this picture will ever change. The general philosophy seems to be "kill everything", in an attempt to wipe out the last tiny cancer cell, and of course the body suffers greatly in this silly and abusive process. You only have to look at pictures of war torn battlefields to realize that the terrain suffers just as much as the soldiers in this kind of all-out onslaught. You would be right to suspect as many people have their lives shortened by the "treatment" as by the cancer!

Doctors seem incapable or unwilling to consider Nature's way of doing things. Coupled with the fact that drug companies are interested mainly in "research" which leads to more staggering profits rather than new directions, not surprisingly, there has been a deadlock in progress that has cost many hundreds of millions of lives. However, the picture has just begun to improve a little. At last there have been attempts to try and understand the mechanics of the life process, and tumour growth in particular, and how Nature's wisdom can be harnessed to advantage, instead of over-ridden.

One such idea has been to bond the damaging chemo-substance onto some inactive carrier which makes it harmless to the ordinary cells. But by using anti-cancer cell antibodies to take the key which "unbonds" right to the tumour, this means the chemo-substance is released ONLY in the tumour, which is where it is needed. It's like delivering a parcel bomb to the exact house you want to demolish, leaving the rest of the street intact! An even simpler idea is to set the "bomb" to go off when oxygen levels drop, because cancer cells don't like oxygen and live only where there is less of it (partly because they outgrow the blood vessels which supply them with oxygen and nutrients). Another bright idea has been to use the antibody weapon to trick tumour into taking up a substance which sensitizes the cancer cells to light and then shining lasers on the tumour. As before, the ordinary cells are left unharmed.

Until these newer "smart" strategies become commonplace, you or your loved ones will probably continue to be faced with difficult choices, due to out-of-date thinking.

What you can do

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