Cancer is not some foreign invader which has to be cut, burned or poisoned in hopes that it will die before
patient dies. No, cancer is simply a temporoary malfunction in your normal cell division process.Each of has about 75 trillion cells in our body. Virtually all of them replace themselves many times during our lifetimes. How many cells? Well, it's 75,000,000,000,000. That's a lot. They have various life cycles, but in about 7 years, they have all been regenerated. Amazing? I'll say!
So, on an average day, about 29 billion cells in your body replace themselves by dividing in two. One of cells resulting from that division dies off.
CELL DAMAGE OR "MUTATION"
In our bodies all day every day are lots of "free radicals." These little rascals are molecules which have one unpaired oxygen electron in their atomic makeup. They are produced by our digestive system, air we breathe, food we eat, water we drink and so on. In other words, we can't avoid them.
These "free radicals" bounce around, bumping into normal cells, and, in process, damaging normal cells DNA. Literally millions of our dividing cells get damaged every day -- some by free radicals, some by viruses and some by just normal cell breakdown due to aging or inherited gene mutation (this latter is rare). Fortunately, our cell division policing process recognizes these "incorrect" cell divisions and kills them off, most of time.
HOW WE "GET" CANCER
About a million or so of damaged cells each day are damaged in such a way that "oncogenes," hundred or so genes (out of 33,000 or so in each cell's DNA) which control cell death, get damaged. When this happens, cell begins to grow out of control. It becomes a cancer cell. Our immune system (about 20 trillion cells strong) normally recognizes this and takes care of it every day, until it can't anymore. Then, we "get" cancer.
Actually, all of us "have" cancer every day. It is controlled and gives us no symptoms. When symptoms (a tumor, for example) show up, it means that our metabolism (cell division and cell death)has temporarily broken down. A tumor with a billion cells is about size of period at end of this sentence. By time a tumor is diagnosed, it has usually been growing for from 5 to 12 years. Far from a death sentence or something requiring instant, emergency, radical treatment, this "getting" cancer is a wakeup call.
The key to understanding and controlling cancer is that it is a "systemic" problem. Our entire system has broken down. Killing cancer cells (with chemotherapy and radiation, for example) is not going to restore our system to its normal balance. In fact, those "treatments" simply make condition worse by severely damaging what is left of our immune system.
Once one understands this, our current conventional cancer treat- ment system makes no sense.
WHAT DO ONCOLOGISTS DO?
An "oncologist" is supposed to be a cancer doctor. But their training and practice does not include studying and understanding cancer cell and its relationship to rest of body's cellular mechanics and communication. Cellular biology is a very complex and fascinating body of knowledge which is growing rapidly.
