Cancer is a process that has always effected animals, it is just as common in domestic and farm animals, birds and fishes as it is in humans. Western scientific medicine has been effective in minimising infectious diseases. Many of us are living longer and cancer has almost been accepted as a normal feature of
ageing process. But statistics do not bear this out. The incidence of cancer is increasing in all age groups.Because cancer cells take some time to grow to a stage where they are a large enough mass to be identifiable, it might be 18 months to 3 years, even 30 years before disease is diagnosed by a doctor. By then we can be more than half-way down path to a terminal illness. Due to our psychological make-up we are often immobilised by news.
We tend to minimise it or deny that it has happened to us. We get depressed. 'Why me?' A cycle of immobilisation - minimisation - depression often occurs. Those who do break out of it and manage to accept reality start testing for options, often 'against clock' find out that cancer is an awesome and complex subject providing a great example of opening a 'whole can of worms'. Information overload, specialist language, ignorance of alternatives, vested interest, lack of co-operation, paradigm gaps, lack of access to specific information or treatment and a host of barriers such as language translation exist that prevent understanding problem let alone latest research.
Since an allopathic doctor (Western surgical doctor) is generally first point of contact for this dis-ease, cancer is mostly treated only with chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery and more recent biological breakthroughs in hormone treatment. Despite billions spent on research these are basically same options we had fifty years ago. Essentially basic treatment of cancer has not changed for many years.
Orthodox treatments for cancer can be brutal and expensive but in face of scientific medical evidence are best we have. Solid information on alternatives is confusing, contradictory, unproved and unsupported by current medical models. Many medical doctors view alternatives or complementary approaches with doubt. Those that do endorse them do so mainly because they might enhance patients quality of life or contribute to palliative care (palliative: 'relieving pain or alleviating a problem without dealing with cause').
Many complementary and alternative practitioners point out that allopathic cancer treatments are only palliative because they treat effects without looking at causes. An example is using pain killers to take away a headache. Although it is highly useful and very convenient it is no guarantee that headache won't re-occur. Similarly orthodox treatment of cancer is more concerned with treating dis-ease than patient.
How does it start? In cancer, a cell, or group of cells, loses touch with where it is in scheme of things, its 'synergy', and starts replicating for itself. The word synergy comes from Greek 'sunergos', meaning 'working together'. Synergy is interaction of two or more agents, that produces an combined effect greater than sum of their separate effects, in this case - us. All cells in a healthy body work together to give us life. They exist as unique individual cells in their own right but also have a higher function, contributing to life-form of which they are part. Every one of two thousand billion cells in our bodies has as many working parts as a passenger airliner so it is quite usual for some of these cells to suffer damage.
We all have potential for cancer. Even a healthy body carries about 10,000 malignant cells and a fully functioning immune system will remove them. But what do cells 'get' that change them, click them out of whole system of our body to become selfish and self-replicating?
