Alternative Medicine - January 2001

Causes of Cancer

Why is there so much cancer today? In the vast majority of cases, the simple fact is that people are being poisoned to death, due to overwhelming numbers of carcinogens in our air, water, food and medicines. Nutritional deficiencies, ionizing radiation, parasites, the unrelenting stress of modern life and other factors further diminish our bodies' ability to detoxify. This compromises our immune system and leaves us vulnerable, not only to cancer but also to the modern day epidemic of degenerative diseases from which few families are spared.

Cancer is a group of more than 100 related diseases, typified by two characteristics. First, in cancer, normal cells mutate into "undifferentiated," abnormal cells. By contrast, normal liver cells, for example, simply perform their specialized programmed activity involved in liver functioning: They are created, exist and die in accordance with their assigned purpose. But when a liver cell mutates into into a cancer cell, it loses its identity as a liver cell-it is no longer differentiated by its use specific to that organ.

The second characteristic of cancer cells is their uncontrolled proliferation: their tendency to infiltrate and destroy adjacent tissues, and to eventually be transported by the bloodstream to distant parts of the body (metastasize)-where they create secondary tumors and ultimately destroy the host.

The cause of cancer, then, would be the toxins, organisms or conditions that trigger a mutation in a normal cell's DNA, creating an abnormal cell, which is characterized by uncontrolled growth and loss of differentiation. Or conversely, the cause of cancer could be considered the conditions in the body that make the cells susceptible to mutation by carcinogens.

But cancer could also be considered a deficiency of our immune system. Out of the millions of cells that our body creates every day, some are bound to have abnormalities-and out of the trillion of cells that our body contains, some are bound to mutate. Our immune system has mechanisms designed to recognize the mutated or abnormal cells as "not-self" and destroy them. We get cancer when our immune system does not recognize and destroy cancer cells, allowing them to proliferate instead.