The Nature of Cancer: Why Some Tumors Are Deadly

The CDC suggests that “To lose weight, you must use up more calories than you take in. Since one pound of body fat contains approximately 3,500 calo-ries, you need to reduce your caloric intake by 500-1000 calories per day to lose about 1-2 pounds per week.” This is fairly standard advice that you can find repeated the world over by doctors and dieticians, and reported in magazines, textbooks, and news-papers.

Medications that lower blood glucose, like insulin, are the standard treatment for type 2 diabetes. Over time, patients usually require higher and higher doses of these medications. If you’re taking more insulin, then it’s pretty obvious that your type 2 diabetes has become more severe. Yet we in the medical community (researchers, doctors) simply maintain the position that type 2 diabetes is a chronic and progressive disease, and that’s just the way things are.

Cancer is deadly because of its propensity to spread, or metas-tasize. Cancer is deadly because it moves, not because it is big. Cancers that don’t metastasize are called “benign” because they very rarely cause significant disease. Cancers that do metastasize are called “malignant” because of their tendency to kill.

The very common lipoma, affecting approximately 2 percent of fifty-year-olds, is a benign cancer of fat cells. It may grow to weigh up to fifty pounds. Yet despite this enormous bulk, this benign cancer is still not life-threatening. A malignant melanoma (a type of skin cancer), however, may weigh only 0.1 pound and be thousands of times deadlier because of its predisposition to spread. Once unchained, many cancers become unstoppable.

For this reason, local cancer treatments such as surgery or radiation are of limited efficacy once a cancer has metastasized. Surgeons go to great lengths in the quest to “get it all.” They will cut huge swaths of normal tissue out of cancer patients to remove even the faintest rumor of a whiff of cancer cells. Surgery for cancer is performed to prevent metastasis, not because the cancer is too big.

A cancer medication’s ability to shrink a tumor is immaterial to overall patient survival. A drug that destroys half the tumor is no better than surgery to remove half the cancer-in other words, almost completely useless. Getting half the cancer is no better than getting none of it.

Cancer is, improbably, a disease unlike any other we’ve ever faced. It is not an infection. It is not an autoimmune disease. It is not a vascular disease. It is not a disease of toxins. Cancer is originally derived from our own cells but develops into an alien species.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus, translated in 1930, contained the medical teachings of the Egyptian physician Im-hotep, who lived around 2625 BC. It describes a case of a “bulging mass in the breast” that was cool and hard to the touch.

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing around 440 BC, describes Atossa, the queen of Persia, who likely suffered from inflammatory breast cancer. In a thousand-year-old grave site in Peru, mummified remains show a bone tumor, preserved by the dry desert climate.

Cancer was first understood as an exuberant, unregulated, and uncontrolled growth of tissue. Normal tissues have well-defined growth patterns. A normal kidney, for example, grows from birth until adulthood and then stops. It then simply maintains its size, unless other diseases intervene. A normal kidney does not continue growing throughout life until it is so big that it takes up the entire abdominal space. Cancer cells, however, will continue growing until they die or you do.

Cancers are usually divided into benign and malignant varieties. Benign cancers grow, but they don’t metastasize. Some examples are lipomas and basal cell carcinomas of the skin. These may become huge, but we aren’t overly concerned about benign cancers, because they are rarely deadly. It is the ability to move and spread, or metastasize, that is responsible for the majority of cancer deaths.

The many types of cancers (breast, colorectal, prostate, lung, myeloma, etc.) are generally named for their cell of origin. There are likely as many types of cancers as types of cells in the body. These cancers both continue growing without limit and have the ability to leave the site of origin to reestablish at a distant site.

All cancers are derived from normal cells. Breast cancer originates from normal breast cells. Prostate cancer originates from normal prostate cells. Skin cancer originates from normal skin cells. This is the particularly vexing and unusual part of cancer-that it originally derives from ourselves. Cancer is not a foreign invader. It’s an internal uprising. The war on cancer is a war on ourselves.

The biggest problem with both surgery and radiation is that they are inherently local treatments. If a cancer remained localized, then these treatments were effective, but if a cancer had metastasized, these local treatments offered little hope of recovery. Luckily, development of a more systemic treatment using chemicals (drugs) had continued concurrently.

Most chemotherapy drugs are selective poisons, preferentially killing fast-growing cells. Because cancer cells are fast growing, they are particularly susceptible to chemotherapy. If you were lucky, you could kill the cancer before you killed the patient.

Fast-growing normal cells, like hair follicles and the lining of the stomach and intestines, also sustained collateral damage, leading to the well-known side effects of baldness and nausea/vomiting.

Newer medications, such as many of the targeted antibodies, are not often referred to as “chemotherapy” because of the negative connotations associated with the classic medications.

If the problem is too much growth, then the solution is to kill. In order to kill, you need weapons of cellular mass destruction for cutting (surgery), burning (radiation), and poisoning (chemotherapy). For localized cancer, you could use locally destructive methods (surgery or radiation). For metastatic cancers, you need systemic poisons (chemotherapy).

Source : The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery by Jason Fung

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52163526-the-cancer-code