A Cure For Cancer?

Did you know may have discovered and successfully used a cure for cancer? You used it on yourself without ever knowing it. Millions probably share the cure with you, but none of you will ever get credit.

More likely, some researcher will get a Nobel in medicine for putting the puzzle together, but she or he won’t have done more than collect information after the fact.

And it probably won’t change things as much as you think.

First obstacle is the medical establishment and drug companies thriving on your being dependent on them for cures, not those you get for free. And there’s the mindset I first read about in Ivan Illich’s indictment of the health care system, Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health.

It’s become more entrenched. You’re not naturally healthy and whole, it says. Only a doctor can make that decision. Illich makes clear, not just how much this disempowers individuals, but, devastatingly, how unearned the credit is.

The medical establishment has a spotty record on its unselfish contribution to health.

We don’t know how many patients die, for example, from the rigors of chemotherapy or other “cures,” since no one really asks the right questions about iatrogenesis (illness caused by medical examination or treatment), but for perspective, the generally accepted number of patients who die from infections attracted after being admitted to hospitals alone, a form of iatrogenesis, is about 100,000 annually. That’s double the number who die in car accidents.

A radical, but rational view is that, just as with infections, the medical establishment doesn’t try hard enough to encourag any cure (like simple hand-washing) not connected to profits.

Conversation About A Cure For Cancer

One sunny afternoon, high up in the Alps, I had a chance to talk casually with a research biologist I’d recently meant. No chance for intrusions by telephones, buzzers, city traffic or anything else.

My book, A Million Different Things: Meditations Of The World’s Happiest Man was already a fixture at the chalet where a group of us were staying. I’d taken some fairly radical positions in it, but wrote very little about health, although the subject and the abundance of misinformation about it fascinated me for years,

So, I started by telling her, “I suspect there might be more spontaneous remissions from cancer than we realize.”

Her answer was surprising: “We know there are. When we look at cancers and find they’ve metastasized, we sometimes can’t find the original sight.”

In other words, she and her fellow researchers found secondary cancers in people where the primary cancer had vanished without ever having been detected. The implications were mind-bending.

Think of it this way – the secondary cancers were found only because researchers were looking for them. The primary cancers without metastasis would never have been known about, otherwise.

Although the medical profession claims spontaneous remissions are few in number, everyone agrees that they occur. As far as I can find, there is no hard science behind the published estimate of one in four-hundred cases.

For obvious reasons, the tiny number can do nothing more than reflect the reported number seen among people under the observation or care of doctors. It says absolutely nothing about those who went into remission without a doctor (or anyone else) knowing about it.

Based on what my biologist friend told me, there is no reason to believe that more cancers are cured by medical treatment than in the absence of it. We may cure ourselves all the time before symptoms give us enough concern to make a doctor appointment.

The truth is, we don’t know what the real number is, and so few of us have autopsies or other post mortem tests, we might never know.

Possible Explanations Of The Cure For Cancer

Here’s a recorded scenario: A doctor tells a woman she has advanced cancer and, at best, six months to live. Six months later, she returns, cancer free. She spent hours imagining the cancer melting away as she regained full health, and her faith in its happening was strong.

No one knows if her visualizing healing sparked the cure, but we do know from placebo research that simple confidence that a treatment will work seems to be just as effective as the treatment itself.

It has been shown in blind tests that sugar pills can be associated clinical results as effect as real medicines. What’s never been adequately explained is how or why. Whatever mechanism there is that comes into play in restoring or securing health remains mysterious.

The truth of how we heal is not as clear as prescription dispensing physicians hope to convince us. Recent studies that show that rich social lives, happy marriages and confidence increase health, and we’re led to a fair conclusion that something is in the works besides or in place of administered chemistry and medically sanctioned treatments.

Three other possibilities come to mind:

• Our immune systems generate the symptoms we call “illness.” Our bodies have evolved astonishingly effective protections against viruses, germs and other invaders, even among the fifty trillion cells making up our microbiomes. Within microbiomes (the totality of microbes and their genetic elements active in and on our bodies), we already know that some bacteria interact with others with what appears to be control or regulation to prevent harm. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that a curative system response to cancers doesn’t play a role when tumors arise.
• Epigenetics, separated from the New Age fantastic stories of Bruce Lipton, may play a role in causing as well as curing cancer, heart and other diseases. Epigenetics, simply, is about changes in the underlying DNA sequence in every cell that occurs outside or “above” the cell. It’s a relatively new field of research that may return powerful insights. (See more here: Epigenetics).
• Another term you may never have heard of – apoptosis – may be a cause for cancer and a clue to its cure. Apoptosis is cell death, a programmed part of a cell’s life cycle that allows used up cells to be whisked away and replaced by fresh material. If the switch in a cell or group of cells that starts the process fails to fire, the uncontrolled growth of cells, many of them passed their useful lifespan, related to cancers may be initiated. That genetic trigger may also stop a cancer or even be used to tell existing cancer cells to kill themselves. A magic switch might be a key to the whole thing.

Last Thoughts On A Cure For Cancer

It’s impossible to exaggerate the implications of figuring out how we cure ourselves of cancers. As with placebos, we know something effective happens, but we don’t yet know what. Maybe it’s within something suggested above or simply an accident.

A cancer might just peter out, or just as likely, our attitudes and lifestyles may be sufficient to chase cancers away.

We don’t know for sure, but the lack of real progress by the medical/pharmaceutical establishment in reducing new or fatal cancers suggests that they are no more enlightened than we are. It’s possible that sheer confidence in our ability to heal is the best medicine of all

In the meantime, it makes sense to cultivate lifestyles we know to be healthful. Make and keep as many genuine friendships as we can. Commit to a life partner. Be an optimist. And certainly retain confidence in your body and its ability to successfully adjust illness.

Eat well. Be happy. Love and be loved as freely and generously as you can.

That prescription may be more effective than anything you doctor scratches out for you. And who knows, you may already forced a cancer into remission or protected yourself from getting one at all.

David Stone

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