Like many diseases, cancer is not something that develops overnight. It’s a gradual process that happens over years, often starting at the cellular level, deep within the body’s tissues. It is a type of dysregulation that disrupts the communication system among cells. While there is still a dialogue between the cell and body, it’s not as direct or straightforward as the communication between normal, healthy cells.
What Turns a Healthy Cell Cancerous?
In simple terms, cancer is the uncontrolled growth and spreading of abnormal cells. A cancer cell is one that starts to function on its own — it’s no longer regulated by the body. Essentially, cancer becomes its own entity, with its own regulatory, metabolic, and immune systems. The cancer cells shift from functioning as part of a larger whole to focusing solely on their own independent survival.
This abnormal survival response can be caused by numerous factors. There are a great array of reasons and processes that can lead to such a shift, from genetics and epigenetics to the environment, lifestyle and toxicity of various origins.
A key component of stopping cancer growth and implementing therapeutic strategies is understanding a cancerous cell’s metabolic changes. The most important of these is the Warburg effect — when cancer cells create a hypoxic environment and shift to aerobic glycolysis even in the presence of oxygen. This metabolic shift inhibits programmed cell death (apoptosis), meaning your cells are unable to complete their life cycle.
This shift also activates the development of new blood vessels (angiogenesis), which allow the primary tumor to grow and metastasize rapidly. It gives the cancer the ability to manipulate its environment. These are all consequences of the survival response of the individual cell — it changes its metabolism to address the crisis, blocks apoptosis to avoid death, creates angiogenesis to allow for additional blood supply, evades the immune system, and creates a favorable environment for cancer growth.
Here’s what this might look like: a stomach cell may no longer want to fulfill its role in the stomach, and a brain cell may no longer want to fulfill its function in the brain. The cell wants to survive at any cost, and it no longer recognizes that its life cycle includes death. It doesn’t recognize its natural environment as a safe and friendly place, and this triggers a survival response. As a result, it isolates itself from the rest of the body by creating a protective microenvironment, or a “shell.”
When a cell is isolated, it no longer has proper communication with other cells and no longer sees itself as part of a larger community. It goes rogue and begins to obtain its own blood supply and nutrition. It starts to grow independently and rapidly, even using alternate metabolic pathways.
It’s as though it refuses to listen to other cells, decides it’s going to be in charge of itself, and takes control over its survival. These rogue cells become more aggressive and attack the host, eventually spreading throughout the body.
How Cancer Evades Treatment
Cancer is notorious for its ability to evade treatment. Even when one approach proves effective, ongoing mutations allow the disease to shield its vulnerabilities, resist drug protocols, and continue growing. For this reason, conventional oncologists often attack cancer with a variety of aggressive approaches: surgery, chemotherapy, radiation. In alternative medicine, this is called the “cut, poison, and burn approach.”
Sometimes this conventional approach works. In my clinical experience of seeing hundreds of cancer patients, however, what is most effective is a dynamic, individualized treatment program designed to fight the cancer and promote the patient’s health simultaneously.
As I mentioned above, cancer does everything it can to survive, grow, and invade healthy tissues. Therefore, we must be highly strategic to overcome the disease, and to do this, we need to combine the most powerful tactics at our disposal. Western medicine provides an impressive toolbox, but it often has its limits.
Fighting Cancer
For optimal clinical outcome, an individualized combination of targeted therapies that work together synergistically to fight cancer and support health, is the wisest approach. It can work by enhancing the effectiveness of conventional treatments, limiting their toxicity and damaging effects, and supporting a patient’s overall health and vitality, a key component often ignored during conventional treatments.
The guiding principles of treating cancer involve trying to harmonize the body, moving it from survival to safety and from survival to harmony with optimal hydration, nourishing foods, exercise, sleep, meditation, and creative outlets. It’s important to bring meaning into our lives, so we connect with our heart and allow life to flow.
For my cancer prevention and treatment strategies, click here to read my blog Powerful Natural Treatments for Cancer.
