Cancer Fighting Foods
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LIMITATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC MEDICINES
Chemotherapy involves poisoning the rapidly growing cancer cells which also destroys rapidly growing healthy cells in the bone marrow, gastro-intestinal tract etc, and can cause organ damage, like liver, kidneys, heart, lungs etc. Side effects of chemotherapy can include nausea, diarrhoea, fatigue and loss of hair. Radiation while destroying cancer cells also burns, scars and damages healthy cells, tissues and organs. Side effects of radiation include redness and irritation of the skin in the area being treated, diarrhoea, shortness of breath, tiredness and cough.
Initial treatment with chemotherapy and radiation will often reduce tumour size. However, prolonged use of chemotherapy and radiation may not result in more tumour destruction. When the body has too much toxic burden from chemotherapy and radiation, the immune system is either compromised or destroyed, hence the person can succumb to various kinds of infections and complications. Chemotherapy and radiation can cause cancer cells to mutate and become resistant and difficult to destroy. Surgery can also cause cancer cells to spread to other sites.
Western medicine treating symptoms of a specific disease by a specific drug or an intervention is marvellously effective in a crisis. But it rapidly reveals its limits when dealing with a chronic illness and its root causes. Chemotherapy kills cancer cells but it also kills intestinal and immune cells as well as hair follicles. It can also lead to sterility. Cancer chemotherapy may in some people severely damage the brain, killing crucial brain cells and causing key parts of the brain to shrink according to recent studies. The studies also suggest that the phenomenon of chemobrain — the mental fuzziness, memory loss and cognitive impairment often reported by cancer patients but often dismissed by oncologists — is a serious problem.
Cancer is a quintessential disease. Many doctors now believe that it is unlikely that we can stamp it out by focusing all our efforts on new techniques of screening and simply targeting tumours. In order to prevent or overcome the disease over the longterm, the “terrain” (environment) must be changed: diet corrected, mental attitude altered and the body strengthened by exercise.
As emphasized by the 2007 report of the World Cancer Research Fund, approaches reinforcing the body’s defence mechanisms — such as nutrition and exercise – are at the same time truly preventive and essential contributions to treatment. Because they rely on natural processes, they dissolve the frontiers between prevention and treatment. On one hand they prevent the micro tumours we all carry in us from developing (prevention). On the other hand they enhance the benefits of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy in the prevention of relapse (treatment.)
Renē Dubos of RockfellerUniversity in New York is considered one of the great twentieth-century thinkers in biology. He had “always felt that the only trouble with scientific medicines is that these are not scientific enough. Modern medicine will become really scientific only when physicians and their patients have learned to manage the forces of the body and the mind that operate via “medicatrix naturae” (the healing power of nature).
From this point of view, we are paradoxically, unwitting victims of Western medicine. Surgery, antiobiotics, radiotherapy are extraordinary steps forward. But they have led us to overlook the body’s own healing power. However, it is possible to enjoy the benefits of medical progress and the body’s natural defences at the same time.
