What Is Cancer?

The treatment for cancer has not changed appreciably since the 1950’s. Someday people will look back on this as the dark ages. The horror is not that there is experimentation on people, but that there isn’t. For most forms of cancer, we don’t even know the base rate of remission. The treatment for cancer usually starts with radiation; the major side effect of radiation is bleeding. This is followed by surgery; the major side effect of surgery is debilitation. Then there is chemo, the idea behind chemo is to poison you nearly to death in the hope that you will come back and the cancer won’t. We don’t know how to treat cancer. It would make more sense to be trying everything, mustard, vinegar, talcum powder, whatever, in controlled studies, than repeating the hopeless therapies that we are doing over and over with nothing learned.

The current theory is that under repeated insult the cell's DNA breaks thereby losing its growth regulation. This is a two-step process. After the initial damage, the cell over-propagates but it is not yet cancerous. The abundance of these cells provides the opportunity for the next breakdown of the cell’s growth regulation; that is cancerous.

Sui genesis has had little success in medicine. In this case, I suspect the degradation of the cell represents a reversion to earlier cell behavior. I believe fungus is the model for the unregulated cancer cell.

Cancer behaves as you would expect nature to behave that is it is opportunistic. Invariably there is some initial damage, hormone imbalance, nicotine poisoning, wound or infection. This is, as you would expect for any natural attack. Although bacteria and virus can provide the conditions for cancer, cancer is not viral or bacterial. Fungus is an odd sort of semi-crystalline life form that we don’t understand too well. Essentially, it spores and fruits. Cancer metastases and tumors. I’ll give my self some wiggle room and suggest that cancer is fungal in nature. For that matter, coral is fungal in nature.

Back in the 1930’s it was noticed that people who get tuberculosis don’t have lung cancer. It was attempted to treat lung cancer by infecting those patients with tuberculosis with some success. This treatment didn’t catch on. However, is suggestive in that fungi and bacteria are often antagonistic.