Cancer & It's Causes: Part 2

Last week I started a multi-week talk about cancer. I began with defining exactly what cancer is: a cell that loses the knowledge of when to stop growing. I also talked a little about how emotional issues and wrong beliefs can be the primary causes of cancer because of the latent stress they cause to the body. This week I’ll talk more about phsysiological causes of cancer. 

First we’ll talk about hypoxia. Hypoxia is a scientific word for not enough oxygen in the tissues. Oxygen deficiency is a cause of cancer. We’ve known that for over 80 years. Dr. Otto Warburg described that in 1925 and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1931 for discovering the cause of cancer was low oxygen at the tissue level. Some of you are also aware that an acid pH causes cancer. These are actually one and the same thing. The acid pH prevents the delivery, the unhooking of oxygen out on the tissue level. So the cells don’t get oxygen when you have an acid environment in your body. That’s why having enough oxygen in your tissues is so critical. There are medical tests that look for this. You put a probe on your finger and it tells you how saturated your blood is with oxygen. Unfortunately, you can have 100% oxygen saturation in the blood and have extremely poor delivery of oxygen out in the tissues because of that acid pH in the environment.  

Another cause of cancer are environmental toxins. I was reading an article in the paper here a couple years ago. It was talking about the annual meeting of all the water treatment plant people that treat water for people to drink. They said they knew that chlorine caused cancer. They just didn’t know what to do about it because they couldn’t treat enough water for everybody without the chlorine. There are known environmental toxins; lead, mercury, chlorine, the different chemicals, pesticides; all kinds of chemicals that we have, unfortunately, in our environment. We’re still putting a lot of these toxins that help facilitate cancer into our system.

We all know that radiation causes cancer. Madame Curie, the discoverer of X-rays, died of, you guessed it, cancer. She didn’t know to protect herself with lead shields and lead aprons because she’d just discovered X-rays and didn’t have a clue that they caused cancer. We get natural radiation from the sun and from space. It’s raining down on us all the time. The medical community is, oddly, pretty free with radiation. There was a period when we were much more careful with radiation. For example, my daughter was getting an X-ray taken a couple years ago and I asked for a shield to put over her ovaries. They looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Why would you do that?” Well, X-rays damage tissue and they cause cancer. Right? “Oh, this isn’t much radiation.” We kind of treat it cavalierly and with bravado. “Oh well, it’s just a little bit of radiation.” Sadly, our medical environment is a significant source of radiation. Woman are encouraged to get mammograms. That’s a lot of radiation, especially if you talk about having it every year.  It may be that you may not be able to not have cancer at some point in time if you get enough radiation.

Another potential cause out there is nutrition, or should I say the lack of nutrition. You’ve got to have the right nutritional things to provide for proper cell structure, proper materials to grow, to maintain health, and the proper detoxifiers or antioxidants.  Nutrition or lack thereof can be put in that list of potential causes for cancer.  

I’d probably list the last cause of cancer as viruses. Every cancer cell will have a virus in it. Viruses play two roles in cancer. One is as a direct causative agent in the cells, helping them lose control. On a broader scope, we all have viruses hanging around. You might’ve seen or heard of somebody having shingles when they’re 70 or 80 years old. Where has that virus been? Where did that come from? That came from when they were 8 or 10 years old and got chickenpox and now 7 decades later it’s popped out and bitten them. Where was it all that time? It was right there in the body. Viruses are tough critters. They live in our bodies and our immune system has to stay constantly vigilant to protect us from them. 

There are some of the causes of cancer. This is a really big subject. What I’m going to do is come back next week and share some more about current therapies and other ways to look at treating cancer. Come back next week and we’ll give you the rest of the story.