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Hi,
In doing some research I came across this article and thought some of you might be interested. Link below.
Best wishes,
Jan
In Reply to: Interesting article about cancer posted by Happygal [2062.2732] on July 26, 2006 at 17:55:39:
ah yes, the most intelligent thing ive seen post since 'help you' left a few years ago. thk you.
In Reply to: Interesting article about cancer posted by Happygal [2062.2732] on July 26, 2006 at 17:55:39:
Thanks, Jan.
Walt
In Reply to: Re: Interesting article about cancer Archive. posted by Walt Stoll [93.1889] on July 27, 2006 at 08:46:23:
Hi Walt,
Since you have archived it, I will copy the article here, because sometimes links become invalid.
Best wishes,
Jan
Cancer Answers you Can Count on
(From Fall 2005)
An Interview with Ralph Moss, Ph.D
by Susan Hussey
Cancer Answers you Can Count on Keeping up with cancer research and treatment, both conventional and alternative, is a challenge few doctors accomplish. Getting this information out to individuals in a readable, balanced format is even more difficult. Ralph Moss does both.
I am a cancer survivor. You may be one too. Chances are you at least know someone who has cancer, and you also know that when you get the diagnosis, you've got a lot of questions. What you need are answers, but few doctors have the time to provide them, assuming they even follow the latest research.
Cancer happens fast: two weeks after diagnosis, I was in surgery; two weeks after surgery, I was scheduled to begin chemotherapy and radiation. In just one month, I was expected to make the most important health decisions of my life on a disease I never expected to have.
Enter Ralph Moss, Ph.D.
Dr. Moss is an internationally known medical writer with 11 books and three documentaries to his credit. His specialty is cancer and its treatment. A former assistant director of public affairs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, Dr. Moss independently evaluates the claims of many cancer treatments, both conventional and nonconventional. He also visits clinics that specialize in the treatment of cancer. As director of The Moss Reports, he makes this information available to consumers in simple, elegant and well-researched prose. To date, there are Moss Reports on more than 200 types of cancer. The Moss Reports, which may number more than 400 pages each, give cancer patients and their families the information they most need to know: What's the research on the cancer treatments my doctor is recommending? What are the side effects? Are there alternatives? Are these alternatives effective? As a cancer patient, what should I eat? What supplements are most necessary? Where can I find a clinic that offers alternative cancer treatments? These and so many more questions are answered in The Moss Reports.
Cancer has surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death in America. It is a disease that most of us will either have or we will love someone who has it. At Dr. Moss' website, cancerdecisions.com, you can get the answers you need quickly, and with research you can trust. I recommend you visit the website today and sign up for a free weekly newsletter.
Dr. Moss was kind enough to grant Organica an interview.
What exactly is cancer?
There's the standard definition, that cancer consists of 100 to 200 different diseases, tissue-specific, organ-specific diseases, broken down into different types as they appear. Each one is treated differently. Many scientists would say that cancer is a mutation of DNA that takes place as a result of either an inherited defect, or as an assault from environment, i.e., something in the diet, air, water, workplace, etc. This standard definition does not assign any root cause to cancer.
However, I think that a new paradigm is shaping up in the cancer field. That paradigm is that many cancers—it could be many, most, or all, even—are caused by changes to stem cells that are present in many parts of the body. As I am sure you know, stem cells are the hottest research topic right now—both in biology and in politics—but very few people in the debate over the stem cell revolution understand the implications as they pertain to cancer. Stem cells are not a treatment for cancer, though human ingenuity may come up with something along those lines. In fact, if stem cells are injected into a person, they would cause cancer (see teratoma in Scientific American, July 2005).
How do stem cells relate to this new paradigm of cancer?
In the 1990s some basic research established that if you take cells from a breast cancer and then try to grow a cancer in a mouse—this is standard operating procedure—fewer than one in 100 of those cells would be capable of growing a new cancer. While originally done at the University of Toronto, Michael Clarke and Mohammed Al-Hajj at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor also showed this to be true. This work has now been extended to a wide variety of cancers, including brain cancer. The University of Michigan has put $12 million towards this research, and Harvard, University of Toronto and the University of California are supporting this as well.
While this work is no secret, the implications have not yet hit home. When the tumor cells are separated and analyzed, the malignant seed cell has markers on its surface but lacks certain others present on the other cells. The pattern of these cell surface markers on the malignant seed cell is similar to that presented by the trophoblastic cells during pregnancy. In a pregnancy, there are the cells that are going to become the person. Around those cells, there is a ball, and the outer cells of the ball become the placenta. These trophoblastic cells are unique in biology, and very interesting. [Editor's note: Trophoblastic cells are very important in the early development of the embryo and fetus. They provide nourishment from the mother to the fetus and participate in the formation of the placenta.] They are invasive—once they brush against the uterus, they grab on and burrow in and spread. They are corrosive and metastatic. This is a very simple way to explain the trophoblastic theory of cancer, which was first developed in 1892 by John Beard, a Scottish professor of embryology in Edinburgh, in an article in The Lancet. After 100 years—and a long checkered history—scientists at major universities are publishing they have found cancer cells with markers on their surfaces characteristic of trophoblastic cells. Cancer is so similar to trophoblasts that they could be considered the same.
A professor of gastroenterology at the University of Western Massachusetts, Jean Houghton, performed a very elegant experiment that shows the activity of stem cells in the development of cancer. She and her team removed the bone marrow from mice and injected them with a new bone marrow that stains blue. They then irritated the stomachs of the mice by infecting them with the animal strain of H. pylori (implicated as the cause of stomach cancer). A great many of the animals developed early stages of stomach cancer. They were then injected with stain and dissected. All of the cancers turned blue, meaning that the cancers came from the new bone marrow. What happened, according to Dr. Houghton, is that the local immune system could not deal with the infection, so that the stem cells came from the bone marrow to the stomach. These were the cells that were transformed by the infection into cancer. It is as if your own army had gone against you. I am sure this is a very big piece of the puzzle. From Clark, et al., we now know that cancer is essentially a stem cell of trophoblastic nature, and that it is probably derived not from the target organ but from the bone marrow. Scientific investigation is getting so much closer to a solution to the cause of cancer.
Has the war on cancer made any headway?
There's been plenty of headway in demonstrating the cause of cancer, but in terms of treatment, the medical industry has been barking up the wrong tree. They have pursued so many directions which have been less than fruitful, and they've thrown a lot of money at the problem, but without a clear concept of what they were looking for. Cancer has been a huge problem going on for many years. Some aspects have made no progress, such as the prevention of cancer, because there's been a total reluctance to look at environmental causes and nutrition. By and large, the war on cancer has been a failure.
You've been an outspoken critic of standard chemotherapy.
Chemotherapy has reached its limits because it can't distinguish between healthy cells and cancer cells. Targeted chemotherapy is much more in line with alternative therapy, but it tends to be not so targeted, and there have been a lot of side effects. Herbatox offers some promise in certain kinds of stomach cancer, but it has to be looked at very carefully. So often the hype is far greater than the real benefits. Many of the drugs currently being developed are extremely expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars, which may not be covered by insurance. But even if the cost is covered by insurance, society eventually has to pay this cost, and for what?
Dr. Leonard Salk at Memorial Sloan-Kettering wrote that the cost of treating stage four colon cancer has risen from $500 about 10 years ago to $250,000 today, while the survival has gone from 11 months to 22 months. If these figures are correct, and I'm not convinced of their accuracy, that means that we extend life for less than a year, and who knows what the quality of that life is, for 500 times the cost for the same disease 10 years ago.
Why has cancer been so difficult for conventional medicine to cure?
Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Nobel prize-winning Hungarian scientist who discovered vitamin C, said we can only cure what we understand. We have not understood cancer. The trophoblastic theory of cancer has been present in the realm of alternative medicine for more than 100 years. It was largely neglected, but now we're coming around to a universal recognition of the nature of cancer, which will turn everything upside down. We will see cancer as a unitary disease process of the transformation of stem cells from the bone marrow into cancer. Then the interesting question will be, how does nature deal with trophoblastic cells?
I'd like to think that there's some grand convergence between the academic research taking place and some of the ideas that were dismissed as visionary and crackpot for many years, but that turn out not to be so crackpot and are quite perceptive. Unfortunately, many cancer visionaries became isolated because of their research, and the more isolated they became, the more crackpot they became. It's not easy to maintain your equilibrium in the face of almost universal neglect.
What are some CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) therapies which are effective?
Some CAM modalities are more promising than others. The problem is proving their effectiveness. The CAM modality that's shown the most proof is hyperthermia, using heat to create an artificial fever to treat cancer. A lot of alternatives go back to that, but it's a fine art. It's done at academic centers in the USA, such as Duke University, which has a great facility. Mistletoe has a lot of documentation. Another interesting modality is photodynamic therapy, which is the use of light-sensitizers followed by intense light. Antioxidants are going to be used more frequently in diminishing side effects from chemotherapy. There are a lot of ideas out there. Some things have no documentation and some are at the point of acceptance. Immune stimulants such as mushroom preparations from Japan are very promising, and have a lot of documentation. They're accepted as standard therapy in Japan, but are not pursued in the USA.
What is the role of diet in the prevention of cancer?
The data is very clear. The folks who eat an unprocessed diet, a low-glycemic diet, with lots of organic fruits and vegetables, have less cancer. It's difficult, however, to tease out the components that make this diet better. Foods that show particular benefit are those high in antioxidants, such as berries. My two granddaughters are here. They're eight and seven, and they've just brought me a big bowl of raspberries out of the garden. You just can't beat that. The data shows that there's a correlation between those kinds of foods and lowering of cancer. You can see the differing levels of cancer in countries, between those with a high intake of natural foods and those with a fast food philosophy. Sixty percent of cancer can be traced to diet.
What about sunlight?
Despite what dermatologists say, sunlight is highly protective against cancer. Sunlight produces vitamin D in the skin, as well as other factors, and vitamin D is protective against cancer. Too much sunlight can produce superficial skin cancers, which are a danger. Sunlight is bad in high quantities; it's important not to burn, but a moderate amount of sun is beneficial. You need only 15 minutes morning and afternoon in the winter. Today's dermatologists have zero tolerance for sunlight. Future generations will see quack prescriptions like in the era of bleeding and leeches. It's crazy.
What role does the consumption of dietary fat have in the possibility of developing cancer?
Very rancid fats and trans-fats definitely play a role. I personally stick to olive oil. Canola oil is questionable in my view. Last year I brought back some grape seed oil from Germany—you can still smell the grapes.
What about coconut oil?
I haven't investigated it per se, but nut oils are good. Monosaturated oils are very good for you. Eating nuts correlates with fewer heart attacks and greater longevity.
Saturated fat in meat and dairy products has been implicated as a cause of cancer. Is this perhaps due to chemicals dissolved in the fat, rather than the fat itself?
Yes. What's done to beef and dairy is very harmful. I do eat some organic, locally raised beef. I'm very lucky where I live, because there's a cornucopia of locally raised food. We have our pick here. Try to establish your own pipelines.
Is raw milk healthier?
It's six of one and half dozen of the other. If you know the dairy is clean, and they take care of their animals, raw milk may be better, though not in immune-compromised people. For the average person, I think raw milk is probably a good choice. Non-homogenized milk is a better choice too: the act of homogenization disperses the fat through the milk, which may make the particles too small and may contribute to heart disease.
Is cancer a modern disease?
I do believe it's a disease of civilization. I wrote some newsletters a couple of years ago about this: the history of cancer and how it developed in modern times. The increase of cancer is about pollution, and it's about stress. If you follow the work of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Arctic explorer, there was no cancer among the Eskimos until 1932. Cancer came with the introduction of canned foods. The first case of cancer was in a man who was a cook for an American family. He was eating the same food they were, and he developed cancer. In China, up until recently, there was very little cancer among people in the countryside. In Japan, where they follow the traditional diet, it's the same. The problem in these countries is that they're hell bent on following American ways. Whether it's diet or the emotional component, cancer is a disease of civilization, though we can't go back to the past and prove this definitively.
Books by Dr. Ralph Moss
Available from Equinox Press:
Cancer Therapy: The Independent Consumer's Guide to Non-Toxic Treatment and Prevention (1992).
Questioning Chemotherapy (1995).
The Cancer Industry (revised edition, 1996).
Alternative Medicine Online: A Guide to Natural Remedies on the Internet (1997).
Herbs and Cancer: History and Controversy (1998)
Antioxidants Against Cancer (2000).
In Reply to: Interesting article about cancer posted by Happygal [2062.2732] on July 26, 2006 at 17:55:39:
Excellent article. Thank you, Happygal. Still so many shortfalls in the system, no wonder progress is so slow.
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