Cancer Is Defeated by a Healthy Immune System

(Third of a Series on Cancer Treatment)

by Heidi Stevenson

The impression that it's beneficial to have early cancer diagnosis is well crafted by mainstream medicine and pharmaceutical companies to create a stream of consumers for the treatments it's developed to serve them. So how can a person avoid becoming fodder for this system? It isn't, of course, possible to absolutely, certainly, without question avoid cancer. The reality is that we all will die of something, and for some, that cause will be cancer. The same can be said of heart disease and a host of other conditions. We can, though, support the one thing that truly does provide protection against cancer: the immune system.

The reality is that the immune system is constantly working to destroy cancers that develop. It isn't that we don't get cancer; it's that our bodies destroy nearly every incidence of it before we ever have even a hint of its existence. The reality is that our immune systems can destroy even cancers that are advanced enough for detection.

What Is the Immune System?

Let's clarify what this thing is. If they think of it at all, most people think of the immune system as special blood cells that gobble up viruses and bacteris. While that's not really wrong, it captures only a small part of the concept. As defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, the immune system is the "integrated body system of organs, tissues, cells, and cell products such as antibodies that differentiates self from nonself and neutralizes potentially pathogenic organisms or substances."

That's a mouthful, but what it means is that the immune system is those things the body does to find and destroy stuff that doesn't belong there. It's far more than white blood cells attacking bad stuff. It's your skin, which keeps harmful substances out. It's the fine hairs in your nose that keep harmful particles from entering your lungs. It's a fever that burns out harmful invaders. It's mucous membranes that catch and destroy invaders and harmful substances. It's the cough reflex, which expels those invaders. It's the inflammation around a wound that helps it heal. It's lymph nodes that secrete fluid to carry invasive and toxic materials out of the body. It's glands that produce hormones that trigger other parts of the body to attack harmful substances. It's the blood system, which provides lymphocytes and other cells to recognize, engulf, and destroy invaders. It's probacteria, which help keep harmful bacteria and fungus in check.

The immune system is a host of body functions that act to protect you against harm. They recognize invaders and tissues that are behaving abnormally. So, cancerous cells, which are growing and functioning in an abnormal manner, are seen as equivalent to invaders. When identified, your body goes to work destroying them. It's when this system goes awry that tumors continue to grow out of control and spread to other parts of the body. That's why chemotherapy is so harmful. It depresses your body's immune response so that something toxic, which would normally be destroyed by the immune system, goes unnoticed and—one hopes—destroys the cancerous cells. That, of course, means that your natural ability to handle any invasive or harmful thing is also harmed, not to mention knocking out your body's natural ability to deal with cancer by itself.

Cancer Vaccines?

The immune system's role in fighting cancer is recognized by Big Pharma and the FDA. In its consumer education article, Cancer Vaccines: Training the Immune System to Fight Cancer, the FDA informs the public about attempts to develop vaccines against cancer. It suggests that cancer vaccines will "try to get the immune system to overcome its tolerance of cancer cells so that it can recognize them and attack them."

Does Gaia Health think that this is a good idea and likely to be successful? In a nutshell, no. The issue of vaccination is complex and very much tied up by the medical system's paradigm of approaching health as if an illness is a body part that needs to be fixed. The reality behind much of its self-proclaimed "success" in fighting diseases with vaccinations is far from what is claimed, as documented in Childhood Vaccinations Hoax—Not Effective and at Worst, Harmful and Life-threatening Pneumonia Is Caused by Pneumonia Vacccine.

There are strong indications that a host of chronic and debilitating diseases are associated with vaccinations, including diabetes and asthma. We do not gain immunity from vaccinations without paying a high price, and the immunity does not last a lifetime, as it does when our bodies learn how to deal with a disease naturally. What sort of price might we have to pay for cancer immunity? Most likely, it would be many years before we'd know, and if experience with other vaccinations is any indication, the price could be extremely high and without any means of treatment. We simply do not know, but the results of previous wonder treatments should give us pause. Aside from some questionable effects of vaccinations, consider the far more difficult to treat superbugs, such as MRSA and C. difficile, both of which are producing their own super-superbugs now.

Cancer Often Regresses

As is documented in Cancer—Does Early Detection Really Mean Longer Life? we know that many, perhaps most, cancers just go away, without our ever knowing they're there. WDDTY reported recently on cancer regression, citing several reports from medical journals⁽¹⁾. It documents the first meta-analysis of cancer regression, done in 1918 by Dr. G. Rohdenburg, medical director of Columbia University, New York, in which 302 cases of spontaneous remission were analyzed. In 1968, researchers from the College of Medicine, University of Illinois, Chicago, documented 176 cases of spontaneous regression that they concluded were genuine. The article reported on many other studies done by mainstream medicine that document cases of cancer that healed without medical intervention. Nearly all the cases referenced here happened at a time when early detection was not possible; these were all relatively advanced diseases, a fact that should be taken into consideration before accepting a diagnosis claiming that one's condition is incurable.

In all of these cases, no matter what else was involved, the body's immune system was able to reverse the cancer. As WDDTY reported, several factors have been noted as potential triggers for healing, including:

• Hormonal factors
• Inhibition of tumor growth by growth factors or cytokines
• Tumor changing into normal tissue
• Removal of carcingens
• Angiogenesis
• Tumor necrosis
• Apoptosis
• Placebo effect
• Genetic factors
• Hypnosis
• Altered states, such as trance
• Miracles
• Group support

Whatever the trigger, the body's own immune system is invoked in any instance of "spontaneous healing".

The Role of Fever

One of our body's most significant means of fighting infections is fever, though it has fallen on hard times in the last decades, with the usual advice of taking aspirin to lower it. However, the potential of fever to reverse cancer was noted well over a hundred years ago. In 1891, Dr. William B. Coley discovered a man suffering from advanced bone cancer who had developed erysipelas, an infectious skin disease caused by a streptococcal bacterium. As typical of that disease, he had a high fever. He was fortunate enough to survive, but even more fortunate, his cancer had gone into remission. Dr. Coley started experimenting with erysipelas on cancer patients, ultimately treating with killed erysipelas bacterium to induce fevers. Patients who were otherwise expected to die survived, though of course the treatment itself, a severe illness, was hard on patients⁽²⁾.

By 1918, a meta-analysis reported in 1918⁽³⁾ by Dr. Rohdenburg found that most cases of cancer regression followed an "acute febrile process", often resulting from surgery that had failed to remove the tumor that subsequently disappeared.

Since that time, the advent of radiology and chemotherapy—both treatments that are enormous profit centers—supplanted the fever approach. However, in more recent times, a few researchers have again looked at it. Professor Dr. U. Hobohm reported in 2005 about "spontaneous regression and remission from cancer" and noted that these cures often followed high fevers, but that such incidents are far fewer now because, during the 20^th century fever has been "regarded unequivocally by main-stream medicine as an unnecessary, weakening state which should be avoided or prevented."⁽⁴⁾

More about fever in terms of applying it will be found in How to Heal Cancer.

The Big Lesson

It should now be obvious that receiving a diagnosis of cancer of any degree or type does not equate to a death sentence, nor does it mean that you must or should give up your autonomy by handing your body over to the cancer industry. There are options, and one of the most significant may be to provide yourself with the tools needed to restore a healthy immune system, so that it can handle the battle against this most insidious of invaders.

Before allowing yourself to be scared into harsh treatments that actually produce more illness and depress the primary means your body has to cure itself of cancer, take a look at the options. You may be surprised to find that they exist—and that they won't take your life savings to implement.

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