Cancer is chaos, not a linear event/progression

Longtermsurvivor

For many months, I've been collecting and sharing articles on:

Cancer as a biological, ecological and evolutionary process

(free registration required)

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Here's one I posted today that may be of interest to those facing breast cancer:

The Man Who Would Tame Cancer

excerpt:

Have we been too simplistic in our thinking about cancer?

Yes, I think that's why we've been losing the war. As physicians we're trained to be reductionist. We rigidly follow protocol. But life is not that way. Cancer is not linear—it is completely non-linear. It lives in the science of chaos. There's no single point of control. You need to attack it in a non-linear fashion across time and space, monitoring it and truly dancing with it. I know this sounds philosophical and silly and esoteric but it's not. If you biopsy a patient with breast cancer twice in the same day, once in the breast and once in the lymph node, you can get cancer cells with different sequences. Even if you biopsy two different points in the breast, the sequence can be different. This heterogeneity has really only come to light recently. Which breaks all these reductionist assumptions, because which target are you hitting and what made you choose it? Is it just because you biopsied here instead of there? You're whacking a mole, but you have no idea which one you're whacking. You whack this one, this other one wakens. The only chance we have, in my opinion, is to do what I call micro killing and macro killing at the same time. Micro killing meaning you go after these little targets, maybe even using a little chemotherapy. And macro killing meaning either surgery, radiation, or immunotherapy.

MusicLover

Thank you for posting this. I was viewing just the video this morning through youtube it is good to have the article available also.