Cause of cancer

I'm convinced my BC was due to exposure to DDT before I even had breasts........DDT was outlawed in the 70's, but in the 60's they sprayed it liberally at the beaches of the North Shore of LI where we played as kids. My mother sprayed it in her flower garden and stored it in the house. Yes, perhaps my post-menopausal weight gain did increase my exposure to the bad estrogen (the kind that is created from fat through the work of the adrenal glands), but my onc told me that the "motor" that drove my cancer's growth was the Her2neu protein...........and until other studies prove me wrong, I'm  blaming it on DDT exposure. Now - don't get me started on the PCP's in our environment and the increases in cancer due to that carcinogen! As you can see - I get upset whenever reading articles that make it sound like it's OUR fault we got BC!

Fairyfloss,

>>in china, this is no red meat and no dairy; and no sugar. no alcohol. and see the other posts ive made for the rest.<<

lmao!  Evidently, you've never been to China, nor even read a newspaper in recent years.  The Chinese have a huge dairy industry for domestic consumption.  Do you not remember all the news (pretty much everywhere for days) about millions of children in China being exposed to melamine in powered milk made from dairy sources?

No alcohol in China?  Although China has been producing wine since at least the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618 - A.D. 907) when the first vinifera grapes arrived there, the Chinese masses don't prefer it. The staple spirit of the Chinese masses is DISTILLED GRAIN ALCOHOL (often wheat and sorghum) - whiskey!  Maotai Spirit, Fen Spirit, Luzhou Spirit, and Wuliangyie Spirit are the equivalent of Budweiser and Miller in China.  The Chinese developed a taste for rice wine (a.k.a. sake) during the period of Japanese rule as well.  The Chinese love to get all liquored-up for social occasions and have for centuries.

No sugar or red meat??  Wait, was your post an attempt at sarcasm or sophistry?  I can't think of any other explanation for how someone could be so 'off-the-mark'.  Granted, believers in 'holistic' and 'Eastern' medicine usually are misinformed if not obscenely uneducated, but this is ridiculous!

SuperScared ~  Don't beat yourself up about not having children increasing your risk of bc.  There are plenty of mothers of 3, 4 and more children here who did everything right in that regard --  had their children at a young age, nursed them -- and still developed bc.  I do believe that excess estrogen throughout our lifetime is a key factor for many of us, but I think not having children as a risk factor is way oversimplified.  Deanna

Yet another thread with hostility. Humm, Brewster, do you have breast cancer? And I must ask have you traveled to China lately? There must be some reason why this thread turned your "tone" sour and mean. If you have nothing uplifting to add, you may be in the wrong place. This forum is place where we come to share  and discuss a variety of ideas, and things we have learned with our collective minds. All things posted are for each reader's consideration, and friendly discussion, not posted for argument.

Brewster, to be sure, there is no shortage of "snake oil salesmen" who are unscrupulously selling false hope to cancer patients. I for one am not swayed by anecdotal evidence (I don't care whether someone's neighbor's brother's pool boy was cured of cancer by eating Dragon's Claw Weed 20 times a day -- not unless there was an objective scientific study that demonstrated a significant anti-cancer effect).

But do you realize how foolhardy it is to dismiss ALL natural/alternative/complementary approaches just because some out there give it a bad name?

Personally, I consider it absurd to pin all my hopes that a better synthetic chemical concoction will magically cure my cancer. My doctor ADMITTED to me that choice of chemo is frequently trail-and-error. That same doctor flat-out denied that nutrition/lifestyle choices would make any difference in cancer response, beyond the placebo effect ("Sure, if you feel you need to do that, go for it, it can't hurt"). 

Yet we're expected to put all our faith in allowing a potent POISON to be injected into our bodies for weeks or months on end, a poison so dangerous it itself is a known carcinogenic, a poison so dangerous it destroys many healthy living cells in its wake, and damages and/or destroys important vital organs along the way... all in hopes of allowing the patient to reach that magic 5-year mark so that they can be considered a success (even if they drop dead in year 6 because their poor body is so wrecked from their "cure").

How is THAT not quackery?? Now, I'm NOT saying it is... I do NOT judge anyone who puts their faith in the heavily funded cancer industry. Many women I know have trusted in chemo and you will NOT see me slamming them for it. And yes, I have no doubt it's extended life for many!

All I ask is that you extend the same courtesy to those of us who are a bit more skeptical about the medical industry or who understand that what we put into our bodies and lifestyle choices we make have as much or more impact on our overall health and healing, including our bodies' natural ability to fight cancer.

Sure, disagree with us, present arguments and evidence and facts... but please spare us the mean-spirited ridicule and sarcasm... that won't sway anyone to your side.

Cancer is pretty much proof that your body does not have the ability to fight cancer.

It represents damage to the part of DNA that tells cells to self-destruct when they detect damage.

Unless you can magically repair that damage (which you can't do, because the DNA code has been altered and cannot be randomly retrieved), then you are not going to convince those cancer cells to self-destruct. They have to be removed (for the ones that have aggregated into a visible tumor) and killed (for those that have travelled away from the tumor). Surgery can remove tumors, and chemo and radiation can destroy cells that have migrated. Some other targeted therapies can prevent cancer cell replication or control the conditions that allow cancer to thrive.

People don't drop dead from the cure. They die from avoiding it.

"People don't drop dead from the............CURE," dear LJ13? Please email me with your secret .....CURE. I will help you market it and you and I will soon be billionnaires, since we have a............ CURE. Please don't tell anyone else just yet, or we will lose all our money.

.....And unless you live in a cave, you should know that people die every single day from bad reactions to chemotherapy, as well as from secondary tumors. That's why they have you sign a 6-page long disclaimer or whatever you call that document, right before starting, making sure that you understand that it actually increases your leukemia risk by 3%.

But perhaps you did not read yours that far down.

I should have used quotation marks. I was referring to SuperScared's 4th paragraph, "(even if they drop dead in year 6 because their poor body is so wrecked from their 'cure')".

Improper citation.

Chemo does cure many people. It cured me.

I'm quite sure that more people die of cancer than die of chemo. Really. Only about a 3% rate of secondary malignancies, depending on the chemo (some higher, some lower). Even lower death rate from adverse reactions. Death from infections is dropping due to the effects of a wonderful pharmaceutical (yay Big Pharma!), Neulasta/Neupogen.

PatMom, how many people exactly DO die from cardiac damage?

Before there was chemo, when there was only surgery, don't you realize that the death rate from cancer was IMMENSELY higher? The death rate for breast cancer has been falling about 2% per year for the past 20 years. This is because of new and better chemos and adjuvant treatments, not improvements in surgery.

Yes, the death rate has fallen, but not because of chemo. 

The rate of women developing breast cancer fell as doctors stopped prescribing HRT for their menopausal patients. 

The death rate has fallen much more for women with hormone receptor positive cancers who are likely to be given hormonal therapy such as Tamoxifen or an AI than for women with hormone receptor negative cancer whose only treatment options are chemo and radiation. 

I don't know how many people actually die as a direct result of chemo induced heart damage, but congestive heart failure occurs in about 4% of people receiving herceptin. 

I never said or implied that chemo kills more people than cancer, just that it does kill some people, and is not an effective cure. 

Scared, my immune system recovered within 3 weeks of completing chemo, so there's no real need to "rebuild" it, and if I were to require additional "rebuilding" it wouldn't be via unproven alternative methods.

Second, I don't "feel" it work. It did work. Tumor shrinkage was palpable, measurable on scan, and observable in pathology. This occurs, by the way, in about 10% of patients treated with neoadjuvant therapy.

Your 3rd paragraph suggests that chemo causes metastasis. That is about the most preposterous claim I've ever seen. Chemo is used to treat the patient systemically, specifically to deal with micromets and local metastasis (and sometimes regional and distant mets).You say "I'm saying that when people 'die of chemo,' they die of the recurrence of cancer that attacks their liver and bones and blood." You are obviously quite confused. That is not dying of chemo. That is dying of cancer, which is what happens, about 99.9% of the time, when cancer is not treated adequately. 

PatMom, half of women who experienced CHF from Herceptin treatment returned to normal after discontinuing Herceptin. Stats vary on the CHF rate with different chemo regimes. Regardless, Herceptin decreases the chance of recurrence by 50%. That's a pretty big gain, for a small risk. For your other claim, I would like to see a citation on that. Herceptin, along with Tamox, AI's and chemo, are all responsible for the drop in death rates.  

Thanks PatMom. A 19% drop for ER/PR negative cancers is not insignificant. But you are right, ER/PR rate of death has decreased more drastically.

LJ -- Yes, it used to be thought that cancer was an immune-system disease, but I believe that was before the major developments in genomics and proteomics.  It would be lovely if the drug mechanisms used in RA (e.g. Enbrel, Remicade etc.) to prevent out-of-control cells doing their damage could also be used in the tx of various cancers.  I know that there is significant cross-over in research -- autoimmune disease and cancer.  I have a great deal of hope.

>> You are obviously quite confused. That is not dying of chemo. That is dying of cancer, which is what happens, about 99.9% of the time, when cancer is not treated adequately. 

By "treated adequately," I assume you mean the current cancer-industry-approved mode of treatment (chemo, synthetic hormones, radiation)? If that's what you mean, please do share your source for this 99.9% stat. I know of a surprising number of that 0.1% whose cancer is gone because of treating with nutrition and lifestyle changes.

LJ13-2, it's interesting that you ridicule the link between the immune system and cancer (which even the National Cancer Institute acknowleges, then in the same post admit that there is research that indicates the immune system itself can be used to attack cancer. Don't worry, though, I won't throw around insults and tell you you're "obviously quite confused" the way some do.

May I ask, why exactly are you on the Alternative/Complementary forum when you are so 100% sure that nutrition and lifestyle have absolutely no bearing on the body's ability to cure cancer? I don't think any of us here would go to the chemo forum and slam them, telling them they're caving to quack science and will die because of their choices. I'm not sure why you're choosing to do that to us.

This will be my last reply on this thread; part of my cancer self-treatment entails 1) researching facts and acting on them, then 2) surrounding myself with positive, uplifting thoughts. That includes not subjecting myself to insults (accompanied by vague assertions that you haven't backed up with any solid evidence). So, on that note, I wish you a beautiful day and a life full of health and happiness. All the best to you.

lindasa, the immune system is widely misunderstood... there's a lot more to it than protection from catching colds. See the link I included above and read the entire presentation for an overview... I have more links if you're interested (PM me rather than posting here, if you don't mind). 

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/understandingcancer/immunesystem/Slide32

Here is  evidence that the immune system is directly related to cancer

Tuesday I went to a very interesting workshop on the immune system and will post more of what I learned when I have more time this week end