Cancer- Navigating The Historical Road to Truth (Part 1)

Fear among most people is the word “Cancer” because they know chances of survival in most cases is minimal. There are however life extension modalities from conventional medicine’s limited arsenal of chemotherapy drugs, radiation and surgery. Some actually have been curative for a while. For example Chemotherapy applied at an earlier diagnostic stage of some blood cancers like Hodgkin’s lymphoma and leukemia has resulted in a ‘temporary cure’. Even surgical procedures to remove prostate glands with localized tumours have cured the patient. Some modern cancer drugs that are based on a monoclonal antibody process that acts as a GPS for chemotherapy treatment specifically targeting tumours is a definite improvement to the old drugs that just poisoned and destroyed everything, cancer and healthy cells alike.

But after 50 or 100 years in our modern era, has cancer been defeated?

As they say in the movies: “What you are about to read is based on actual events – but not necessarily in chronological order”

In 1980,‘Interferon’ was introduced to the world as a possible means to treat cancer successfully.Interferon’s are signalling proteins or Cytokines These interferon cytokines mobilize the immune system’s NKC (Natural killer cells)and Macrophage rank and file.The interferon drug was a manmade synthesis of the cytokines that are naturally made in the body. In 1980 it was published in the medical journals of the day as an immune stimulant that would bring cancer to its knees, but unfortunately it did not. Then in 1985, another ‘miracle cure’ was found,Interleukin 2, another immune stimulant, that did not work either. The Interferon provides a barrier between host cells and viruses so as a virus cannot inject its DNA into a host cell for reasons of replication, and they mobilize macro phage cells to absorb viral agents. The interleukin family of immune system messengers are produced by the leukocyte white blood cells for purposes of immune system regulation.

Within this same period as the Interleukin 2, approval and fateful clinical study, ‘Bone marrow transplants’ were being discussed, especially for breast cancer. Insurance companies at the time refused to reimburse such a procedure due to its unproven status and the immense cost of$500,000.This opened up a hornets nest, and oncologists began filing lawsuits against insurance companies accusing them of being heartless bullies, depriving women of possible life saving treatment, suffering from aggressive breast cancer who could potentially be saved. One lawsuit involved Nelene Fox, a 38year old who developed breast cancer in 1991.

Her HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) insurance company Health Net refused to pay for the bone marrow transplant. She took the matter through the courts and was awarded $77 million in punitive damages, $12 million in compensatory damages and $212,000 in medical expenses. The reason for Health Nets refusal to pay for the transplant procedure was the advice given byDr. Sam Ho, medical director of the company, who had been advised himself that the procedure was unproven for advanced metastatic breast cancer. As it turned out he was right, because the woman was dead two years later in 1993. Nonetheless, the medical profession refused to withdraw the procedure and whenLinda McCartney was diagnosed with the same disease in 1995. She to was given a bone marrow transplant in 1998 and within 3 months she was dead.

Bone Marrow transplantation is an aggressive procedure that involves removing some healthy bone marrow cells, administering large doses of Chemotherapy drugs (much larger than normal) to destroy completely, the bone marrow, in order to rebuild it using the healthy bone marrow initially removed.Unfortunately, in ‘wiping out’ the bone marrow there is a distinct possibility that some of the cancerous cells will resist the chemotherapy onslaught and begin growing back , but in a more aggressive form.

In early 2000 an American biologist/pediatrician Dr Judah Folkman who had been studying CancerAngiogenesis since 1970, based a curative cancer theory on 2 endogenous anti-angiogenic inhibitors