Herbal Health » Cancer

VITAMINS THAT FIGHT CANCER: VITAMIN A

admin — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 19:30:19 +0000

Beta-Carotene, an orange pigment and a precursor of vitamin A has been linked with preventing cancer. It improves the functioning of the immune system and helps eliminate oxygen-type free radicals. It has been noted that cancer patients often have low blood levels of beta-carotene. In a study, beta-carotene levels in the blood of lung cancer patients was found to be one-third lower than that in healthy individuals. Similarly, according to a recent British study, it was found that men with the most beta-carotene in their blood were 60 per cent as likely to develop cancer, especially lung cancer, as those with the lowest blood beta-carotene.According to several studies, vitamin A exerts an inhibiting effect on carcinogenesis. It is one of the most important aids in the body’s defense system to fight and prevent cancer. Dr. Leonida Santamaria and his colleagues at the University of Pavis in Italy, have uncovered preliminary evidence suggesting that beta-carotene may actually inhibit skin cancer by helping the body thwart the cancer-causing process, known as oxidation. This vitamin can be taken in large doses up to 1,50,000 units a day in the treatment of cancer.The main food sources of Beta Carotene are dark orange and dark green leafy vegetables – sweet potatoes, carrots, dried apricots, lady’s finger, spinach and pumpkin. Other good sources of this vitamin are grapefruit, mangoes, lettuce and broccoli. The darker orange or green the fruit or vegetable, the more beta carotene it contains.*44/355/5*

CANCER RISKS BY AGE AND RISKS

admin — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 09:06:02 +0000

Clearly, age and race appear to have a significant influence on ‘ whether or not a person gets cancer and what the eventual prognosis may be. As already noted, many possible explanations exist for racial and cultural disparities in incidence and survival of cancer, not the least of which are access to health care and socioeconomic status. Consider the following statistics:
Among Women• The incidence rate for female breast cancer is highest among white women (113 per 100,000) and lowest among American Indian women (33.9 per 100,000). • Black women have the highest incidence rates of colon and rectal cancer (44.9 per 100,000) and lung and bronchus cancer (46.2 per 100,000), followed by whites, Asian/Pacific Islanders, Hispanic Americans, and American Indians. • Black women are more likely to die of breast cancer (31.4 per 100,000) and colon/rectum cancer (20 per 100,000) than are women of any other racial and ethnic group. White and black women have the highest mortality rates of lung and bronchus cancer, followed by American Indian, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Hispanic women.
Among Men• Black men have the highest incidence rates of prostate cancer (223 per 100,000), colon and rectum cancer (58 per 100,000), and lung and bronchus cancer (112 per 100,000).• Black men are at least 50 percent MORE LIKELY to develop prostate cancer than are men of any other racial or ethnic group. Like American Indian women, American Indian men have consistently lower rates of cancer incidence than men of other racial and ethnic groups.• Black men have the highest mortality rates from colon and rectum cancer (28 per 100,000), lung and bronchus cancer (101 per 100,000), and prostate cancer (55 per 100,000). Black men are twice as likely to die of prostate cancer than men of other racial and ethnic groups.*4/277/5*

OVERCOMING CANCER: PARTICIPATING IN YOUR HEALTH: A CASE HISTORY OF JOHN BROWNING

admin — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:09:42 +0000

The case of John Browning demonstrates how people participate both in the onset of—and recovery from—illness. This case is revealing because it suggests specific connections between emotional stresses and cancer.John is a brilliant scientist who works for a world-renowned research firm. At the time of the onset of his cancer (of the pancreas), he was fifty years old. He was given a life expectancy of six to nine months. Professionally, he had always been an overachiever, but as he approached fifty, he began to face the fact that many of his childhood dreams would not be reached. Although he had received considerable professional recognition, it had not been at the level he had hoped. In effect, he was experiencing mid-life crisis.In addition, in the months prior to the onset of his cancer, John’s son went off to college. Almost every weekend for many years, John had gone to athletic events with his son. John took great pride in his son’s aptitude for sports. After his son’s departure, however, John stopped attending sports events entirely. Clearly, an era had ended.The end of this period also raised new stresses between John and his wife. His wife had not recently enjoyed sports and had not participated in the family’s many athletic pursuits. Instead, she had become involved with club work, church work, and similar activities. Since John no longer spent every weekend with his son, he and his wife were thrown together as they had not been for a long time, and they had to develop new ways of communicating and creating interests in common.Another of John’s regrets was that some years earlier he had left a university post to go to work for his present employer. His motivation had been the extra money he would earn for his son’s college education. But while his salary was indeed substantially greater, he badly missed having people to guide and instruct.A great satisfaction in his present job was that he had been able to produce a number of significant research breakthroughs by putting together a collection of scientists and guiding them into an exceptionally creative team. His supervisors had been so impressed with his performance that they put him in charge of another major project as a reward. But to John the new project felt more like a punishment than a reward, for it meant he had to leave his team. Like many of our patients, however, John had extreme difficulty expressing his feelings and never told his superiors how badly he felt about the new assignment.This inability to speak up for his needs became clear after John entered into therapy with us. He told us he had always prayed regularly, but he soon informed us that he had never prayed for his own health. John believed it would be wrong to ask for anything for himself in his prayers. These attitudes traced back to his childhood. John’s mother was, he said, “a very pious and self-sacrificing person.” John saw his father, in contrast, as a “selfish person” who accumulated money and then spent most of it on himself. John took his mother’s self-sacrificing attitude yet always believed he had inherited a selfish streak from his father.But as John rejected his father’s apparently immature and selfish behavior, he overcompensated because of his fear of being selfish. This showed up in his difficulties in communicating his needs and feelings to others, in investing his life with meaning by making himself responsible for others, and in abandoning pleasurable activities when they were not shared with his son. In short, John felt obliged to place everyone else’s needs ahead of his own, and so when his son left for school, when John was removed from his work team, when his professional dreams were unfulfilled, his personal rules were such that he could see no way to meet his needs. He thus became extremely depressed.Changing BeliefsThe first step for John, or for anyone else trying to get well, is to identify those attitudes and beliefs that lock him into a pattern of hopeless victim. The psychological reality is that if John were to hang onto his beliefs that everyone else’s needs come first, he would indeed be powerless to meet his own emotional needs. Clearly, these beliefs need to change.We worked with John to help him recognize the facets of himself he was ignoring, and also to help him change his perception in other areas in his life. As a result of those efforts, he reexamined his work situation and finally came to the understanding that his superiors had, in fact, been trying to reward him by giving him the new job assignment and had no way of knowing of his disappointment. We urged him—as we urge everyone—to take his emotional responses to life more seriously.We also worked with John on his sense of failure because he had not realized his early dreams. Like many ambitious men, John had channeled his energy into developing primarily those parts of himself related to his work. Now, since the dreams were no longer attainable, we urged him to give himself permission to explore other interests or pursue other parts of himself that had been held in check. Finally, we worked with John on his sense of loss of his son, pointing out the degree to which he had vested so much of his personal happiness in someone else rather than himself, and helped him to see that he had an opportunity to renew his relationship with his wife.None of this is meant as a criticism of John; many of us have experienced similar events and reacted similarly. The difficulty is that the beliefs John had adopted as a child in response to the conflict between his mother and father were blocking his finding alternative ways of responding to life’s inevitable disappointments. The point is that there are alternatives. Whenever people feel boxed in and trapped, it is because they are limited by their own beliefs and habitual ways of responding.*31\347\2*

WHY RADIATION AFFECTS CANCER CELLS MORE THAN NORMAL CELLS – GREATER PROPORTION OF DIVIDING CELLS (PART 1)

admin — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:03:37 +0000

Let’s now see what makes cancer cells more likely to be killed by radiation than normal cells. Firstly, the part of the cell that is most sensitive to radiation is the part that controls reproduction. This means that tissues with a high proportion of cells that divide frequently show the harmful effects of radiation more obviously and more quickly than tissues in which the cells rarely divide. Cells that are actually in the process of dividing when radiation passes through them are so sensitive to its harmful effects that they die within a few hours. Cells which are not actually dividing at the time of treatment still suffer serious damage to their reproductive ability. They can often continue to function quite normally provided they don’t try to divide. Once they do, it is likely that they will die in the attempt. Most cancers have a higher proportion of cells that divide regularly than most normal tissues. Most, but not all, cancers are therefore likely to show more rapid and severe damage after radiation than most, but not all, normal tissues.

Low doses of radiation interfere with the ability of the cell to divide. Higher doses kill cells directly. Therefore any cell can be killed by radiation if the dose is high enough.

*256/40/1*