The Real Cause Of Cancer And The Solution
by Dr Vernon Coleman
Cancer Is Getting Commoner And The Cancer Industry Will Never Find A Cure
History is full of examples of original thinkers who have been scorned, laughed at, ruined and imprisoned for daring to be creative and original and (most heinous crime of all) for having the temerity to threaten the status and authority of the establishment.
Socrates was condemned to death for being too curious. Dante was condemned to be burned at the stake. The works of Confucius were still banned in China two and a half thousand years after his death. Spinoza was denounced for being independent and every schoolchild knows about Galileo's battles with the Church. Paracelsus was the greatest influence on medical thinking since Hippocrates but the establishment regarded him as a trouble maker and persecuted him all around Europe. (He is still regarded with considerable fear and distaste by the medical establishment which, on the whole, prefers not to acknowledge his existence or his importance).
Semmelweiss, the Austrian obstetrician was ostracised by the medical profession for daring to criticise filthy medical practices. Thoreau was imprisoned for sticking to his ideals. Wilbur and Orville Wright were dismissed as hoaxsters by the Scientific American, the US Army and most American scientists. When Wilhelm Rontgen discovered x rays his achievement was described as an elaborate hoax by one of Britain's most eminent scientists.
The relationship between a diet low in vitamin C and the development of scurvy was first described in 1636 by John Woodall. James Lind reintroduced the idea in 1747 but it wasn't until 1795 that the British Admiralty decreed that lemon juice should be part of every sailor's diet. Only God can possibly know how many sailors died as a result of this appalling example of cooperative prejudice.
The inventors of turbine power, the electric telegraph, the tank, the electric light, television and space travel were all laughed at or ignored by the scientific establishment. William Reich's books were burned by the Nazis in the 1930s and by the American government in the 1950s. (The Federal Food and Drug Administration was still burning his books in 1960).
More recently Dr Dean Ornish, who was responsible for devising a safe, effective treatment proqramme for heart disease that depends upon diet, exercise and relaxation, was denied funds by the American government and the American Heart Association. Dr Ornish has been quoted as having been told that drugs are essential because it is impossible to persuade people to change their drug taking habits.
The Establishment Opposes Original Thought
The irony about science (which is ostensibly a search for new truths) is that most members of any scientific establishment seem dedicated to opposing real progress and suppressing original thought.
One can attack political or economic theories with some freedom and there is room for originality in most areas of intellectual thought except science; the one area which one might suppose would depend almost exclusively upon original thinking.
Any scientist with a new and original idea is likely to be regarded as a dangerous crank rather than an original scientist whose ideas are worth evaluation.
When I said on the radio recently that I thought that it was vital to maintain an open mind another panellist on the same programme commented that in his view: 'Open minds are empty minds.' This grossly prejudiced viewpoint is quite common among many of the world's best known scientists and helps to explain why the vast majority of new and original ideas are dismissed out of hand, and their authors sneered at and dismissed as cranks and nutcases.
Repressive and Prejudiced
The most repressive, most prejudiced and most obscenely intolerant branch of the international medical industry is undoubtedly that part of it which claims to deal with cancer.
The reason for this is simple: the medical and scientific establishments are largely comprised of men and women whose original thinking (if they ever did any) is long behind them.
Members of the establishment are committed to supporting long established theories partly because they do not have the breadth of intelligence to cope with anything new, and partly because personal and professional jealousy makes them unwilling to acknowledge any genuinely new and creative ideas which might result in non-establishment scientists acquiring public respect and honour.
This small town paradigm is made even more repressive by the fact that the cancer industry is now so huge that it requires vast amounts of money simply to stay alive.
Since a good deal of that money comes from the drug industry (which is, not surprisingly, only interested in pharmacological solutions) the cancer industry's aims, methods and motives are now virtually indistinguishable from the drug industry's aims, methods and motives.
The Least Successful Branch of Medicine
In addition to being the most intolerant the modern cancer industry must surely be the least successful branch of medical science ever to have existed.
(In my view it is also probably the most corrupt and self serving. If the cancer industry ever accidentally hit upon a cure for cancer I honestly doubt if anyone would hear about it. Finding and publicising a cure for cancer would soon put the cancer industry employees out of business.)
Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on research the cancer industry has consistently and reliably failed to find any answers.
Indeed, as has been well documented, the incidence of cancer has been steadily increasing for decades. The cancer industry makes a good deal of noise about the fact that there has been some progress in the treatment of rare forms of cancer in children but the overall death rate from cancer just goes up and up. Chemotherapy does not work and has never worked for the cancers which kill nine out of ten cancer patients. Many patients given chemotherapy and classified as 'cured' go on to develop another cancer within a short period. The cancer establishment has insisted on sticking with radiotherapy and chemotherapy despite the fact that there is now so much evidence that these approaches do not work that ordinary patients who have no idea that there are alternatives are turning them down; preferring to die quietly and in peace rather than to die as a result of a painful and pointless treatment programme.
The only people who benefit from the modern cancer industry are doctors, drug companies and the people who make radiotherapy equipment.
The drug industry has so much control over the private cancer charities (because it gives them money) that these charities are only interested in research that is likely to uncover drug based cures. (How could a drug company ever make money out of a treatment programme that involved meditation or a change in diet?)
And yet, throughout the world, the modern cancer industry - which steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the fact that 80% of cancers can be prevented or to investigate the many new alternative therapies -- is protected by law.
In most western countries it is now actually illegal to offer a treatment for cancer that might work.
Even qualified doctors are only allowed to prescribe chemotherapy or radiotherapy or to send their patients for surgery. The authorities relentlessly persecute those who offer new and possibly effective and non toxic therapies (ignoring the wishes of patients who wish to try those therapies) while condoning, paying for and protecting by law therapies which are known to be often toxic and frequently ineffective. It is bizarre to see the way that governments tell their citizens that vaccines are all safe, that beef is safe to eat and that chemotherapy is the treatment of choice for cancer. I suspect that governments would tell their citizens that hitting yourself on the head with a hammer was safe if the hammer industry told them to say this. It would be funny were it not so tragic.
Doctors who dare to offer patients new hope and new treatments are scorned, abused, persecuted, vilified, forced to go into hiding or threatened with imprisonment. I could fill VCHL with the names of honest, well meaning, caring doctors whose work with cancer patients has won them many followers among the sick and their relatives but has earned them nothing but trouble from the authorities.
The problems faced by the proponents of remedies not made by drug companies have been well documented. Anyone who dares to offer an unofficial remedy for cancer is accused of being simply out to make money. This accusation (which is often easy to disprove in the case of doctors and others offering 'alternative' therapies) is, of course, never made about doctors or drug companies, whose work is (as I'm sure you'll agree - ha ha) all done exclusively in the public interest.
Persecuted for Trying to Cure
The list of doctors who have been persecuted for offering non-orthodox cancer treatments (which invariably seem to work much better than anything offered by the official cancer industry) is as long as the list of alleged cancer 'cures' offered or promised by the cancer industry which have been proven to be of no value, or quietly forgotten once those making the promises had acquired the grants they wanted. In Britain it is illegal for anyone to claim to have a cure for cancer that is not approved by the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry. Countless cancer pioneers - including some of the brightest medical brains of the century - have been hounded out of America and forced to open clinics elsewhere. One district attorney who arrested successful alternative cancer clinic operator Harry Hoxsey over a hundred times within two years changed sides when his brother - allegedly suffering from terminal cancer - was successfully treated at a Hoxsey clinic. The FDA finally padlocked all 17 Hoxsey clinics on the same day and he was stopped from practising in the US. Dr Max Gerson, the brilliant German physician who moved to the US and devised a fruit and vegetable juice-based cancer treatment was rejected by the American cancer industry. Hoxsey and Gerson therapies are now available in Mexico.
The Italian government has banned the treatments Professor Di Bella offers. (It has not, however, banned chemotherapy which has been proven to be expensive, toxic and largely ineffective.)
This offer has not been taken up despite the fact that when 22 samples of his AIDS vaccine were tested 20 of them showed 99% efficacy in neutralising HIV-1.
Dr Chachoua points out that the data on the spontaneous remission of cancer (where people appear to make miraculous recoveries - rising from their death beds with no apparent trace of the disease which seemed about to kill them) suggests that just before a person with cancer (or any other terminal disease) has a spontaneous remission they invariably suffer a severe infection of some kind.
This was, Dr Chachoua reports, first noticed a few hundred years ago by a French doctor who noted that if prostitutes had syphilis they were very unlikely to develop cancer. The Frenchman actually treated 20 cancer patients with syphilis and 14 of the 20 went into total remission. (I rather doubt if the authorities - which happily approve of toxic chemotherapy - would allow anyone to perform any such experiment today.)
Similarly, whereas cancer is uncommon in areas where malaria is present, getting rid of the malaria in an area will result in a rise in the cancer rate.
It has also been reported that people who have cancer and who catch malaria have a good chance of going into remission. (AIDS patients who were injected with malaria improved and stayed stable at the improved level.)
Politicians And The Media Are Controlled
The medical and scientific establishments have (largely through the fact that they have sold out to the enormously wealthy and powerful international pharmaceutical industry) obtained more or less complete control over politicians and the media.
As I mentioned in VCHL Vol 2 No 12 advertisements for my book Food for Thouqht are still banned by Britain's Advertising Standards Authority because the book contains advice on what sort of diet to eat in order to reduce the chance of developing cancer.
The advice in the book isn't even controversial: I simply list the foods that are known to cause cancer and the foods which are known to provide some protection.
Because we refused to accept the ban the ASA (which, quite bizarrely, will not accept scientific research papers or even government publications in evidence) has warned newspapers not to accept any of our advertisements. The ASA claims to exist to protect the public but I find it difficult to see how banning a book that contains a summary of proven clinical advice on how to avoid cancer can possibly protect the public. It seems to me that, wittingly or unwittingly, the ASA is simply protecting the cancer establishment. I find it difficult to avoid the observation that the cancer industry would undoubtedly find it much harder to raise money if the incidence of cancer were cut.
Why The War Against Cancer Will Continue To Fail: A Faulty Paradigm
The war against cancer will continue to fail. Avoidable cancers will continue to become commoner and commoner and the establishment will continue to ensure that only the toxic (but highly profitable) alleged treatments of cancer which are authorised by the pharmaceutical industry will be authorised by governments.
The cancer industry will not find the all powerful magic bullet cure for which it has been searching now for decades.
It will fail because it is wedded to an interventionist paradigm which depends upon treating the body as a battlefield and the disease as an enemy.
The interventionist paradigm is modelled upon the way that medicine was practised at the start of the twentieth century when the diseases which worried doctors most were those which were caused by infections (tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza, pneumonia, syphilis, cholera, typhoid fever and so on)
The incidence of these diseases was to a certain extent controlled at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century and as a result the medical profession as a whole made two crucial and fundamental mistakes.
Two Big Mistakes
The first mistake was a retrospective one: it was to assume that the reduction in death rate from these diseases was a result of things which doctors had done.
This was quite wrong.
The reduction in the incidence of infectious diseases (and, more importantly, the reduction in the number of deaths from those diseases) was a result of better water supplies, better sewage facilities, better transport and better food. The man who invented the water closet saved far more lives than any thousand members of the medical establishment. Death rates from infectious diseases had fallen long before the introduction of vaccines and antibiotics.
The second fundamental mistake was a prospective one: it was to assume that the interventionist 'magic bullet' approach which appeared to have worked in the war against infectious disease would enable doctors to tackle all other health and life-threatening diseases - including cancer.
This was a pretty daft mistake to make because most modern killer diseases develop in a very different way to infectious diseases.
People get heart disease because they eat too much of the wrong sort of food and not enough of the right sort of food and because they take too little exercise. And people get cancer because they eat too much of the wrong sort of food and not enough of the right sort of food and because their bodies steadily become increasingly contaminated by toxic, carcinogenic chemicals.
You would have thought, would you not, that some of the brighter members of the medical establishment might have thought that since modern killers are plainly different to the infectious diseases it might be necessary to think up a different type of treatment approach?
It is this error (no doubt encouraged and compounded by the affection of the medical profession for the money so generously distributed by the pharmaceutical industry) which has led researchers (and doctors) to experiment with increasingly toxic drugs (chemotherapy) in order to try and 'kill' the cancer.
Chemotherapy Has Repeatedly Failed
Chemotherapy has repeatedly failed. The medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry and the cancer industry are so desperate to hide this fact that they now probably consider it a success if the survival rate of patients who take chemotherapy actually matches the survival rate of patients who don't take chemotherapy.
The two most fundamental problems with chemotherapy are:
1. In order to kill the cancer cells (which are, after all, merely ordinary human cells which have got out of control) the drug must be so toxic that it inevitably causes a great deal of damage to other, healthy, cells. When chemotherapy is given by mouth (or by any other general route) the whole body may be affected - even though the drug is aimed only at one very specific site in the body. When chemotherapy fails to work (which it usually does) the doctors often respond by increasing the dose or making the chemotherapy even more toxic. The end result is that the chemotherapy may well kill the cancer cells but it will probably also kill the patient. (Thereby helping to perpetuate the old medical comment about the treatment being a success but the patient dying.)
2. Even when chemotherapy (or radiotherapy) does succeed in apparently 'killing' a cancer (and doctors like to give themselves a decent chance at a good cure rate by claiming that any patient who survives an extremely modest five years has been cured) there is a considerable risk that the cancer will recur. When you stop and think about it this isn't difficult to understand for chemotherapy (or radiotherapy or surgery for that matter) does absolutely nothing to alter the circumstances which led to the cancer developing in the first place.
Does Cancer Recur? Or Is The Body Simply Vulnerable To Cancers?
When a cancer recurs it isn't necessarily because the surgeon, the radiotherapist or the physician prescribing the chemotherapy has failed to kill all the cancer cells (this is the excuse usually given by surgeons, radiotherapists and physicians and since I try to retain an open mind I will happily agree that it may sometimes be true) but may be because nothing in the body has changed. The circumstances which led to the development of a first cancer can just as easily lead to the development of a second cancer.
It is for this reason that one often hears of extremely unfortunate individuals who have developed two or even three cancers in separate organs.
Here's an interesting observation which I bet you won't see plastered all over the official medical journals: Dr Sam Chachoua reminded readers in the June/July 1998 issue of Nexus magazine that twenty years ago when a group of leukaemia patients were treated by wiping out their own bone marrow and giving them bone marrow from a donor the leukaemia returned in a number of the patients.
But - and this is the fascinating bit - DNA checks showed that the new, second bout of leukaemia, consisted of cells which had belonged to the healthy donor. The patient's original bone marrow had all been removed and this time it was the donor's bone marrow which had turned into leukaemia cells.
It is clear from this that there must have been something within those patients' bodies which was turning healthy cells into cancer cells.
The cause of the cancer is in the patient and merely trying to wipe out cancer cells isn't enough.
It is because the cancer industry either fails to understand this (or doesn't want to believe it) that the cancer industry will never succeed in beating cancer.
All those billions of dollars being pumped into cancer research are being wasted because scientists and doctors insist on attacking an enemy they cannot see.
It is no coincidence that doctors and researchers involved in the cancer industry frequently describe themselves as being involved in a war - that is exactly how they plan their treatment programmes.
But the real problem for the cancer industry is that the real enemy isn't just invisible - it simply doesn't exist in the same way that smallpox, tuberculosis or influenza exist. The real problem, the real enemy which has to be confronted, is not a bunch of malignant cells but a weakened, toxin infiltrated body. And since cancer develops when a body is ill and weak it seems pretty obvious to me that the very last thing the body needs when it is ill is to be attacked with toxic chemicals. Prescribing toxic chemotherapy is like prescribing a hammer blow to the head for a man with a headache The main hope is that the blow to the head will cause so much pain that he won't notice the original headache.
(The real irony here, as I have mentioned before, is the fact that the same huge multinational corporations which produce the toxic chemicals which cause cancer also sell the toxic chemicals which are prescribed as a 'cure'. This is the ultimate perpetual motion money machine; exclusively self serving.)
Self Healing Mechanisms Overlooked
The other crucial fact that the cancer industry overlooks is that our bodies are remarkably capable of looking after themselves. Few people take advantage of these self-healing mechanisms and protective capabilities because we are all encouraged to put our health and our lives into the hands of the so called experts - practitioners who are often trained to look at our bodies, and the diseases which afflict them, with all the breadth of vision of a man looking through a microscope.
Conceit, Arrogance And Bigotry
The great tragedy of orthodox medicine is that doctors have always been suspicious of anything new and often reluctant to listen to theories and ideas which contradict traditional attitudes.
From Paracelsus to Lind to Semmelweiss, medical history is littered with doctors who learned the hard way that the medical establishment does not take kindly to original ideas or to new concepts which threaten the status quo.
Medical students are taught that they should avoid asking uncomfortable questions and young doctors who wish to succeed know that they must remain unquestioningly faithful to the established truths.
Any physician who rocks the boat, makes waves or swims against the tide will soon find himself floundering in deep water - and struggling to survive! To be successful in our society a physician must respect the prejudices of his elders, adhere to the dogma of his teachers and shut his mind to theories which do not fit in with orthodox medical doctrines.
Modern medicine is, much like the black magic medicine of the middle ages, an unstructured, unscientific discipline in which uncertainty, confusion and ignorance are too often disguised with conceit, arrogance and bigotry.
At a time when the half-life of medical information is shrinking and the limits of traditional, interventionist medicine are daily becoming more and more apparent, this ostrich-type behaviour is difficult to understand and impossible to justify.
Unless doctors are prepared to consider the unexpected, the unlikely and even the apparently impossible, patients must regard rigidly orthodox interventionists with a certain amount of suspicion and cynicism.
The Underestimated Healing Power Of The Body
The truth is that our bodies have far more power than we give them credit for.
Fifteen years ago I wrote a book called Bodypower in which I observed that the body's self healing mechanisms are so effective that in nine out of ten illnesses the body will deal with any disorder itself - without any outside intervention.
If you look after your body well you will dramatically reduce your chances of developing heart disease, cancer or any other threat to your survival.
Moreover, if you do fall ill then you can help yourself recover by taking advantage of those internal self healing powers and, if necessary, by helping your bodypower.
When a disease threatens the very survival of the organism then the body needs to be encouraged to use all its internal healing powers in order to alter the circumstances within. You need to turn up the boost on your bodypower.
When the circumstances change the cancer won't grow. When the body is stronger than the cancer the cancer will, to use the aggressive jargon of the cancer industry, be defeated. And that, surely, is the key to success in defeating cancer: not to try to destroy the cancer from the outside but to try to help the body defeat the cancer from the inside.
A Vital Lesson
A little earlier I said that one of the fundamental errors doctors make is that they assume that they can treat cancer (and other life-threatening diseases) in the same way that they thought they could treat infectious diseases.
Tackling cancer as though it were an outside agent (such as a virus or a bacterium) simply doesn't work because cancer is not something that comes in from the outside of the body -- it is something that develops within as a result of a fundamental problem inside the human body (although it is often triggered by environmental toxins).
But there is a vital lesson to be learnt from the way that our bodies respond to infectious diseases.
Triggering A Bodypower Response
Earlier in this article I explained how doctors had observed that when cancer patients fall ill with an infectious disease they are more likely to go into spontaneous remission.
Now why could this be?
I have seen it argued that the infectious disease somehow eats up the cancer. But I don't think that this is what happens at all.
What I believe happens is that patients with cancer who develop an infection get better because their immune systems are triggered into a response. The infection is easily recognised as an immediate threat to the body (in contrast to a cancer which may not be such an immediate and obvious threat) and so the body reacts in the only way it knows how - by winding up the immune system; the result is that the bodypower effect comes into operation and the cancer gets defeated along with the infection.
Alternative Therapies: The Common Factor
There are now many alternative therapies available for the treatment of cancer. Some are available very cheaply. Some are extremely expensive. Some are simple to follow. Some are extremely complex.
But the two things that the successful anti-cancer therapies all have in common (and the multi billion dollar a year cancer industry either hasn't realised this yet or else refuses to act on it) is that, whether they are designed to do this or not, the so called alternative therapies which work, and which often have extraordinary and dramatic results when applied to seriously ill cancer patients, all improve the health and vitality of the body's immune system and help eradicate chemical toxins from the body.
The alternative cancer therapies which work offer diets which are rich in vitamin-packed organic fruit and vegetables and low in toxic chemicals. They also encourage patients to learn how to relax and to find some peace in their lives. It doesn't matter whether the peace comes through meditation, relaxation, religion or love and comfort applied by people who care.
Those are the stable, ever present qualities of the effective anti cancer cures which work.
The coffee enemas, the hormone injections and the obscure herbal additions may, in my considered view, be little more than bits of fine tuning which may or may not have an additional healing effect superior to that which would be offered by a placebo. There is some evidence suggesting that herbal remedies do contain substances which have effective anti-cancer properties but I believe that it is the immune system which is the real key to cancer treatment.
(To this reservation must be added the side observation that I don't see how some of these additional remedies can really be described as 'natural' Giving vast quantities of vitamin by intravenous injection can hardly be described as 'natural' and coffee enemas can hardly be described as 'natural' either.)
I believe that the real benefit from these alternative approaches to cancer comes from the boost the immune system gets from the absence of stress and the high natural vitamin content of the fruit and vegetable enriched diet.
Conclusion
I believe that cancer develops because the body is a wreck. (Although the owner of the body may not be aware of this. Many people who have been under stress and over-exposed to toxins for long periods succeed in suppressing and ignoring the physical and mental signs of distress. They don't feel 'well' but they don't feel 'ill' either - until, one day, a lump is found or an unmistakeable symptom of cancer appears.)
Because of the accumulated stresses the immune system doesn' t work properly and so the toxic chemicals and other irritants which have collected in the body trigger off the development of a cancer. (There are thoughtful scientists - derided by the AIDS industry - who claim that AIDS develops for similar reasons) .
Where do the toxins and irritants come from?
There is pretty convincing evidence showing that tobacco and toxin contaminated food are by far the two biggest causes of cancer. (It is, I believe, because they eat more than their fair share of contaminated food and have toxin rich fat deposits that overweight individuals are more prone to cancer) . Other possible irritants include radiation, polluted air and water, alcohol, drugs, toxins in household and industrial chemicals and electrical fields.
If you don' t want to get cancer - or you have cancer and you want to get rid of it - then I believe that the answer is clear: you must reduce your intake of and exposure to toxins and build up your immune system so that it can work harder to defend your body. With an immune system working well you will be less likely to develop cancer. And if you develop cancer then it is my belief that your body will be better able to turn up the boost on its bodypower if you improve the efficiency of your immune system and reduce your exposure to toxins. (I described how you can support and strengthen your immune system in VCHL Vol 1 No e and VCHL Vol 2 No 2.)
The importance and vulnerability of the body's immune system cannot be exaggerated. I believe that it is because they overwork their bodies and dam-age their immune systems that top international athletes suffer so much from illness - and tend to die earlier than non athletes. There is, as I have pointed out before, a huge difference between fitness and good health.
Sadly, I rather doubt if the medical establishment will ever support this approach, which is based upon my own personal views. It is an approach to cancer which offers little or nothing in the way of profit to the shareholders and employees of large international companies.
I should also mention that the power of the immune system to heal will, naturally, be as dependant as any other part of the body upon the power of the mind. Using 'mindpower' alongside 'bodypower' makes a formidable combination. If a patient believes that something is going to happen then there is a very much greater chance that it will. (And, conversely, if a patient does not believe - or believes that the disease is going to defeat them -- then the chances of success are slight indeed.)
For the foreseeable future the official answer to cancer is likely to remain the same as it is at the moment: blast the body with toxic chemicals in the hope that these will kill the cancer tissue.
Ironically, the medical establishment, committed as it is to supporting the pharmaceutical industry and the cancer industry, seems unlikely or un-willing to recognise that the other effect of this approach is to damage the immune system, weaken the body and make the organs and tissues within the body more vulnerable not only to the existing cancer but to the development of new cancers too.
Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc practised medicine for ten years. He has written over 80 books which have been translated into 22 languages.
Taken, with permission, from: European Medical Journal, Dr Vernon Coleman’s Health Letter, (Vol. 3 No 1 Aug 1998), Publishing House, Trinity Place, Barnstaple, Devon EX32 9HJ. Tel: 01271 328 768. Fax: 01271 328768.