Tuesday, September 30, 2008

The Law Of Attraction And Cancer

Discussions involving the Law of Attraction or the Secret of Attraction predominately revolve around money and wealth. However, wealth is only one aspect of life. Health is of greater daily concern to us than is wealth but it does not appear to receive the same attention.

The Law of Attraction applies to all aspects of our lives including our health. We attract our state of health just as we attract our state of wealth. This attraction is, for most people, usually by default. While we are usually cognizant of attracting good health into our lives by our activities and philosophies, we are usually totally unaware of attracting disease into our lives. Very few patients with whom I have dealt have stated initially that they knew they created their disease.

Cancer is one of the areas where I spend a lot of time with patients, families and medical staff. As I ponder the Law of Attraction, I often think about the universal focus on cancer. Cancer is a hot topic. The treatment of cancer is a hot issue. The medications for cancer treatment are an expensive issue. Newspapers, radio stations and television stations regularly carry articles and programs about some aspect of cancer. Governments feed more money into cancer research and treatment. Pharmaceutical companies develop more expensive medications for its treatment and make more and more money. Physicians specialize in its diagnosis and treatment. Treatment teams are set up to work with the cancer patient and his family. Public forums are held and even court battles are fought over one type of cancer being given preferential treatment. And the incidence of cancer continues to escalate!

Why? Why, with all the focus on cancer and the enormous amounts of money being spent, does the incidence of cancer continue to rise? With all the expensive treatments, why do people continue to have recurrence of their cancer? Why do some families appear to be magnets for the disease while others appear to be immune?

Certainly, I believe, environmental issues play a large part in the development of cancer. Genetics play a part. Lifestyle, eating habits and smoking all play a part. But what about the Law of Attraction? Does it somehow explain the increasing incidence of cancer throughout the world.

The Law of Attraction requires three steps: ask, believe and receive. According to Law of Attraction, the universe will give us exactly what we ask for. Is not the attention that we give to cancer in a way sending a message to the universe that we are asking for more (is not preparing for it asking for it?)? Is not the ongoing devotion to the business of cancer telling the universe that we believe we are ready to receive more of it. We are receiving it with open arms!

I am not suggesting that any individual wishes to have cancer. Nor am I suggesting that we should stop our research and treatment or our funding for such. That would be foolish. I do notice that very little emphasis is placed on prevention. As a society, if we were not ready to receive cancer, would we not be taking steps to get rid of the environmental and publicly promoted lifestyle and eating habits that we know contribute to cancer?

I believe the Law of Attraction adds a viable explanation to the increasing rates of cancer (as well as many other diseases) in our society. I believe it applies at both the macro level and the individual level. I expect little significant change will occur at the macro level and that it is up to each individual to apply the tenets of the Law of Attraction to their own lives to protect themselves. I do not believe our governments, industry or large institutions have the best interest of the individual in their focus. Thus we must learn to protect ourselves from these diseases by every means possible.

Fighting Cancer From Within

Health insurance is vital when it comes to the treatment of cancer. This life threatening disease is often diagnosed in its later stages and needs intense treatment to save a life. We all know that the NHS is stretched to its limits and because of this people are more frequently turning to private health insurance to protect themselves in the event of a major health concern. They want to know that should they or their family contract an illness or disease that they can benefit from all the medical research that has been carried out over the years and that benefit can be felt immediately and not at the end of some waiting list.

Because cancer is one of the UK's biggest killers and can sometimes be difficult to detect, constant research is being carried out into the earlier detection as well as preventative hints and tips and the best, least invasive treatment that can be brought about either through the NHS or with the assistance of health insurance.

It has long been known that the harsh treatments for cancer take an extreme toll on the body, weakening the immune system and laying the patient open to other possible infections. This is because the best hope of beating the disease is usually to use forms of chemotherapy and radiotherapy but it is near on impossible with conventional methods to direct this treatment at specific growths. Normally, this treatment will also kill off surrounding tissue and this is what causes the problem. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy are used with a fine balancing act of knowing when the patient is at the strongest to strike with the treatment and then allow some recovery time.

As with many things, results are always more effective when a problem is treated from within. To this end, the Daily Mail reports on new research into a highly effective way of encouraging the body's own immune system to fight cancer. Blinatumomab* is a new drug that is being trialled that uses the power of the immune cells to shrink or eliminate cancerous tumours and it is hoped it will be widely available within the next five years.
Thus far, tests have been carried out on people with non-Hodgkins lymphoma but the results are so promising that it is hoped further development will lead to many other cancers being treated. Already, the drug is being tested on patients with aggressive blood cancers.

The new drug has the ability to make cancer-killing white blood cells adhere to the tumour, releasing a poison that destroys the tumour. The body is adequately supplied with white blood cells to fight disease and normally they do a fine job. However, in the case of cancer, the white blood cells are often overwhelmed to the point where they become ineffective.

This is exactly what it is hoped the new drug will overcome - using the body's own defence mechanism to destroy rogue cells from within without the need for invasive treatment. The drug will effectively activate the white blood cells to continue doing their thing until the tumour is beaten.

The research results have grabbed the attention of Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK's chief clinician and he is quite excited about the future prospects for patients. Careful monitoring and further research is necessary, but so far, this is the most promising possibility.

*Most insurers will not pay for drugs that have not obtained a license from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) or those that are currently under experimentation, however, they will provide access to new drugs licensed by the EMA based on the individual’s needs.

Equine Cancer

It is not very often you hear of a horse with cancer. Often when you do it is after the horse has died and the cancer was later discovered in a necropsy. However, if the cancer is detected early then there are several things that a veterinarian can do to help your horse fight the cancer.

Horses, like humans are able to develop a number of cancers. They are able to get skin cancer and lymphatic cancers. They are also able to contract cancers in various organs as well. Like humans, horses will also develop lumps and tumors. They can also develop skin cancer lesions. These lumps often occur under the eyes, around the genitals and on the skin. These lumps call for diagnosis via biopsy to determine the type of cancer as well as the severity.

Cancer is hard to diagnose because the symptoms are so vague. They may present symptoms similar to other disease or none at all. The main symptom associated with cancer is a horse that doesn’t seem to be thriving or responding to treatment for other diseases. These horses are often suffering from some sort of cancer.

Treatment for equine cancer is very similar to human treatments. The horse may undergo surgery to remove malignant tumors or potentially malignant tumors. They can undergo chemotherapy, immunotherapy for immune system support and even laser therapy.

Often several of these treatments may be employed at one time. Horses may also undergo radiation therapy and a process called cryosurgery, which involves freezing off the tumor caused by skin cancer.

Skin cancer is prevalent in light colored horses. Horses, such as Paints and Pintos that have a lot of white, as well as white colored horses, may easily sunburn and develop skin cancer.

Owners with horses such as these can often prevent skin cancer by keeping the horses in the shade during the day and turning out at night or by applying sunscreen to their white and sun sensitive areas.

The number of companies that are producing equine related sunscreens and treatments to help prevent cancers such as these should be praised. Not only do we worry about our children in the sun but sometimes we force or do not have resources to help shade or our equine friends.

A few that I know of are absorbine and healthy haircare, both human sunscreens can be watered down and sprayed with great results. I would use no less than 30 or 50 rated for this.

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Equine cancer is growing at alarming rates and whatever we can do to help will prevent some of these horses from not reaching a good old age.

Causes Of Prostate Cancer

The prostate is a gland found only in men, which lies just below the bladder. The tube through which urine flows from the bladder when you pass water goes first through the prostate gland then out through the penis. The prostate gland can become enlarged in many men as they get older which then causes difficulty with urination.

The job of the prostate gland is to produce fluid which forms part of semen and helps to nourish sperm. The prostate gland sits in front of the back passage or “rectum” which is why if a doctor wants to examine the prostate gland they feel it by putting a finger into your back passage. This is also called a “digital rectal examination” or DRE for short. From feeling the prostate gland the doctor can tell how enlarged the gland is and whether it feels normal or cancerous, this can then provide a picture of prostate cancer if it exists.

Cells in the prostate gland are constantly turning over to replace old with new but sometimes this process can get out of control. Cancer is the name for cells which have lost control of their renewal process and start to grow unchecked. They grow into a group of cells called a “tumour”. As the cells grow they can start to invade surrounding tissues. This invading process is called acting in a “malignant” fashion. Cells can break off the tumour and spread to other sites in the body, usually via the blood stream. The cells can then grow where they have settled, often in distant parts of the body such as the bones or brain. These deposits are often called “secondaries” or “metastases”. These deposits are not new cancers but are groups of cancer cells spread from the original or “primary” cancer in the prostate gland.

Most often in prostate cancer this process of tumour growth followed by invasion then metastasis is relatively slow and can occur over many months or years. This is why some men may have prostate cancer but never have a problem because of it i.e. their prostate cancer grows so slowly that other diseases or illnesses (e.g. heart attack or stroke) cause problems or even death before the prostate cancer has developed far enough to cause symptoms or spread from the prostate. With modern treatments many men with early prostate cancer can be cured and in many more the prostate cancer can be controlled and the invasion process slowed even more. Prostate cancer survival rates vary widely around the world, although detection in 3rd World countries is often poorly catalogued.

The cause of prostate cancer is not known. What is known is the characteristics of those men who tend to develop prostate problems. These are known as “risk factors” i.e. men with these characteristics are at greater risk of developing the cancer. However it is important to realise that ALL men are at risk of prostate cancer and even young men who have no history of cancer in their family can develop prostate cancer.

Cancer Is An Energy

This is the technical meaning of “healthy fat.” Your body needs these fats to function properly, yet it doesn't produce it on it's own.

Flax seed oils is the form in which the oil was extracted from the seed. Omega-3 fatty acids which contain the majority of flax seed health benefits are very susceptible to heat.

Flax seeds are basically available everywhere. You can purchase then at a health food store to a place were you buy natural foods sold in bulk. Although drugs have very important clinical uses, they are only part of the solution. A comprehensive approach to treating cognitive disorders should include foods and supplements that benefit the overall health of brain cells.

Studies of animals, too, suggest some anti-cancer benefit from flaxseed.

Cancer Is An Energy

Einstein, a genius scientist of the 20th century, and central to the new energy physics, stated that ‘a problem cannot be solved by the same mind set that created it’. Cancer is a case in point. Cancer is a dis-ease that stems partly from the products of the mechanistic, anthropomorphic and exploitative philosophy at the heart of our culture, which we tend to ignore. Its effective treatment demands that we see ourselves in a different light and act accordingly.

Medicine is extremely slow to move from a mechanistic and physical philosophy to a more energetic model, like the Gaian paradigm that values all life forms as connected. A philosophy of medicine that is over-reliant on logic and limited mainly to drugs and surgery is fundamental flawed. Acts of logic always rely on analysis, that is breaking down a ‘whole’ into its constituent parts, and examining each minutely. Reductionist approaches fail to see the connectivity and relatedness of all things. As a result this philosophy is offering us ‘cures’ to cancer that are often as dangerous and destructive as the disease itself.

Flax Seed muffins pregents Cancer? Find Flax Seed Recipe today! Omega-3 for health! Nobel prize-winner Carlo Rubbia maintains that only a billionth of the world is actually made of matter and the rest is made of energy. The new sciences are challenging the way we perceive the world and as a result the way we relate to our bodies. Dr. K. Scott-Mumby is author of Virtual Medicine and an allergy specialist in the UK writes: Science is proving that we exist as regulated and informed energy. Disease can now be redefined as a disruption, cessation or distortion in the information and energy fields. Its time for medical practitioners to join the party.

Classical science has reached the end of what it can explain in reductionist terms. Issues such as whether light is a particle or a wave, or whether or not water has a memory (an issue central to the ‘proof’ of homeopathy), are moving modern science to a quantum level that deals with fields of energy. Medical science is still stuck in a very physical universe, where the objective is to ‘excise the lump’ almost regardless of where it came from and individual conditions of the patient and their experiences.

New sciences such as the chaos theories point a way forward into handling the complexities of whole systems that work together, in synergy. Unfortunately our medical systems and practises are still too often based on philosophy formulated in medieval times.

Because all interventions in a medical process have to been ‘proven’ as workable (using scientific double-blind testing methods) before doctors will recognise their validity (if they then do the research), medical science mostly marginalises or ignores healing alternatives that can provide only ‘anecdotal evidence’. Multiple simultaneous treatments of different types and ‘levels’ tuned for one patient are un-testable by a reductionist philosophy and therefore ignored by mainstream medicine. In addition to this regulatory pressures force researchers and companies to test their drugs on patients with advanced cancer - when the dis-ease is much more difficult to treat and when the chances of success are modest - this means that potentially useful treatments are discarded as worthless. Omega-3 fatty acids are long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (18-22 carbon atoms in chain length) with the first of many double bonds beginning with the third carbon atom (when counting from the methyl end of the fatty acid molecule). Read on for more details on flax seed benefits.

The lignan constituents of flaxseed (not flaxseed oil) possesses in vitro anti-oxidant and possible estrogen receptor agonist/antagonist properties, prompting theories of efficacy for the treatment of breast cancer.

There are many benefits to adding flax seeds to your diet. Well for instance they can get rid of your constipation problem.

Flax Hull Lignans are very beneficial for many health conditions. Studies have shown that SDG or lignan (secoisolariciresinol diglycoside, but for simplicity this substance will be referred to as lignans)

But that should come as no big surprise, since any highly unsaturated oil will do that, particularly if substituted for saturated fats. Traditional research methodology, or ‘quantitative research’ is central to science and other methodologies are not usually acceptable. ‘Qualitative research’ is equally, if not more important at the present time in reference to cancer. Other medical systems, such as Chinese or Ayurvedic medicine, Homeopathy or Naturopathy use far subtler tools in both diagnosis and treatment. They are based on seeing the patient as a whole being and often use multiple interventions on several levels, simultaneously in the treatment of dis-ease. Because they work at the level of an individual patient, and from a different philosophy of medicine, it is almost impossible to analyse them with the tools of reductionist science.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Cancer In The Environment

Almost all of us know someone who has cancer, or who has died from it. We all know the anguish, suffering and grief that it causes. It has become so common that we treat it as if it’s a part of life that we just can’t avoid.

People are being diagnosed with cancer at unprecedented rates. Melanomas, breast and prostate cancers, colon cancer, testicular cancer and multiple myeloma are all increasing. During the 25 years from 1976 to 2001, the age-adjusted incidence of cancer among males increased by 27.7%, and the female rate increased by 17.8%. (Canadian Cancer Statistics 2006)

After examining 10 million people over a 70-year period, a recent Swedish study found that 90% of cancers were caused by the environment, where "environment" means everything outside our bodies that can make its way in, including tobacco smoke, toxic chemicals, alcohol, radiation from nuclear power plants, and the sun, processed foods high in sugars, fats and additives, some pharmaceutical drugs, medical x-rays, and more.

These are avoidable toxins, which should not be getting into our bodies. With changed policies, and industrial/agricultural practices that focus on prevention and precaution, and healthier diets and other personal habits, we can prevent this epidemic.

Toxic Nation

In 2005, Environmental Defence Canada released a report called Toxic Nation, which summarized the results of 'body burden' tests on 11 Canadians from coast to coast, including renowned wildlife artist Robert Bateman. Each had blood and urine tested for 88 toxic chemicals, many of them carcinogens. Sixty chemicals showed up in the combined results, including 41 known or suspected cancer-causing substances such as benzene, PVC, formaldehyde and some pesticides.

No one deliberately chooses to be exposed to man-made carcinogens, except perhaps for smokers. The chemicals that end up in our bodies are a by-product of many industrial processes, released from facilities such as pulp & paper and chemical plants into the surrounding air, water and soil. Agricultural chemicals and emissions from nuclear facilities also contribute to our toxic load.

People are also exposed to toxic chemicals everyday through commonly used products in the home, such as perfumes, shampoos, air fresheners, cleaning products, furniture and appliances, frying pans and food and beverage containers.

Even our food can contain chemicals that are harmful to human health, through pesticide sprays on fruits and vegetables, or by being grown and processed in ways that prevent key cancer-fighting compounds from being created.

Astonishingly, you can read entire tracts about cancer published by the American Cancer Society and the word carcinogen never comes up. These seemingly authoritative agencies have framed the cause of the disease as a problem of behavior rather than as one of exposure to disease-causing agents.

- Dr. Sandra Steingraber says: Chemicals have replaced bacteria and viruses as the main threat to health. The diseases we are beginning to see as the major causes of death in the latter part of (the 1900's) and into the 21st century are diseases of chemical origin.

Yoga And Cancer

In the 1980s a cancer specialist from San Antonio, Texas, reported that cancer can be cured by the use of yoga. But most physicians refused to acknowledge the cure, said Col. Hansa Raval, M.D., a pathologist with the United States Army. Dr. Raval said her work in cytotechnology _ a diagnostic branch of medicine designed to pinpoint early stages of cancer _ was fruitless until she began researching the use of non-conventional methods of treatment.

The specialist said she witnessed the use of Raja yoga and meditation cure crippling arthritis, headaches and even cancer. And even though Raval offers proof, which she said was collected during two years of study at the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University in India, she has been dismissed by other members of the medical profession as a kook.

Yoga's success as a treatment method is due to another hypothesis Raval proposes that 98 percent of all cancer is psychosomatic. This is not chanting or mantra reciting, the physician said. It's not based on scriptures. It's not a cult. It's not biofeedback. It's deeper than that. This is a full-proof method of meditation, a detailed understanding of what the soul is.

Raval maintains that medical schools belittle the study of non-conventional methods of cancer treatment in favor of conventional methods such as radiation, chemotherapy, and treatment through machines.

The soul creates the disease, but the body suffers. If the psyche creates the disease, the only way to cure it is through the psyche. It's a very simple formula: treating the seed of the problem.

Further, studies in parapsychology all point to the treatment of illness through treatment of the soul. In fact, medical schools teach students that the human being is only a body. But the mind has the power to cure the body. By definition, psychosomatic means a combination of mind, or soul and body.

The World Spiritual University, which has branches in 30 countries, teaches peace and perfection for health and happiness through the use of Raja yoga. The university gained status as a non-governmental member of the United Nations and has offices at the U.N. building in New York.

Raja yoga teaches students to search their soul world for answers on where they came from and why the cancer entered their body. They learn what role religion, stress, family and lifestyle played in the cancer.

So is there truly a cure for cancer by practicing yoga? The fact that there is research is exciting, but not conclusive. While there are effective means of treating disease beyond the conventional Western approach, it may be premature to turn our backs on what has been proven effective. But there's always hope and yoga is no doubt a useful and beneficial activity. But will it cure cancer? It may be too early to tell, but what's the harm in adding it to your arsenal?