According to a recent article in the NY Times, a study published in The Archives of Internal Medicine found that some breast cancers may go into spontaneous remission on their own, with no medical intervention. The researchers found this from looking at the mammography results of thousands of women in four Norwegian countries, and surprisingly, some of those women who showed a tumor in their breast at one point in time did not show a tumor in a repeated mammography six years later. Of course, there are many complexities and more details to this study (you can read the original research here: http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/168/21/2311), but the researchers are baffled, with the one conclusion: do some breast cancers disappear on their own?!
Have you heard about this phenomenon? Can you imagine being the woman who's cancer disappears, and it just depends on when you get the mammogram (before or after the tumor is seen).
Please don't misinterpret this as a reason to not get a mammogram. It is impossible to know which tumor will magically disappear on its own, and which one will spread and cause irreversible damage. What I got from this study is that if some women's tumors are going into remission on their own, then what do these women have that other's don't? A specific gene, or antibody or something?? And, can we manufacture this to help cure cancer?!
What do you think about this?
One more note: when I was in high school, I remember learning in health class that "viruses aren't curable or treatable and bacteria are". Well, now we've learned that some virus strains actually go into remission and essentially "cure themselves". So, maybe we can learn something new about cancer?!
Source:
Per-Henrik Zahl, MD, PhD; Jan Mæhlen, MD, PhD; H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH (2008). The Natural History of Invasive Breast Cancers Detected by Screening Mammography. Arch Intern Med; 168(21):2311-2316.
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That's a pretty fascinating study. It makes me wonder if our bodies' immune systems, when healthy, can constantly fend off small threats from disorders or disease, and only when our immune systems break down in some way do the disorders or disease take the upper hand.
These paragraphs are both exciting and worrisome:
"If the results are replicated, he said, it could eventually be possible for some women to opt for so-called watchful waiting, monitoring a tumor in their breast to see whether it grows. “People have never thought that way about breast cancer,” he added.
"Dr. Kaplan and his colleague, Dr. Franz Porzsolt, an oncologist at the University of Ulm, said in an editorial that accompanied the study, “If the spontaneous remission hypothesis is credible, it should cause a major re-evaluation in the approach to breast cancer research and treatment.” "
That's exciting because anything that improves treatment and success rates for any cancer is exciting, but I wonder about the "watchful waiting" part, simply because women have always been told that the cancers found earliest are the ones easiest to treat. Imagine the trauma and pain if a woman engaged in "watchful waiting" and during that time, a small tumor became larger and more threatening to her life? Perhaps requiring much more drastic levels of treatment?
Perhaps as we gain more knowledge of what a healthy body does naturally in this area, we'll be even more motivated to keep our bodies in the best condition we can, and we'll think three times about bad nutrition, smoking and other harmful habits. It's definitely (no pun intended) food for thought.
November 25, 2008 - 5:31pmThis Comment
This findings are not at all surprising for someone who studied GNM (German New Medicine), which states that cancer is caused by conflicts that 'trigger' biological emergency programs. In the case of cancer, the body tries to help you by producing more cells (for instance more breast cells to help you nurture your kid if it got hurt - these programs are very primitive, I suggest read about at some gnm-site). Anyway, as soon as the conflict is solved - your kid is out of danger, say out of the intensive care unit of a hospital - the multiplying of cells is stopped and the 'tumor' gets removed by the bodies own bacteria, if there are enough of them - anti biotics can remove too many bacteria, in which case the tumor gets incapsulated, with the danger of getting detected by a later screening and treated by surgery, chemo and radiation...
June 14, 2011 - 2:10amThis Comment
By the way, I'm the writer of the comment about GNM, and my ex-girlfriend got diagnosed with malignant breast cancer at april of 2009. She was strongly adviced to have a mastectomy, to be followed by radiation and chemotherapy. The night before the operation I found out, by accident, about GNM and we dicided to postpone the operation to first look in to this new theory about disease. Later we canceled the conventional treatment altogether and found/solved the conflict that had caused her breast cancer. As to this day she is feeling better than ever. Maybe we got lucky, maybe belief (placebo) has a lot to do with it, but my studies of the cancer subject convinced me of the fact that conventional treatment is not only pretty useless, but even pretty dangerous. My mother got killed by chemo in 6 days, but this was 14 years ago and I didn't know anything at that time, other then what most people know through the media and from they're doctors (who know all they know from textbooks which are based on false premises for the biggest part - that's why doctors treat symptoms, not causes of 'illness'). Anyway, best wishes to you all.
June 14, 2011 - 2:20amThis Comment