Cancer

-How sophisticated is our understanding of cancer?
Well, from the perspective of Western medical science we know most of what there is to know about it.  As Leland Hartwell says, genes change, sometimes go berserk, and then the berserk tissues either thrive or don't depending on whether they can get blood supply.  That's about everything we can know about a tumor as a separate entity; any further knowledge, such as why genes would go berserk in some people and not others, or why blood goes where it does, has more to do with an understanding of how physiology and genetics work generally than with understanding any particular disease.


-How does a TCM approach to cancer differ?
The TCM approach to cancer differs from the Western one the in the same ways that the two systems are different generally.  What this means is that TCM is built on the idea of using the mechanisms within the body to cure the body.  Herbology and acupuncture are, usually, a set of suggestions made to the body's systems rather than a set of orders.  This is why chemical analysis of herbs hasn't gotten us anywhere;  the active ingredients are often inside the body of the patient, not within the plant.

Cancer, however, creates an interesting exception to this contrast, demonstrated in the "detoxifying with toxic substances" chart of the article.  In this section, it is demonstrated that for patients who are extremely toxic, as sometimes happens with cancer, the only way to talk to there bodies at all is to poison them. 

Please note here that I am using the world "toxic" as a TCM technical term, not literally.  We're not talking about true chemical toxins here, but of a poisonous physical process manifesting as a fever on top of other cancer symptoms.  From a TCM perspective, the essence of this poisonous functionality and the essence of poisonous herbs are exactly the same.

So, that is how TCM views this class of treatment.  However, from a Western perspective, "detoxifying with toxic substances" is chemotherapy!  This is a fascinating example of two very different theoretical structures producing very similar treatments, and might be a starting point for opening dialogue between the systems.

-Are our genes still being shapes by natural selection?
Well, yeah.  We continue to change, the Earth continues to change, our genes continue to change.  The only reason this question came up at all is that our drive to remain unchanging became so strong that it destroyed our minds.

Which (segue!) brings me to a thought about cancer that I had in class the other day.  Our esteemed teacher began our class on a terminal illness by talking about the wish, so prevalent in humanity up to this point, to become immortal.  When he said that, I immediately thought "Immortality? Cancer is living that dream!"  And it is.  Cancer happens when some of the cells in our body succeed in turning off the mechanisms that we have already worked so hard to destroy.   Examples are apoptosis (it turns off and makes cancer, right?), ischemia (this both ravages tissues in the elderly and renders any tumor harmless if it cannot produce angiogenic factor), and, most strikingly, hormone starvation! This last example brings out the absurdity of our situation most strikingly, as it has created a situation where women go through both prophylactic mastectomy and permanent hormone replacement therapy in the same body, albeit at different times in their lives.

My point is that Western longevity treatments and cancer treatments are trying to do exactly opposite things, and often amount to two different medical specialists having a biochemical showdown within the body of a patient. The characteristics of cancer, wild growth and agelessness, are the same ones lusted after by America generally.  If we cease in this lust, our thinking about the disease will become less confused.