Some Useful information on Cancer

Forwarded by Khalil Essat

1. Every person has cancer cells in the body. These cancer cells do not show up in the standard tests until they have multiplied to a few billion. When doctors tell cancer patients that there are no more cancer cells in their bodies after treatment, it just means the tests are unable to detect the cancer cells because they have not reached the detectable size.

2. Cancer cells occur between 6 to more than 10 times in a person's lifetime.

3. When the person's immune system is strong the cancer cells will be destroyed and prevented from multiplying and forming tumors.

4. When a person has cancer it indicates the person has multiple nutritional deficiencies. These could be due to genetic, environmental, food and lifestyle factors. 5. To overcome the multiple nutritional deficiencies, changing diet and including supplements will strengthen the immune system.

6. Chemotherapy involves poisoning the rapidly-growing cancer cells and also destroys rapidly-growing healthy cells in the bone marrow,gastro-intestinal tract etc, and can cause organ damage, like liver, kidneys, heart, lungs etc.

7. Radiation while destroying cancer cells also burns, scars and damages healthy cells, tissues and organs.

8. Initial treatment with chemotherapy and radiation will often reduce tumor size. However prolonged use of chemotherapy and radiation do not result in more tumor destruction.

9. When the body has too much toxic burden from chemotherapy and radiation the immune system is either compromised or destroyed, hence the person can succumb to various kinds of infections and complications.

10. Chemotherapy and radiation can cause cancer cells to mutate and become resistant and difficult to destroy. Surgery can also cause cancer cells to spread to other sites.

11. An effective way to battle cancer is to starve the cancer cells by not feeding it with the foods it needs to multiply.

CANCER CELLS FEED ON:

a. Sugar is a cancer-feeder. By cutting off sugar it cuts off one important food supply to the cancer cells. Sugar substitutes like NutraSweet, Equal, Spoonful, etc are made with Aspartame and it is harmful. A better natural substitute would be Manuka honey or molasses but only in very small amounts. Table salt has a chemical added to make it white in colour. Better alternative is Bragg's aminos or sea salt.

b. Milk causes the body to produce mucus, especially in the gastro-intestinal tract. Cancer feeds on mucus. By cutting off milk and substituting with unsweetened soya milk cancer cells are being starved.

c. Cancer cells thrive in an acid environment. A meat-based diet is acidic and it is best to eat fish, and a little chicken rather than beef or pork. Meat also contains livestock antibiotics, growth hormones and parasites, which are all harmful, especially to people with cancer.

d. A diet made of 80% fresh vegetables and juice, whole grains, seeds, nuts and a little fruits help put the body into an alkaline environment. About 20% can be from cooked food including beans.Fresh vegetable juices provide live enzymes that are easily absorbed and reach down to cellular levels within 15 minutes to nourish and enhance growth of healthy cells. To obtain live enzymes for building healthy cells try and drink fresh vegetable juice (most vegetables including bean sprouts)and eat some raw vegetables 2 or 3 times a day. Enzymes are destroyed at temperatures of 104 degrees F (40 degrees C).

e. Avoid coffee, tea, and chocolate, which have high caffeine. Green tea is a better alternative and has cancer-fighting properties. Water-best to drink purified water, or filtered, to avoid known toxins and heavy metals in tap water. Distilled water is acidic, avoid it.

12. Meat protein is difficult to digest and requires a lot of digestive enzymes. Undigested meat remaining in the intestines become putrefied and leads to more toxic buildup.

13. Cancer cell walls have a tough protein covering. By refraining from or eating less meat it frees more enzymes to attack the protein walls of cancer cells and allows the body's killer cells to destroy the cancer cells.

14. Some supplements build up the immune system (IP6, Flor-ssence,Essiac, anti-oxidants, vitamins, minerals, EFAs etc.) to enable the body's own killer cells to destroy cancer cells. Other supplements like vitamin E are known to cause apoptosis, or programmed cell death, the body's normal method of disposing of damaged, unwanted, or unneeded cells.

15. Cancer is a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. A proactive and positive spirit will help the cancer warrior be a survivor. Anger, unforgiveness and bitterness put the body into a stressful and acidic environment. Learn to have a loving and forgiving spirit. Learn to relax and enjoy life. 16. Cancer cells cannot thrive in an oxygenated environment. Exercising daily, and deep breathing help to get more oxygen down to the cellular level. Oxygen therapy is another means employed to destroy cancer cells.

Courtesy: AL-ISLAAH PUBLICATIONS

What Is Asthma?

UNLIKE other common chromic illness such as diabetes or hypertension, which have a simple definition, asthma is a clinical condition that is defined by its clinical, physiological and pathological features.

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disorder or the airways in which many cells and cellular elements play a role. The chronic inflammation is associated with airways hyper responsiveness that leads to recurrent episodes of wheezing, breathlessness, chest tightness and coughing, especially at night or in the early morning.

These episodes are usually associated with widespread, but variable airflow obstruction within the lung that is often reversible either spontaneously or with treatment.

Clinical manifestations of asthma is controlled, there should be severe exacerbations should be rare.


Burden of asthma

Asthma is a major problem worldwide with almost 300 million people suffering from asthma. Poorly controlled asthma is also a major cause of morbidity and mortality as such it is a burden to the health care system.

The cost of asthma to any health care system depends on the individual patient's level of control and the extent to which exacerbations are avoided.
Point to note include:

- Emergency treatment is more expensive that scheduled treatment.
- The non-medical economic cost of asthma is substantial
- Guidelines have determined that asthma care can be cost effective
- Families can suffer from the financial burden of treating asthma

Based on these findings, from the perspective of both the patient and society, the cost of not treating asthma correctly is very much higher.

Thus using guidelines such as the GINA guidelines to deliver appropriate care based on the severity of the patient's asthma is probably the most cost efficient way to optimize asthma care.


Factor that cause asthma

Factor that influence the risk of asthma can be divided into those that cause the development of asthma and those that trigger asthma symptoms. The mechanisms by which they influence the development and expression of asthma are very complex and interactive.

Host factor that influence the development of asthma are genetic predisposition to atopy and airway hyper responsiveness. Environmental factors that cause asthma are allergens both indoor and outdoor, infections, occupational sensitizers, tobacco smoke, outdoor and indoor pollution.


Mechanism of asthma

Asthma is an inflammatory disorder that is driven by the inter-play of several inflammatory cells and multiple mediators which result in a wide and variable spectrum of manifestation of the disease.

There is an interaction between inflammatory cells and inflammatory mediators. The inflammatory cells are those which are found in allergic diseases such as mast cells and eosinophills. The list of known inflammatory mediators keeps growing and at the last count there are more that one hundred (100) known mediators, and the list keeps growing.


Diagnosis of asthma

A clinical diagnosis of asthma is made when a person has symptoms of episodic breathlessness, wheezing, cough and chest tightness. Measurement of lung function provides an objective assessment of the severity of airflow, its reversibility and help confirm the diagnosis.

Clinical control of asthma is defined as:

-Daytime symptoms not more than twice a week

-No limitation of daily activities

-No nighttime symptoms

-Using relive medications not more than twice in a week

-Normal or near-normal lung function

-No acute attacks.

Treatment of asthma

The goal of asthma treatment is to achieve and maintain clinical control. The drugs used can be divided into controllers and relievers. Controllers are drug that are taken on a daily basic to keep asthma under control. Examples include inhaled steroids, sustained release theophyllines, leukotrine modifiers, and combinations of long acting beta-agonist with inhaled steroids.
Relievers are drugs that are used on an as needed basic to rapidly reduce the symptoms of breathlessness, and include drugs such as short-acting beta-agonists.
Asthma medications can be given by the inhaled, oral and intravenous route. It is preferable that inhalation therapy is used in asthma so that the drugs are delivered directly into the lungs. This ensures that the drug is delivered directly to the airways, producing higher concentrations of the drug at target sites with reduced total dose, thus reduced total dose, thus reducing the occurrence of side effects.
Increased use of relievers is a warning sign of worsening asthma and any patient who uses his or her reliever more that two times in a week is in danger of having a life threatening attack of asthma.

Asthma management –Effective partnership between patient and doctor

Effective management of asthma requires the development of a partnership between the patient and the healthcare provider. The aim of this partnership is guided self-management-that is, to empower asthmatic individuals with the ability to control their own condition with guidance from health care professionals.
The patient must be given adequate education on the role of the various symptoms so that they are in a position to take the necessary steps to maximize the control of their asthma.

GOOD OLD GARLIC

-fact or fiction

WASHINTON: Garlic – long touted as a wonder food for treating everything from the common cold to heart aliments – is one of the most popular dietary supplements in the United States.

But a new study published in the Feb 26 issue of Archive of Internal Medicine questions one popular notion: that raw garlic supplements may help lower cholesterol.

Forty-nine participants in the study were randomly assigned to receive raw garlic, 47 to take a powdered garlic supplements, 48 others took an aged garlic supplement, while 48 took a placebo.

The nearly three-year study determined that none of the garlic treatments had a “statistically significant” impact in treating high cholesterol – despite the fact that many garlic supplements are promoted as cholesterol-lowering agents. However, the researchers could not rule out garlic’s effectiveness in treating other ailments.
“The result do not demonstrate that garlic has no usefulness in the prevention of cardiovascular disease,” the authors wrote.

The reported no serious side-effects from giving the study’s subjects intensive doses of garlic, although breath and body odour problems were reported by more than half of the subjects in the raw garlic group -AFP