Hildreth on Health: Now that you or your loved one has or had cancer

I think it would be appropriate for us to delve a little deeper into the cancer picture from the primary care perspective.

I would expect that your oncologist is doing or has done the best job he knows how to eliminate the cancerous tumors.

But is that all there is to eradicating cancer from your body? Is the cancer challenge the same in all of us?

Has it ever come back a second time? Is it appropriate to just wait and see and hope?

Would you have any difficulty in getting any kind of insurance if you have had cancer?

Let’s start by reviewing just “what is cancer.” In researching this, there appear to be some different opinions. However, most of the researchers express a relatively common opinion.

Cancer is not just a lump or bump disease even though the English name for the science of cancer, oncology, means the study of tumors.

It is true that tumors are the characteristic visible signs of most forms of cancer. In most cases, your oncologist can do a great job in eradicating the tumor either through surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy.

However, statistics have shown us that anyone that has required one of these procedures to remove an active cancerous tumor, wherever it might be, has a greater chance of this cancer coming back or experiencing a new cancer somewhere in the body in the future.

Why is this? Freedom from tumors does not, therefore, necessarily mean freedom from cancer.

This is where the patient’s primary care physician working with the oncologist can support the patient’s immune system, cellular nutritional balance, and aid in synchronizing the patient’s cellular metabolic processes by correcting any ongoing chronic inflammatory processes.

Chronic ongoing inflammatory processes, particularly in the elderly, are not uncommon in the gastrointestinal area and bowel due to emotional stress, eating habits, chronic or ongoing infectious processes, food allergies or sensitivities, or altered bowel habits.

The prostate and breasts, secondary to hormonal imbalances and nutritional deficiencies, and the lungs, due to smoking or contact with other toxic elements through the years, are susceptible to cancer particularly in patients that have experienced cancerous tumors before.

Cancer is a chronic systemic metabolic condition characterized by the growth and uncontrolled proliferation of primitive undifferentiated cells usually in the presence of depressed host resistance or inadequate wound healing and usually within an environment of nutritional deficiencies.

According to this definition, we all have and are experiencing this process of altered cellular activity from time to time.

But always before there was ever a visible sign of it, your enzymes and immune system went to work to eradicate it as fast as it appeared.

This time, things are different. This time, there are insufficient pancreatic enzymes to destroy the microscopic malignancy and inadequate immune activity and cellular nutritional backup so the cancerous cells proliferate, divide and unionize into a mass that is expressed as a tumor.

Lifestyle changes, emotional stresses, change in eating habits or a change in food assimilation and utilization because of age and inadequate pancreatic enzymes to break down, assimilate and utilize the nutrients you are taking in, even if they are the best possible, may play a role.

Again, I want to reiterate that removing the tumors does not necessarily equate with removing the cancerous disease that produced the altered undifferentiated primitive cells that have only one goal in life and form together to produce the tumor we call cancer.

The tumors are the reflection of the systemic cancerous disease that the body has failed to keep under control. An ongoing out-of-control cancerous process can rob the body of a huge amount of nutrients and quickly get the metabolic condition out of hand.

To reverse this, the tumor growth process, it must be eradicated. The nutritional state of the body must be re-established. The immune system must be supported and brought under control. The pancreatic enzyme production that makes the primordial cells vulnerable to destruction by the immune system must be in full production or supplemented.

The whole hormonal glandular system must be in complete balance to control intracellular metabolic processes of healthy cells for preparation to handle and destroy all altered undifferentiated primordial cellular activity as it arises.

You may be interested in some U.S. breast cancer incidence by the American College of Surgeons. For the period from 1970 to 1979, the rate of breast cancer was about one in 12. From 1980 to 1989, the rate was about one in 10. From 1990 to 1999, the rate was one in eight. From 2000 to 2009, the rate will be approximately one in six.

A short list of breast cancer risk factors really indicates the altered metabolic activity: first, female gender; second, age (as we age, the risk becomes greater), family history, early onset of menses, late menopause, nulliparity (in other words, no pregnancies), breast cancer genes and obesity.

Many risk factors are related to hormonal imbalance through the years. It appears that hormonal imbalances in the man may play a role in prostatic cancer also.

Cancer is a systemic disease and must be treated that way to produce any permanency of results.

Contact Dr. DeWall J. Hildreth at 625-1101 or cnhcgv@yahoo.com. Dr. Hildreth specializes in hormone balancing and musclo-skeletal degeneration. He practices with Continental Natural Health Clinic at 210 W. Continental Rd., Suite 130. His column appears biweekly in the Green Valley News.