This article starts with a critical review of Tripping Over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer is Overturning One of Medicine’s Most Entrenched Paradigms by Travis Christofferson, MS and goes on to discuss holistic perspectives on cancer and how to treat it.
A Book Review, and a Critique by David Osborn, MH, L.Ac.
I was shopping for probiotic supplements at a local health food store in Albuquerque, New Mexico not too long ago when I noticed an interesting looking book on the bookshelf in their bookstore section. Yeah – time to read up and study something interesting on holistic and alternative cancer therapy, I thought. What I got in this book was way more technical info on science, genetics and biochemistry than I had bargained for, and, frankly, wading through, or slogging my way through, all the genetics and biochemistry required a lot of persistence and focus. On second thought, I should have been able to figure out that the book would be quite heavy on scientific and technical minutiae by the author’s MS, or Master of Science, after his name. As an herbalist, I could pretty well guess that Otto Warburg’s discovery, way back in 1924, that cancer cells have a deranged metabolism that ferments glucose or sugars for energy instead of using the more aerobic or oxygen-rich form of cellular metabolism that happens in the cell’s mitochondria, would be a central focus of the book – and it was. I figured that every herbalist worth his or her salt would know about Otto Warburg’s discovery, which took place almost a century ago – and how cancer research and treatment has been lagging behind Warburg in a kind of scientific equivalent of the Dark Ages for so long, getting lost in blind alleys and dead ends.
The “One of Medicine’s Most Entrenched Paradigms” that Mr. Christofferson is referring to is the Genetic Theory of Cancer, which has dominated cancer research for most of its history, also known as the Somatic Mutation Theory (SMT) of Cancer. The basic premise of this theory is that cancer is a disease of uncontrolled growth and cellular division, seemingly sparked by genes that have mutated and gone haywire. After all, when it comes to cell division and replication, the genes are in charge, and call all the shots – right? In a masterful use of scientific metaphor, Mr. Christofferson called cancer the great shapeshifter of human pathology, capable of changing all the rules of the game for those who study it, trying to find a cure, at the drop of a hat. The basic process or protocol that he outlines in his book that has guided conventional cancer research and treatment for most of its existence is this: Scientific researchers studying cancer pathology isolate the latest thing, whether it be a receptor, a gene, or whatever, that seems to be the culprit or “bad guy”; this gives the green light to the drug designers to find, create or engineer a new drug that sets its sights on that “target” – until some problem is discovered with the drug, or its toxicity or negative side effects are too great, and if so, it’s back to the drawing board, chasing after the latest identified target, or tryng to find a new drug that is better tolerated or less problematic.
As a good yardstick of just how bogged down this book is in scientific and technical minutiae, Christofferson doesn’t get around to mentioning the Hollywood actress who is probably the most famous and well-known victim of the genetic theory of cancer, who is Angelina Jolie, until page 155 of this book, when he finally gets around to discussing the particular gene that Ms. Jolie felt was a virtual death sentence for her when it came to the possibility of her getting breast cancer. What did she do? She had her breasts surgically removed and replaced with artificial implants as a kind of preventive medicine. I thoroughly believe that a new term could be coined for this kind of grim mindset when it comes to cancer – call it Genetic Fatalism, if you will. Anyway, genetic researchers studying cancer had isolated a certain gene as the big culprit that offered the greatest risk for developing breast cancer, and Angelina Jolie just happened to test positive for it. Frankly, if I had been writing this book, I would have mentioned Angelina Jolie right at the beginning of the book, right in the first chapter or the introduction; as it was, a singular question was haunting me as I slogged my way through chapter after chapter of scientific and technical minutiae: When the heck is he going to get around to mentioning Angelina Jolie??? As it turned out in the book, if Ms. Jolie had just waited a few years more, until the results of the cancer genome project were finally all in, and researchers found that no definitive, consistent genetic patterns could be found guiding the pathogenesis of cancer, she could have reconsidered and avoided flushing her breasts down the toilet.
On the positive side of the ledger, Mr. Christofferson does give valuable historical background information on the development and evolution of conventional cancer research and treatment, and he does his best to try to tie this in with a human interest dimension of the story for those who are not scientists or researchers, but simply laypeople. Along the way, some shocking but little known things come to light, like how the first chemotherapy drug for cancer, Nitrogen Mustard, had been the notorious chemical warfare agent that the Germans had used in the Second World War. But the sad thing, especially from an herbalist’s point of view, is that the author does not seem to be particularly open or receptive to natural, or complementary and alternative, treatments for cancer at all. If you distill all the scientific and technical material in this book down to a few simple words, it would probably be this: Cancer has a sweet tooth. With the metabolic “target” or culprit thus clearly identified, the name of the game as far as treatment is concerned is to get blood sugar levels down as low as you can, so that there is no, or at least very little, sugar for potential cancer cells to ferment. That, and to increase the level of ketone bodies in the bloodstream, which seem to have an antioxidant, anti-cancer effect in general. And so, Mr. Christofferson advocates a low carbohydrate, high fat ketogenic diet. He also mentions how those who have advocated for more research into the metabolic theory of cancer within the scientific community have even gone as far as taking the antidiabetic drug Metformin to keep their blood sugar levels low so that they would reduce their cancer risk.
The Keto Diet, Pro and Con
The Keto diet seems to be all the rage these days, as any cursory stroll through your local health food store will tell you. Eat a diet that is low in sugars and carbohydrates, but high in fat, and your body will metabolically generate all these ketone bodies, which have seemingly magical benefits for one’s overall health and wellbeing, including anti-cancer benefits, if this book is right. Although I must admit that I don’t fully understand exactly how these ketone bodies work, or how they confer their extraordinary health benefits, from a practical standpoint, apart from the basic metabolic theory involved, the Keto diet seems to be problematic in two ways:
First of all, to me, the Keto diet seems to be unnatural. Love the fat bomb, the Keto advocates say as they push their little candy-like fat boosters – but the fact remains that, in a state of Nature, very few foods, if any, are quite as fat-laden as the Keto fat bomb. The unavoidable conclusion is that the ketogenic state of bodily metabolism that the Keto diet is designed to put us into is basically an unnatural one.
The second big drawback of the Keto diet is that fats and fat rich foods can be problematic for those with chronic digestive issues, especially those involving bilious disorders that affect or impair the digestion and assimilation of fats. While the Keto diet does not indiscriminately promote the ingestion of all fats, and recognizes some as being damaging or unnatural, which is good, a lot of the fats that the Keto diet recommends, like the tropical coconut and palm oils, some people, like myself, are allergic to or intolerant of. For these reasons, I feel that the Keto diet cannot be promoted as a blanket cure-all for everyone’s chronic health problems. Sad to say, so many of these modern, newfangled diets have a fanatical, cult-like following today, almost to the point where good old fashioned sensible eating habits are vastly underappreciated, and have fallen by the wayside.
The Forest versus the Trees: Holistic Perspectives on Cancer
One of the main things that Mr. Christofferson says about the gene-fixated cancer researchers in this book is that they can’t see the forest for the trees. Yet, in so many ways, that seems to be the very essence of the reductionist approach of modern medicine – isolate the culprit and then target it as specifically as you can with the therapeutic solutions you devise. At one point in his book, Mr. Christofferson says, “Gene – meet the molecule!” I may be paraphrasing a bit here, but you get the point: The author’s intention was to imply the inherent superiority of the metabolic theory of cancer over the genetic theory, but even this falls short of the mark, and betrays an excessively materialistic or reductionist focus that I feel is one of the main drawbacks of modern science and medicine. My point is that a molecule is still an inherently dead and lifeless substance – it’s what the human organism does with that molecule, or how it utilizes or metabolizes it, that is the main point. Those who are still involved in the study of the genetic aspect of cancer, it seems, are now talking more about epi-genetics, or the vague and mysterious forces that are behind genetic expression versus repression, or switching a gene on versus switching it off, and this alone is a move in the right direction, towards a more holistic and life-affirming orientation and focus.
Cancer, as Mr. Christofferson writes in his book, is the real dark genius when it comes to human pathology, and figuring out its wiles and tracking it to its ultimate source or lair is no easy task. Another way of looking at things is to see cancer as a multifaceted jewel, with multiple systems and faculties of the human organism involved in its pathogenesis; in other words, there are many different ways of looking at cancer – its basic nature, as well as how to treat it. At this juncture, I would like to offer you, dear reader, some brief summaries as to how holistic medicine views, approaches and treats cancer:
Cancer as an environmental disease: One of the first ways in which scientific researchers approached cancer, as Mr. Christofferson narrates in his book, was to see it as an environmental disease caused by exposure to certain noxious or toxic substances in the environment that were carcinogenic, or had the tendency to provoke the onset of cancer. At first, only a few of these carcinogenic substances were isolated and studied, but since then, the list has grown to be quite long, and more carcinogenic substances continue to be added to the list. Mr. Christofferson points out in multiple places in his book how the overall incidence and prevalence of cancer is growing year by year, and one automatically assumes that a big factor in this rising occurrence of cancer is increasing exposure to carcinogenic substances in one’s outer environment. Yet this whole environmental aspect of cancer actually is a coin with two sides; what scientific researchers have mainly focused on is the external environment, but the internal environment of the human organism, or what holistic medicine calls the biological terrain, is also important – and one of the key factors in shaping this internal environment is metabolism, or how efficiently the organism utilizes the substances it ingests and eliminates the toxic byproducts or residues.
The two basic mainstays of conventional cancer treatment have been surgery and radiation, or cutting out the cancer, or burning it to death. To this has been added chemotherapy, or a targeted poisoning of the tumor, but even this, as Mr. Christofferson so aptly points out in his book, is far from ideal, and has many negative side effects. “By their fruits shall ye know them,” said Jesus when speaking of false teachers, but the entire human organism could also be likened to a tree; a tree / organism whose internal environment is considerably toxic or deranged will be a tree that produces cancer fruits or tumors, and simply cutting, burning, or poisoning existing tumors is often not enough to solve the problem, and the cancer will often grow back. When I, as an herbalist, learned of Otto Warburg’s discovery, way back in 1924, of cancer’s sick and deranged metabolism, the message or moral of the story was clear to me: Detoxify, or clean up the internal biological terrain of the organism, and cancer will not be able to grow and thrive in this new and healthier internal environment. Oxygen and aerobic metabolism does not do so well in a more toxic internal environment, but does much better in a cleaner and less toxic one. And God’s natural herbs are still the best therapeutic agents we have when it comes to internal cleansing and detoxification.
Cancer as a genetic disease: Ever since the early days, when the observation of cancer cells under a microscope revealed that there was chromosomal chaos in the cancer cell, as well as rapid, continuous and uncontrolled cell division and replication, genes and genetic factors have been a prime suspect, and the focus of much intense research into the nature and pathogenesis of cancer. As Mr. Christofferson points out in his book, the basic assumption of the genetic or somatic mutation theory of cancer is that there was a fixed, orderly progression of successive mutations in a cell’s genes and chromosomes that led it inexorably down the path towards becoming a cancer cell. But when the results of a comprehensive study of cancer genes, made all the more powerful and complete by the latest computer data processing technology, was all in, researchers could find no clear, definitive genetic patterns in the process of carcinogenesis. In other words, what initially appeared as total genetic chaos to early researchers peering at cancer cells under a microscope turned out to be exactly that – total chaos, with no perceivable patterns to be found. In total frustration, the head and supervisor of the whole project just threw up his hands and said that there might be something like “dark matter” that was behind the process of carcinogenesis.
In other words, even though genetics has proven to be a useful guide in the general statistical analysis of risk factors for certain types of cancer, on a more detailed and specific level, the genetic changes that lead to cancer cannot be analyzed or predicted with total accuracy and certainty. Genes and genetic factors do play a role in the process of carcinogenesis, but they are not as primary and causative as they were once assumed to be, and where exactly genes and genetic factors fall on the hierarchy of relative cause versus effect in the pathogenesis of cancer is up for debate. Genes, which cancer researchers once assumed were calling all the shots, may actually be the effect of something greater, more elusive and harder to pin down. What the frustrated supervisor of the cancer genome project called “dark matter” might actually be what Greek Medicine calls Physis, or the organism as a whole, which is much greater than the sum of its individual parts. In his book, Christofferson gives us some hints when he speaks of cells under distress giving out multiple different types of alarm signals, seemingly to turn cancerous when there is no other way for it to continue to lead a normal existence. Multiple stress factors all impinging on the cell, in real time, would obviously be quite hard for standard medical diagnostic tests to capture.
There is yet another aspect to the genetics of cancer that provides quite a lot of food for thought on a deeper and more metaphysical level. In a book he wrote on Healthy Aging, Dr. Andrew Weil, one of the leading scholars and specialists in the field of integrative medicine, pointed out that researchers have found that cancer cells are essentially immortal – that is, they will continue to grow, divide and multiply vigorously forever. Normal cells, however, are not immortal; in other words, the organism as a whole has somehow programmed them for a certain finite number of cell divisions, with the whole process of genetic replication and cellular division growing more and more faulty and defective towards the end of that finite, limited number of cell divisions. This is basically the genetic theory of aging. The implications of this basic difference between normal and cancerous cells are very deep and profound, and suggest that aging, and finally death, are an integral and unavoidable part of a healthy life, or life cycle.
Cancer as an immunological disorder: A faulty, run down or defective immune system is a definite factor to consider in the origin and development of cancer within the human organism. There are certain immune cells, like Natural Killer Cells, whose job it is to hunt down and vanquish cancer cells, and other immunological factors, such as various immune globulins, play their role in mounting a healthy and vigorous immune response against cancerous cells. Cancer cells, it is said, have certain evasive mechanisms they employ to outwit the immune system and avoid being hunted down by these various immune cells and factors. It is precisely here in which herbs have distinctive, and even unique health benefits to offer, in addition to detoxifying the body and improving the overall biological and metabolic terrain of the organism, with certain herbs like Astragalus and Ganoderma – a great combo to use in immunotherapy for cancer – being quite well-known and studied as tonics and restoratives for the immune system.
I had a teacher in Oriental Medicine school, a doctor from China, who was quite experienced in using Chinese herbs for treating cancer. When it came to treating cancer, he told us, modern medicine was too focused on eliminating or reducing the size of the tumor – even if that was to the detriment of the organism as a whole, and its God-given immunity. If the immune system is nourished, strengthened and kept healthy, a person can live with a cancerous tumor, especially one that is not overly aggressive, for quite a while. Conversely, if you weaken or damage the immune system, that protective immune force is no longer there, and even if existing tumors are eliminated or destroyed, new ones will often grow back, because the inherent immune resistance of the organism as a whole is gone. This has led many holistic doctors and therapists to call the growth or tumor merely a symptom of cancer, but not the essential disease itself. And conventional cancer treatments, like radiation and chemotherapy, are quite debilitating to the immune system. “Where is the immune system?” asked a professor of mine in Oriental Medicine school. The answer, of course, is that it is everywhere, and pervades the whole organism; this is yet another systemic manifestation of Physis, or the organism as a whole.
Cancer as a metabolic disease: Since cancer is a disease of chaotic and uncontrolled growth, it obviously involves what Greek Medicine calls the Natural Faculty, the faculty that governs nutrition, metabolism and growth. You might say that cancer hijacks the nutritive growth forces of the human organism to feed an uncontrolled growth that does not serve the needs of the organism as a whole, to the latter’s detriment, which becomes fatal in the terminal stages of cancer. Metabolism, like immunity, is a normal, healthy function of the human organism that depends on a clean and healthy internal biological terrain. In other words, a healthy internal biological environment is one within which normal and healthy metabolic processes can occur; a deranged or disordered one, on the other hand, promotes the unhealthy and unbalanced metabolic processes that lead to cancer, including the fermentation of sugars and glucose for energy instead of the aerobic cellular metabolism of glucose by the mitochondria. In Tripping Over the Truth, the author focuses on altering the basic makeup of the diet in order to put the metabolic “squeeze” on cancer, but medicinal herbs can also be used to provide vital nutrients in special forms that have a therapeutic or corrective effect on bodily metabolism. Nevertheless, diet does play a decisive role in effective cancer therapy, no matter which particular therapeutic path or strategy you follow.
I’d Really Like to Hear from You: An Invitation to an Ongoing Dialogue
I’m interested in hearing from you regarding this article and book review, and would like to hear your opinions on it. Please direct all your questions and feedback to: davido@greekmedicine.net