CELLULAR MECHANISMS OF ANTI-CANCER STRATEGIES
Excerpts from Alternative Medicine, November 2000
Detoxification
The issue of toxicity goes much deeper than just avoiding the side effects
of drugs and radiation. Toxins within the body are a major contributing
cause of cancer and autoimmune diseases in the first place, and then
continue to inhibit the body’s ability to heal itself.
Cancer cells, like other virally infected cells, are susceptible to heat.
That’s one reason why people mount a temperature when they get the flu.
Here we employ far‐infrared hyperthermia as a heat therapy, which aside
from being an excellent detoxifier, possesses the ability to interrupt the
blood supply to tumors and also to damage cancer cells themselves.
The National Cancer Institute recognizes hyperthermia as a viable, integrative approach to cancer.
The infrared rays penetrate to the inside of the body
and heat the core temperature up to 103˚F or so. Normal cells have no
problem with this temperature, but it is very detrimental to cancer cells.
Cancer cells undergo a disintegration process, or lysis, at that temperature.
The other thing hyperthermia does is that it helps to shrink the blood
supply to cancer cells. Cancer cells create their own blood supply, but it is very tenuous. When you subject the blood vessels surrounding the cancer to heat, they shrivel up – and the blood supply is cut off to the
tumors. That’s another way tumor cells die in the presence of heat.
Strategy: Fragment DNA and decrease blood supply (anti‐angiogenesis)
Agents: Hyperthermia (heat). Far infrared radiation is used to increase
the temperature of the entire body (whole body hyperthermia, employing
sauna‐like chambers) or to local areas with tumors or metastasized
sites (local, or regional, hyperthermia, using probes or focused emitting
devices). The Immune Institute raises a patient’s core temperature up to
103˚F and local areas even higher.
Mechanism: Cancer cells are far more vulnerable to heat than healthy
cells. While a temperature of 103˚F or so does not harm normal cells, it
damages the enzymes, the membranes and particularly the DNA of cancer
cells. Cancer cells need their own blood supply to grow into tumors, but
their blood vessels are very fragile; heated to 103˚F they shrivel up. With
their blood supply cut off, tumor cells die.