NYT: Cancers Can Vanish Without Treatment, but How?

[Guest guest]

Good article, underscoring the complexity of the syndrome, which to the

perceptive eye argues against the efficacy of conventional treatments .

.. .

 

Cancers Can Vanish Without Treatment, but How?

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27canc.html?_r=1

 

By Gina Kolata Published: October 26, 2009

Call it the arrow of cancer. Like the arrow of time, it was supposed to

point in one direction. Cancers grew and worsened.

But as a paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association noted

last week, data from more than two decades of screening for breast and

prostate cancer call that view into question. Besides finding tumors

that would be lethal if left untreated, screening appears to be finding

many small tumors that would not be a problem if they were left alone,

undiscovered by screening. They were destined to stop growing on their

own or shrink, or even, at least in the case of some breast cancers,

disappear.

 

The old view is that cancer is a linear process, said Dr. Barnett

Kramer, associate director for disease prevention at the National

Institutes of Health. A cell acquired a mutation, and little by little

it acquired more and more mutations. Mutations are not supposed to

revert spontaneously.

 

So, Dr. Kramer said, the image was an arrow that moved in one direction.

But now, he added, it is becoming increasingly clear that cancers

require more than mutations to progress. They need the cooperation of

surrounding cells and even, he said, the whole organism, the person,

whose immune system or hormone levels, for example, can squelch or fuel

a tumor.

 

Cancer, Dr. Kramer said, is a dynamic process.

 

It was a view that was hard for some cancer doctors and researchers to

accept. But some of the skeptics have changed their minds and decided

that, contrary as it seems to everything they had thought, cancers can

disappear on

their own.

 

" At the end of the day, I'm not sure how certain I am about this, but I

do believe it, " said Dr. Robert M. Kaplan, the chairman of the

department of health services at the School of Public Health at the

University of California, Los Angeles, adding, " The weight of the

evidence suggests that there is reason to believe. "

 

Read the full article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27canc.html?_r.....

 

Resources

Can Breast Cancer Tumors Vanish Without Treatment?