Logically, you might think that counting the number of cancer cells in circulation in the blood might be a good way to measure the potential dangers of a cancer. There are some surprising problems with this.
Dr. Ryke Geerde Hamer has pointed out that it’s very rare indeed to find cancer cells in circulation. From that he has speculated that secondary cancers are not spread via the blood but are new cancers, that have arisen due to the shock of diagnosis.
Whereas, I love and respect the work of Dr. Hamer, I disagree with him in this. I turn instead to the model of Dr Rife, whose brilliant microscope (section 35) enabled him to see tiny sub-bacterial bodies that he likened to viruses and called the BX organism. Like Rife, I think that this is how cancer is spread to remote tissues. Rife found the BX organism in all cancer patients and was able to kill it with 100% success, using his amazing beam ray machine.
Despite the scarcity of circulating cancer cells, using this phenomenon is a cancer marker is not a lost cause. I found a recent study previewed in a cancer journal The Lancet Oncology, Feb. 10, 2009, which stated that checking for changes in the number of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) could help doctors predict advanced prostate cancer patients’ survival and response to treatment.
CTC numbers (before and after treatment) , studied along with other factors such as changes in levels of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and baseline lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) were useful.
High values of CTC numbers and PSA levels before treatment meant to reduced survival. At four, eight and 12 weeks after treatment, changes in CTC numbers were strongly associated with the likelihood of dying, while changes in PSA were only marginally associated with increased risk of death.
Methylation Cancer Marker?
Here’s another likely advance. Remember you will read it first on this site and in my great eReport "Cancer Confidential"!
It relies on the fact that many cancers appeared to be viral in origin. The first ever virally-caused tumour was Burkitt’s lymphoma. There are probably many other diseases caused by viruses that we haven’t yet realized. Three common human pathogens are definitely known to cause cancer. These are Epstein-Barr, the human papilloma virus (HPV) and hepatitis B. HPV is strongly linked to cervical tumors, and hepatitis B has been tied to liver cancer. About 15% of all cancer cases worldwide are linked to a viral infection.
But the virus doesn’t always cause cancer. Moreover, survival is not a genetic matter, since according to a recent study, those who developed the cancer and those who didn’t had identical genomic make up.
What appeared to be different was that when the infected person developed cancer, there was clear evidence of a methylation process. According to the researchers, methylation (an enzyme-mediated modification to DNA) may prove to be a type of camouflage to help the virus elude the body’s natural defense system.
Therefore, according to the study, measurements of the presence or absence of the methylation process would provide a very good marker for who would and wouldn’t develop cancer due to these and presumably other viruses.
The findings were published online in Genome Research, Feb. 9, 2009
Methylation is a phenomenon that we call epigenetics (meaning above and beyond genetics). I learned to myself some 30 years ago that epigenetics is the number one factor influencing genetic outcomes. I saw time and again serious diseases, even genetic disorders, switched off easily by changing environmental factors, such as cleaning up chemicals in the environment and improving diet.
It’s clearly the medicine of the future, and you need to look out for breakthroughs of this kind. Eventually pioneer doctors like me, who through the 70s, 80s and 90s claimed that environmental triggers were responsible for over 80% of disease, will be proved correct (this may be an underestimate).
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