As seems to be the case almost every week, as I sat down to do my weekly post for this blog I had a hard time deciding what specific topic I should devote my attention to, thanks to the hellscape that is our current government when it comes to public health? News stories that Donald Trump is about to issue an executive order on autism and vaccines, ordering more research into the already massively studied question of whether vaccines increase the risk of autism? Let’s just say that if he had issued the order before this weekend, that would have been my topic, but I didn’t see the point of speculating right now just how bad it would be. News stories about how a notoriously bonkers “lab leak” conspiracy theorist is on the short list to succeed Dr. Anthony Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)? I thought about both, but then an Instagram post making the rounds (which appears to have been deleted since going viral and spawning a bunch of reaction videos) caught my attention. Remember how during the pandemic I kept saying that everything old is new again and that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to antivax narratives and lies? Unfortunately, under “make America healthy again” (MAHA), the slogan repurposed by our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he same is true of cancer, as I hinted at six months ago.
So, until we find out exactly how bad the predicted Presidential Executive Order on vaccines and autism really is, I thought I’d revisit a more “classic SBM” topic. Here are just a couple of the reaction videos to the original video that appears to be gone:
Yes, it’s the revenge of the return of “cancer is not the disease but a body defense mechanism” against X, X being “toxins” or some other external problem caused by poor diet or external forces. And it’s all over social media again. But that’s not all, as you will see. In any case, I haven’t dealt with this particular claim in a long time, and so I thought it would be worth revisiting, given that it’s now seemingly everywhere. Truth be told, it never went away. No cancer quackery or misinformation ever does. Rather it mutates, rather like the genome of a cancer cell, in response to the environment in which it finds itself.
Cancer is not the problem? (Robert O. Young)
It’s not difficult to find posts and content making this sort of claim, that cancer is not the problem, but rather a survival mechanism that is trying to protect the body, with the corollary claim that it is the medical treatments, not the cancer, that cause complications and death from cancer, which, if you believe the quacks, can be eliminated with “natural” interventions. Of course, that leaves the question of why you would you want to eliminate the cancer if it is a protective mechanism. The answer, obviously, is that you’re treating the “root cause” or the “true cause” of the cancer, unlike that nasty surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy, and targeted treatments that modern oncology and surgery uses now.
As I said before, the original Instagram post by Chelsea Chapman that inspired the two reaction videos above appears to be gone. (If one of my readers has come across it, let me know, as I’ve searched diligently and scrolled back through way too much of Chapman’s Instagram feed than is good for my mental well-being and been unable to find it.) However, here is a reel from a couple of years ago that says much the same thing:
And:
And:
The man in the video above is Leonard Coldwell, an old school cancer quack whom I’ve mentioned before. From the first video:
Cancer is not a disease, it’s a survival mechanism. So cancer is not trying to kill you, cancer is actually trying to save your life. Its creating a tumor, a place for all those toxins to be so that they don’t spread to other parts of the body. When you go to a doctor, the first thing they do is say okay, well let’s take a biopsy where they prick the tumor and they see if it was cancerous or not। well first of all whether the tumor is cancerous or not, your passive treatment is still the same so you don’t actually need; the biopsy. In fact, most people don’t actually die from cancer. They die from the treatment of cancer. Yes. And so so when they take that biopsy, remember that it we’re dealing with health care, so there’s no money to be made off healthy humans. And so when they prick the tumor, they’re opening it up and allowing the cancer cells and all the harmful toxins to now spread throughout the body. So now you go from having a tumor on biopsy, they come back, you know, a little bit later and they say, “Okay, well now the cancer spreading all throughout your body.” So we’re going to have to train uh you know, charge you more money and you’re going to have to do more radiation, chemotherapy and all that…
In the spirit of how everything old is new again, this particular claim, that a cancerous tumor is not the disease but rather the body’s defense mechanism against “toxins” is an old one. I first encountered it two decades ago, but it predates that by at least three decades. In what context did I encounter this claim? Does anyone remember Robert O. Young? I do, because it was in 2007 when I first encountered a post by him entitled What is the cause of cancer? Is there a cure? Let’s see how familiar this sounds:
Cancerous tissue, above all other consequences of choice, has countless secondary causes. But even for a cancerous condition there is only ONE PRIME ORIGIN and CAUSE. I have simply summarized this origin and cause of cancerous tissue in a few words. The prime origin and cause of cancerous tissue is the over-acidification of the tissues then the blood due to lifestyle and dietary choices. A cancerous tissue begins with our choices of what we eat, what we drink, what we think and how we live. Cancer is a liquid and this liquid is a toxic acidic waste product of metabolism or energy consumption.
According to Young, acid is the cause of cancer (of all disease, actually), and alkalinization is the cure in the form of what he referred to as “pH Miracle Living.” But where does the tumor come in? Let’s take a trip down memory lane. First, Young invokes the Warburg effect. I note that around 2007 was when studying the metabolic causes of and contributors to cancer were all the rage. After decades of being underappreciated, the Warburg effect became the focus of intense research because of observations demonstrating. its importance. Indeed, here’s a graph from a very good 2016 review on the Warburg effect showing the explosion of scientific papers on the topic that started in the early 2000s:
For those who don’t remember, Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize nearly 100 years ago for having discovered that many cancers switch from aerobic metabolism (metabolism based on respiration with oxygen) to anaerobic metabolism, in essence “choosing” (if you’ll excuse the anthropomorphizing of cancer) to use glucose as their fuel. You don’t need to understand the details of the Warburg effect to know that it posited that cancer was caused by metabolic derangements, which is why a lot of the advocates of “natural” cancer remedies immediately glommed onto it as justification for their claims that diet and lifestyle interventions were better than surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy for “curing” cancer.
Unsurprisingly, in the scientific literature, the debate is more along the lines of, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” What I mean is: Was the disordered metabolism observed in many cancer cells the result of the mutations which had caused the cancer, or were the mutations that caused the cancer a result of disordered metabolism? Of course, we know from copious experiments that there are single genes that can induce cancer, either by being overexpressed (induced to make too much of their gene product) or silenced, by themselves, but there is little doubt that there is a major metabolic contribution to cancer. That’s part of why the current consensus is that somatic mutations drive cancer and that the metabolic reprogramming is adaptive, allowing faster growth, rather than a cancer-inciting event. That disordered metabolism is the primary cause of cancer is very much a minority opinion in oncology, although that doesn’t mean that targeting the metabolism of cancer cells hasn’t proven to be useful for diagnosis, imaging, and some treatment.
But I digress. As I said, you don’t need to understand the Warburg effect to understand why the following blather from Young is nonsense:
The following is a summary of understanding cancerous tissues:
Cancer is not a cell but a poisonous acidic liquid.
A cancer cell, is a cell that has been spoiled or poisoned by metabolic or gastrointestinal acids.
A tumor is the body’s protective mechanism to encapsulate spoiled or poisoned cells from excess acid that has not been properly eliminated through urination, perspiration, defecation or respiration.
The tumor is the body’s solution to protect healthy cells and tissues.
Cancer is a systemic acidic condition that settles at the weakest parts of the body – not a localized problem that metastases.
Metastases is localized acids spoiling other cells much like a rotten apple spoiling a bushel of healthy apples.
There is no such thing as a cancer cell. A cancer cell was once a healthy cell that has been spoiled by acid.
The tumor is not the problem but the solution to protect healthy cells and tissues from being spoiled from other rotting cells and tissues.
The only solution to the acidic liquids that poison body cells causing the effects that medical savants call cancer is to alkalize and energize the body.
In conclusion, the human body is alkaline by design and acidic by function! If we desire a healthy body we must maintain that alkaline design.
This is wrong on so many levels, particularly the part about cancer cells being healthy cells “spoiled by acid” but also including his claims that “alkalinizing the body” will cure cancer. I also note that he claimed that viruses are “molecular acids” (he claimed his “pH Miracle Living” could cure HIV/AIDS as well) and that he is basically a germ theory denialist as well, having used the tragic death of a Brazilian model due to sepsis to claim that sepsis is not caused by bacterial infection, but rather by “acidic lifestyle choices, including acidic food, drink, and drugs – especially dextrose and/or antibiotic IV’s given at hospitals around the world.”
However, the case that made Robert O. Young most infamous was that of Kim Tinkham. Tinkham, you might recall, was a woman diagnosed with breast cancer who appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Showover 11 years ago. During the interview, Tinkham told Oprah that she was not going to undergo surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation but that, thanks to The Secret, she believed that the universe would bring her healing, which was why she chose to use alternative medicine to treat her cancer. (Often forgotten these days is that Oprah was a big proponent of The Secret back then, which preaches that if you want something badly enough, visualize something clearly enough, the universe will manifest it for you.) Who was the quack that Tinkham chose? You guessed it: Robert O. Young. As a result, Tinkham became a passionate advocate for Young’s quackery, even recording YouTube videos with him to tout his “pH Miracle Living.” Ultimately, Tinkham died of her disease, although it did take over three years to happen. No one knows how many other cancer patients who didn’t talk to Oprah Winfrey chose to trust Young, with the same results.
Cancer is not the problem? (Andreas Moritz)
Robert O. Young might have been the first quack that I encountered claiming that cancer is a mechanism to protect the body against “spoiled” cells, but he is far from the first to claim that cancer is not the problem, but a reaction to the “real” problem. Around the same time, a cancer quack named Andreas Moritz published a book entitled Cancer Is Not a Disease! It’s a Survival Mechanism. (There’s even a chapter entitled “The Wisdom of Cancer.”) Here’s a taste of Moritz’s “wisdom”:
If the body is designed to live and not to destroy itself, why then would it suddenly allow the growth of extra cell tissue and kill itself? This does not make any sense at all. The main obstacle to finding real cures for cancer is that modern cancer treatment is rooted in the false assumption that the body sometimes tries to destroy itself. Medical students are trained to understand the mechanism of disease development, but they are left in the dark concerning the origins of disease. Viewed superficially, to the students, an illness appears to be something destructive and harmful to the body. Seen from a deeper perspective, however, the same illness is but an attempt by the body to cleanse and heal itself, or at least, to prolong its life. Since the medical textbooks offer few insights into the true causes of illness, it is understandable that the majority of doctors today believe that the body has self-destructive, and even suicidal abilities or tendencies. Claiming to be non-superstitious and objective, they inadvertently admit that certain cells suddenly decide to malfunction, become malicious, and randomly attack other cells and organs in the body. Based on this purely subjective and unsubstantiated belief, the doctor and his patient alike become almost obsessed with trying to protect the body from itself. Yet despite such undisputed notions of “truth,” none of this means that the body does, in fact, attempt or cause its own destruction. Would it actually astound you if I told you that cancer has never killed a person?
The only thing that would astound me about this claim is just how much of a lie that it is. I have, sadly, seen many die of cancer, including at least two family members thus far.
I love the whole argument from personal incredulity going on here. Just because Moritz can’t believe that the body would ever permit the growth of extra cells that will lead to its destruction and death, he assumes that, in fact, the body does not permit the growth of extra cells that will lead to its death and destruction. It is, of course, true that the body tries very hard not to allow the growth of cancer cells that threaten it. There are lots of very complex and elegant homeostatic mechanisms to keep cells from “going rogue,” as well as similarly complex and elegant immune surveillance mechanisms to destroy cells that “go rogue” before they can progress to full-blown life-threatening cancers. The error in thinking here is that these mechanisms are perfect, that they are foolproof, that they never, ever fail. Unfortunately, nothing in the world is perfect and works 100% of the time. Our body’s defense mechanisms against cancer are quite good, but they are unfortunately nowhere near perfect. The can and do fail, and they fail more often as we get older and damage to the genome accumulates.
Cancer is not the problem? (Ryke Geerd Hamer’s German New Medicine)
Still, Moritz didn’t think of the idea of cancer as a protective mechanism. Its origins go back at least a few decades earlier, to the late 1970s. Does anyone remember Ryke Geerd Hamer’s German New Medicine (Die Germanische Neue Medizin) and its bastard offspring, like the French version, Biologie Totale? Here’s the general idea:
THE GERMAN NEW MEDICINE provides us with illuminating explanations about the origin, development and healing of both physical and mental disorders. In 1981, Dr. Hamer discovered that every DISEASE is caused by a shock experience that catches us completely off guard. He found that this shock not only occurs in the psyche but simultaneously in the brain and on the organ level. At the moment the unexpected trauma takes place the shock impacts a specific area in the brain causing a lesion that is clearly visible on a brain scan as a set of sharp concentric rings. With the impact the affected brain cells communicate the disturbance to the corresponding organ. Whether the organ responds with a tumor growth (cancer), with tissue degeneration, or with functional loss, is determined by the exact type of conflict shock. Based on the analysis of over 40,000 case studies Dr. Hamer is the first to provide scientific proof that cancer is not caused by a malfunctioning organism producing deadly cancer cells but is rather the result of an innate meaningful survival program that has been successfully practiced for millions of years. Since HEALING can only occur after the conflict has been resolved, the GNM-therapy focuses on identifying and resolving the original conflict. By understanding healing symptoms such as painful swelling, infections, fever, or inflammation in their psychological, biological and evolutionary context, we are able to liberate ourselves from the fear and panic that often come with the onset of an illness. Dr. Hamer’s findings offer a completely new understanding of so-called diseases. His scientific discoveries revolutionize entirely our view of medical conditions and their causes.
The German New Medicine presents a comprehensive system that allows us to understand what type of conflict causes the onset of a particular disease, how the disease manifests itself in the conflict active phase, what can be expected in the healing phase, and how all the developments are connected to the brain, verifiable with a brain scan.
See what I mean? The general idea is the same, except that it’s not “cells spoiled by acid” or “toxins” or whatever that the cancerous tumor is protecting you from. It’s psychic trauma. In a way, Hamer’s conclusion is somewhat understandable if you know his history. It turns out that Dr. Hamer’s son was tragically shot in his sleep by Vittorio Emanuel, the last crown prince of Italy. After a prolonged course requiring multiple operations, his son unfortunately succumbed to his wounds, which undoubtedly caused Hamer immense emotional trauma, as the sudden loss of a child always does. Three years later, Hamer developed testicular cancer. After that, in a perfect case of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, Hamer decided that it must have been the psychic shock of his son’s death that had caused his cancer. Forget about all that molecular biology. Forget about oncogenes and tumor suppressors. Forget about increased mutation rates. Hamer, like many cancer quacks before him preached that everything that scientists thought they knew about the pathogenesis of cancer was wrong. To him, cancer was (and is) really due to a “psychic shock,” not genetic alterations in cells that lead to uncontrolled proliferation.
What about cancer patients who have lived happy lives devoid of “highly acute, dramatic, and isolating shocks”? There’s no such person, according to Hamer. If you search back far enough, you will find such a shock, and if that fails you can alway postulate some sort of birth trauma. As I always say when I discuss the German New Medicine, I don’t mean to minimize the tragedy that Dr. Hamer must have suffered because of the shooting of his son and the fact that the killer got off with a slap on the wrist because of his title and wealth, nor am I claiming that mental stress doesn’t contribute to disease. Unfortunately, Hamer took his tragic personal experience and generalized it to a ridiculous extreme, even to the point of basing rather arrogantly-named “biological laws” on it. It’s as if the shock of losing his son unhinged his mind. I’m not going to reiterate all five of his “Iron Laws” of cancer and other diseases other than the First Law, a.k.a. the Iron Rule of Cancer, which is subdivided into three criteria:
- The development of the conflict determines the exact development of the Hamer Focus in the brain as well as the exact development of the cancer or cancer-equivalent disease in the organ.
- Every cancer or cancer-equivalent disease originates from a DHS (Dirk Hamer Syndrome), which is a serious, highly acute, dramatic and isolating shock that catches an individual completely off guard. The conflict shock occurs simultaneously in the psyche, the brain and the corresponding organ.
- At the moment of the DHS, the content(s) of the conflict determine the location of the Hamer Focus in the brain and the location of the cancer or cancer-equivalent disease in the organ.
According Hamer, every cancer patient has suffered DHS, and that the evidence is a lesion in the brain observable on CT scans called the Hamer Focus, visible “as a set of sharp concentric rings.” (HINT: No one has ever observed the Hamer Focus in cancer patients.) You can read in detail about the rest of the “Laws” that Hamer posited here, if you wish. Suffice to say that Hamer’s ideas were the “inspiration” behind so much quackery. Indeed, one variant of the “cancer isn’t the disease but the defense” is the risible claim by Tullio Simoncini that all cancer is a fungus.
One can argue that the basic germ of the idea that cancer isn’t really the disease but the defense against disease goes back even further, to an idea held by a minority of conventional pathologists around 1900. Sometimes referred to as the parasitic theory of cancer, the idea was that cancer was an attempt of the body to “encapsulate” pathogens. Of course, today we know that some cancers are indeed caused by infection, such as cervical cancer being caused by certain strains of human papilloma virus and stomach cancer being caused by H. pylori infection, but the mechanisms are nothing like what was proposed in the parasitic theory of cancer. A related concept is Antoine Béchamp’s terrain theory, which hypothesized that microorganisms were not the cause of disease, but a manifestation of diseased tissue or a “terrain” that was not in homeostasis.
Cancer is not the problem? Only if you don’t understand cancer!
These days, the idea that cancer is a protective mechanism nearly always posits unnamed “toxins” as the danger that cancer is supposedly trying to protect the body against. Worse, these influencers nearly always claim that cancer is completely—or almost completely—avoidable because it’s a consequence of lifestyle choices, as Robert O. Young put it in 2007:
Cancer is not something we get it is something we do as a consequence of daily choice of what we eat, what we drink, how we think and how we live. We either have an alkaline lifestyle and diet and enjoy a fit and healthy body or we have an acidic lifestyle and diet and experience the aches, pains and suffering from metabolic acids.
And:
A cancerous condition is the consequence of choice. For example, if you want to reduce your risk for cancereous tissue of the lung by 100%, then stop smoking and stop associating or working around people that do smoke.
Secondary smoke is just as acidic and damaging to the lung tissue.
If you don’t want a cancerous liver then stop drinking alcohol and carbonated drinks.
If you don’t want a cancerous pancreas then stop eating the acid, sugar.
If you don’t want a cancerous bowel then stop eating protein.
It is that simple.
The only things in the above passage are correct are that stopping smoking will reduce your risk of lung cancer and stopping drinking will reduce your risk of liver cancer. Too bad Young comes to the right conclusions in these two cases for the wrong reasons. The idea, however, is very much of a piece with what MAHA has embraced, namely health as a consequence of virtuous health behavior, in which you are damned near entirely responsible for your own health. In this case the health “reward” is freedom from cancer. Unfortunately, the flip side of this idea of personal responsibility for one’s health is that, if you aren’t healthy and are unfortunate enough to get cancer, then it must be your fault for not living a sufficiently “virtuous” lifestyle.
Unfortunately, this answer resonates among those skeptical or hostile to conventional medicine, leading to posts like this:
While I’m glad that this woman is apparently alive ten years after a diagnosis of a stage IV cancer, her survival doesn’t mean that cancer was beneficial to her and not trying to kill her.
Of course, we now know a lot about how cancer originates, progresses, evades the immune system, and ultimately kills its host if left untreated. Unfortunately, we do not know enough to come close to curing all cancers, and some cancers (e.g., pancreatic cancer) remain deadly and difficult to treat. We do, however, know enough that the death rate from cancer has been steadily declining for the last three and a half decades, having declined by approximately 34% since 1991. That’s what science can do, and deluding oneself into believing that cancer can’t and won’t kill you won’t change that, other than to provide a reason to blame cancer deaths on the treatment rather than the disease.
Sadly, there is nothing new about this. Everything old only seems new again because, before MAHA and the rise of so many quack influencers, most people hadn’t encountered quackery like the claim that cancer is not a disease, but a defense mechanism used by the body to protect itself from toxins.