Cancer is a very old human problem. There is mention of cancers and tumors in ancient Chinese literature. Chinese medicine doctors have been trying to invent ways of treating cancer and helping people with cancer for very long time. In Chinese medicine terms, cancer is defined as a kind of poisonous accumulation or entanglement of what may have been originally normal, healthy things in the body, normal healthy qi, blood and tissue.
But for some reason and under some conditions, these healthy normal things become scrambled, and in a sense, they lose their identity. If you think about what cancer really is, cancer is us, but it’s a part of us that has lost touch with the rest of us – it’s no longer subject to the interests of the whole. It’s self-seeking, self-serving as if the rest of us didn’t exist.
This points to a very important idea, the idea of coherence or integrity, that is, all parts of the organism are in a relation to, and interacting with all the other parts of the organism. For some reason, one of these parts gets out of contact with the rest of the body. It’s not communicating nor is it integrating with the rest of the body and begins to have a life of its own.
But it is part of us, and it is utilizing all of our resources for its own growth and development, although it’s no longer in the interest of us as a whole. The way Chinese medicine can help people with cancer is that it can help people with any problem – essentially all problems are resolved from the same causes, which is a lack of coherence, integrity or harmonious movement of qi and blood.
There are many medicines in the pharmacopeia of Chinese medicine that are known to have antitumor effects. In Chinese medicine terms, they are things that break up, dissolve or carry masses out of the body. In fact, what investigations show that many of these substances, for example, medicinal mushrooms, have been used to treat tumors for hundreds of years.
We now know that medicinal mushrooms have the property of modulating our immune response. The immune system is a way, that we as human beings, to know ourselves, to be in touch with ourselves. It’s a method of surveillance, a mechanism for keeping touch and track every cell in our body. So when we lose the ability to keep track of those cells, and keep them within the community of the body as a whole, then we have the possibility of developing cancer.
We have the possibility of something growing and being alive without any of the constraints of the community of which it’s a part. What Chinese medicine does is it uses acupuncture in Orlando, herbs, nutrition, physical exercise like qigong, tai chi or calisthenics; whatever it can, it uses to help reorganize the body in such a way that these organs or tissues that have come out of touch are brought back into touch with the rest of the body.
We know this is possible because of what are called spontaneous remissions. Some people don’t have any treatment at all and their cancers go away. So we know that we have this capacity and we believe very strongly that Chinese medicine can activate this mechanism that we have innately to bring ourselves back into communication with ourselves and make the cancer go away or keep it at bay.
The other thing that Chinese medicine does is it can help to keep a person healthy while they are undergoing conventional therapy. One of the challenges of radiation therapy, chemotherapy and surgery is that it can be very injurious to the healthy parts of the body. Chinese medicine can help cancer patients maintain their health during the process of conventional care, so that when it’s over, they regain their health and their quality of life.
Many studies have shown that when Chinese medicine is combined with conventional therapy, cancer patients have a better quality of life. Their results, in terms of tumor regression are as good or better than people undergoing either chemotherapy or radiation therapy, and that they live longer.