but our good immune system controls them while we are physically and mentally healthy.
Much have been studied, researched and written about cancer, with no definitive answers. Now and again, we come across some articles backed by scientific studies which convinced us to a certain extent, like this one, by Frank Shallenberger, for example...
All men get prostate cancer: what are you going to do about it?
Excerpt:
Doctors are finally realizing that most people have cancer in their body. But it’s latent — or hidden — cancer. Latent cancers are so well contained by the immune system that they never get large enough to cause problems. As a result, doctors rarely discover them, unless they discover them by accident. Most of the cancers they discovered in this autopsy study were latent cancers. And, as you can see, they are very common.
Autopsy studies on women, for example, show that by the time a woman is 40 years old, the chance of her having a latent breast cancer is 40 percent.
That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? It’s really not terrible. In fact, the existence of latent cancers is very reassuring. They clearly demonstrate how effective a healthy immune system can be in stopping cancer.
It’s so effective that the great majority of latent cancers never go on to become full-blown cancers. That’s good news. When you start to add up all of the various autopsy studies that are published, you soon realize that every single one of us over the age of 60 has cancer. Actually, we have at least two of these cancers already living in our bodies. But the really important thing about latent cancers is that they can teach us a lot.
The first thing they teach us is that by maintaining a healthy immune system, we can dramatically decrease our chances of dying from cancer.
Take me, for example. I’m 64 years old. Therefore, I have at least two cancers in my body. They are not diagnosed, but they are there. They might be in my colon, my prostate, my lung, wherever. I don’t know where they are because, right now, they are latent. My immune system is covering them.
But what will happen to me if my immune system stops working as well as it has been? What if I start stressing a lot? Or what if I suddenly decide to stop exercising or to abandon a healthy diet? What if, as I get older, I become deficient in the hormones that are so important for optimal immune system function? Or what if I develop a serious injury, a bad dental infection or some other immune-depleting problem? What then?
It’s pretty obvious. If that were to happen, I shouldn’t be too surprised if one of those latent cancers were to progress to a clinically detectable cancer within a few years.
So here’s what the whole idea of latent cancers tells me: It emphasizes the importance of maintaining a lifestyle that optimizes my immune system as best as I can. It also emphasizes the importance of discovering a latent cancer that’s breaking out into a full-blown tumor as early as possible. That way I can get a handle on it before it gets too far down the road.
More where that came from:
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