What Is Cancer, Anyway?

What Is Cancer, Anyway?: "What Is Cancer, Anyway?


Cancer is not some foreign invader which has to be cut, burned
or poisoned in hopes that it will die before the patient dies.
No, cancer is simply a temporoary malfunction in your normal
cell division process.

Each of has about 75 trillion cells in our body. Virtually all
of them replace themselves many times during our lifetimes. How
many cells? Well, it's 75,000,000,000,000. That's a lot. They
have various life cycles, but in about 7 years, they have all
been regenerated. Amazing? I'll say!

So, on an average day, about 29 billion cells in your body
replace themselves by dividing in two. One of the cells
resulting from that division dies off.

CELL DAMAGE OR 'MUTATION'

In our bodies all day every day are lots of 'free radicals.'
These little rascals are molecules which have one unpaired
oxygen electron in their atomic makeup. They are produced by
our digestive system, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the
water we drink and so on. In other words, we can't avoid them.

These 'free radicals' bounce around, bumping into normal cells,
and, in the process, damaging the normal cells DNA. Literally
millions of our dividing cells get damaged every day -- some
by free radicals, some by viruses and some by just normal cell
breakdown due to aging or inherited gene mutation (this latter
is rare). Fortunately, our cell division policing process
recognizes these 'incorrect' cell divisions and kills them off,
most of the time.

HOW WE 'GET' CANCER

About a million or so of the damaged cells each day are damaged
in such a way that the 'oncogenes,' the hundred or so genes (out
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