Dispelling the Disease Myth
Integrative Oncologist Thomas Lodi MD, says “Cancer is not a disease. Cancer is the body’s extraordinary effort to keep you alive!”
What is cancer? You ask. Well first of all let’s say what it’s not. It’s not a thing, it’s not something you inherited, and it’s not something you caught. It’s a process, it’s a dance; it is the body’s extraordinary effort to keep us alive. Now at first that sounds strange but it’s really not.
I want you to consider something, because what you need to consider now is not just cancer. Cancer falls into a category called diseases and the first thing we have to do is remove the myth of diseases.
If I go in to see a doctor and he takes my blood pressure and my blood pressure is, by whatever current standards, considered elevated, and let’s say this happens on three separate occasions, the doctor will tell me, “You have high blood pressure. We have to lower it because here is all the data that shows that people with this disease have a higher incidence of stroke and heart attack, etc.” Okay sounds logical. So I buy into this myth and I start taking a drug that is going to lower my blood pressure.
Have I solved the underlying cause?
What studies now show is that when people follow this course of action they are much more susceptible to getting all kinds of cancers. People given anti- hypertensive medications for a long time, have a higher-incidence of cancer in all organs.
Let’s look again at high blood pressure. The real reason I have elevated blood pressure is not because my body has made a mistake. The body being part of nature always acts out of absolute wisdom. So the focus of the doctor and the question he or she should be asking is not “how do we lower your blood pressure?” but rather the question should be “why would this body that only does things out of wisdom, why would it elevate your blood pressure?”
Well the blood pressure is elevated because the arteries are blocked. Because of my lifestyle I’ve accumulated deposits in my arteries, and my body knows that if I’m going to stay alive I’ve got to get blood to all the organs of my body, and so in it’s innate wisdom it increases pressure to get blood and oxygen to all the system. So is that a problem? No, it’s saving my life: It’s keeping me alive!
So the answer is not to artificially via a pharmaceutical product dilate those arteries and lower the blood pressure, because I’m not accomplishing anything long-lasting with that approach. And I’m also removing what the body knew needed to happen for survival.
You see, high blood pressure is not a disease; it’s the body’s effort to keep us alive. The real problem is the plugging of the arteries. And this is the true cause of any so-called disease and the root of what needs to be addressed.
In the same manner let’s look at diabetes. It is not a disease, it’s not an entity, it’s not something you inherit; it’s something you develop. In fact it turns out that all these conditions are really, and can almost always be classified as eating disorders!
At our clinic, it takes us two to three weeks for someone who has been diagnosed as diabetic to normalize their blood sugar and get their fasting insulin’s down to normal. That happens, and it happens without drugs! And in fact it can’t happen with drugs. So it’s not a disease, again it’s an eating disorder because we do this just by changing the person’s diet.
So again, as a doctor what I want to tell you is: Address the root cause.
I think the analogy that works best for people to gain a clear understanding of this is this one: Imagine that you are driving in your car on a long drive and a red blinking light comes on your dashboard. Do you reach into your glove compartment, grab a hammer, smash the light and go on back to driving? Did you clear that problem? No, actually you didn’t. Down the road the car is going to break down.
And that’s what happens with the body as well. That’s what I learned to do as an MD when I went to medical school and residency. As MD’s we learned how to smash those lights in the dashboard so you don’t notice them. And that doesn’t ultimately work. And that’s what the current paradigm does with cancer.
So what we’ve done is that we’re naming the processes that the body is engaged in to save us as a disease. The whole paradigm is wrong. And since that entire paradigm is wrong, if you work within that paradigm you cannot ultimately achieve your goal. And your goal is not to get rid of these symptoms; your goal is to be restored to health. That’s what you’re looking for.
What I want people to understand first of all is that cancer is not a disease. It’s the damage your body is doing to maintain your life and what you need to do is to modify your biochemistry, which starts in your mind and ends in your colon.
There are all sorts of ways of going about this. One of them is to monitor what you eat and what you don’t defecate. If we can change all that, then what we are calling disease will no longer be required because the body is not out to harm us; our body is our best friend. And a best friend has certain requirement, that’s all. So take care of those requirements and the body will just be restored to health.
