Four different articles. Four different stories.

They all show the same thing. Our understanding of cancer has something very very wrong. The very basis of our beliefs must be misplaced.

But let us take a closer look…

Story 1: Stamatis was diagnosed with lung cancer in the 1960s, given nine months of life. He returned to Ikaria, his home island in Greece, and is now 97 – alive and well! [1]

Story 2: DNA pioneer James Watson slams ‘war against cancer’, by stating that “The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer”. [2] [3]

Story 3: The same article which states the story of Watson also states that there is wide agreement that current approaches are not yielding the progress they promised. Much of the decline in cancer mortality in the United States, for instance, reflects the decline in smoking, not the benefits of clever new therapies. “The great hope of the modern targeted approach was that with DNA sequencing we would be able to find what specific genes, when mutated, caused each cancer”, said molecular biologist Mark Ptashne of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The next step was to design a drug to block the runaway proliferation the mutation caused. But almost none of the resulting treatments cures cancer. These new therapies work for just a few months. The main reason drugs that target genetic glitches are not cures is that cancer cells have a work-around. If one biochemical pathway to growth and proliferation is blocked by a drug such as AstraZeneca’s Iressa or Genentech’s Tarceva for non-small-cell lung cancer, said cancer biologist Robert Weinberg of MIT, the cancer cells activate a different, equally effective pathway. [2]

Story 4: Another article states that introducing medication-free spells (drug “holidays”) to some cancer treatments may keep patients alive for longer. [4]

Life is still a mystery. And a very weird one. Life can spring out of nowhere. It can just pop up out of inorganic material. Could it be that cancer cells are just a manifestation of this inherect characteristic of life? Could we be fighting… life when we fight cancer? After all, one of the greatest challenges with cancer treatment is resistance. Promising drugs suddenly fail after a few months. [7] What more proof do we want in order to understand that we are searching in the wrong direction? From Reich’s bion experiments [5] and orgone accumulation [6], to the philosophy of Parmenides, thinkers believe that everything is in a very simple manner interconnected in such a way that our attempts to isolate one factor (e.g. a gene) so as to cure an illness are just a joke.

A new paradigm shift is urgently needed in medicine and it seems that cancer will be the basis for that change.

We are ready to make a change.

All we need is a way to view things from a different perspective.

> Check the new philosophy blog Philosophy Snapshots !