Quotes About Cancer

Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.

So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

Natural healing has the power to cure pancreatic cancer. But usually, before I see the patient, medical treatments - not the disease - have destroyed the patient's body.

The creator who could put a cancer in a believer's stomach is above being interfered with by prayers.

People's view of cancer will change when they have their own relationship with cancer, which everyone will, at some point.

Such research has sometimes been misinterpreted to mean that "all diets are alike," or "sticking to a diet, any diet, is the only thing that matters." But these conclusions are simply wrong. This sort of faulty reasoning wouldn't withstand scrutiny in other areas of clinical research. Should we abandon a promising new cancer drug, simply because participants in the experimental group didn't take most of the medicine?

The best proof of a link between changes in lifestyle and the arrested development of cancer cells is that the more diligently these men had absorbed Dr. Ornish's advice and applied it to their daily lives, the more active their blood was against the cancer cells!

These recent findings support the notion that "cancer genes" may not be so harmful if not triggered by our unhealthy lifestyle

In a long-range study of 91,000 nurses over twelve years, the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard showed that the risk of breast cancer in premenopausal women is twice as high in those who eat red meat more than once a day as in those who consume it less than three times a week .97 The risk of breast cancer could therefore be halved simply by reducing consumption of red meat.

same conclusion for colon cancer: The risk was twice as high for people who ate large quantities of meat as for those who consumed fewer than 20 grams (an ounce) a day. (With regular consumption of fish—rich in omega-3s—the risk went down by 50 percent.)98

Seventeen years ago, I discovered from my own brain-scanning experiment that I had brain cancer. From the waiting room on the tenth floor of the oncology building, I remember looking down at people in the street—distant and oblivious, going about their everyday life. I had been cast out of that life, separated from its goal-oriented busyness and from its promises of joy, by the prospect of a probable early death.

and it has confirmed the importance of paying attention to how our emotions may affect the course of cancer.

When left unattended, these feelings—not the stresses of life themselves—contribute to the inflammatory processes that can help cancer grow.

New research has confirmed the importance of vitamin D3 in preventing cancer, particularly in countries where the lack of sunshine means that the skin cannot synthesize enough of this vitamin during the winter.

I have integrated the information from these studies into the various chapters of this new edition. For example, one study published in the journal Nature in 2007 concluded that cancer can be understood as a breakdown in the balance between cancer cells that have always been "dormant" in the body and the natural defenses that normally keep them at bay (see chapter 4).

Cancer lies dormant in all of us. Like all living organisms, our bodies are making defective cells all the time. That's how tumors are born. But our bodies are also equipped with a number of mechanisms that detect and keep such cells in check.

Taken as a whole, the mass of scientific data reveals an essential role for our natural defenses in the battle against cancer.

This is what I learned: If we all have a potential cancer lying dormant in us, each of us also has a body designed to fight the process of tumor development. It is up to each of us to use our body's natural defenses.

We all live with myths that undermine our capacity to fight cancer. For example, many of us are convinced that cancer is primarily linked to our genetic makeup, rather than our lifestyle. When we look at the research, however, we can see that the contrary is true.

This study shows that lifestyle is fundamentally involved in vulnerability to cancer.

All research on cancer concurs: Genetic factors contribute to at most 15 percent of mortalities from cancer. In short, there is no genetic fatality. We can all learn to protect ourselves.

The first part of this book presents a new view of the mechanisms of cancer. This view is based on the fundamental but still little-known workings of the immune system, on the discovery of the inflammatory mechanisms underlying the growth of tumors, and on the possibility of blocking their spread by preventing new blood vessels from nourishing them.

The objective, when you have cancer and want to combat fatality, is to make sure you find yourself in the long tail of the curve.

By participating in certain programs, such as that of the Commonweal Center in California (which we'll discuss later), patients try to take charge of their cancer, to learn to live in greater harmony with their bodies and their past, to seek peace of mind through yoga and meditation, and to choose foods that fight cancer while avoiding those that promote its development.