Health/Wellness

88

Doctor finds inflammation a cause of cancer.
Dr. Vijaya Nair, MD FAMS, MS, after years of researching the cause and treatment of cancer concludes that inflammation is a key contributor to major diseases plaguing our citizens. In her new book, Prevent Cancer, Strokes, Heart Attacks and other Deadly Killers! Dr. Nair claims that although inflammation is your immune system’s way of protecting you from physical trauma or foreign invaders, such as viruses and bacteria, many times it forgets to shut itself off and ends up destroying the very tissues and organs it was meant to protect. “It’s a major contributor to heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and many more life-threatening conditions. Control inflammation and you control disease,” Dr. Nair says.
Through her research, Dr. Nair has found that all types of inflammation can cause cancer. Whether the inflammation is caused by an infection (such as hepatitis), a mechanical irritant (such as kidney stones), or a chemical irritant (such as stomach acid) the result is the same. Chronic, low-grade inflammation greatly increases your risk of developing cancer. Arthritis conditions see an avalanche of inflammatory chemicals being released — and those inflammatory chemicals wear away the joint cartilage. The first step in any program to combat arthritis then isn’t to stop the pain, but to stop the inflammation! With the development of the condition of Alzheimer’s, inflammation plays a role and also makes it progress faster. That’s because the plaques and tangles themselves are mechanical irritants to the brain. The inflammation they create causes the release of brain-killing chemicals. From these examples we can see the root cause of most disease is the body’s inability to control inflammation. Prevent Cancer, Strokes, Heart Attacks and other Deadly Killers reveals some non-drug methods to reduce or eliminate inflammation and thus speed recovery. According to Dr. Nair, this is the first place modern medicine should start looking for treatment and prevention.

What do cancer, heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer's disease, digestive tract diseases, macular degeneration and chronc fatigue syndrom have in common? They're all caused by chronic, low-grade inflammation.

Excerpt
Introduction
How I came to write this book
“Happiness lies, first of all, in health.”
-George William Curtis (American writer, 1824-1892)
If you’re like me, you’re keenly interested in preserving or regaining
your health, yet you reserve a healthy dose of skepticism about anything
promoted as a “miracle cure.” I’ll be the first to acknowledge that many
of the natural supplements available today have big claims but little scientific
backing. Too often, when you dig a little deeper you’ll find these
claims are either distortions of the truth or downright fabrications. So
for much of my life I, like many people, disregarded herbal therapies as
a valid possibility for the prevention and treatment of serious diseases
such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer’s.
When you look at my background you may understand why. Although
I was born in Singapore, an island nation in Southeast Asia, my academic
studies were similar to that of any Western doctor. I was initially trained
as a psychiatrist (a medical doctor who specializes in mental health) in
my home country. I later moved to the United States and completed my
post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and at Columbia
University. I then taught epidemiology (the study of identifying risk
factors for disease) at Columbia. If I was going to be convinced of the
validity of herbal therapies I had to see factual evidence!
However, my unquestioning support of Western medicine started to
crack while I was doing research at Columbia. In all the studies I was
coming across and helping to direct, one thing was striking — conventional
treatments for chronic illnesses had shocking and often painful side
effects. For example, standard cancer treatments such as chemotherapy
and radiation not only made people sick to their stomachs, bone-achingly
tired, and skinny as a rail, but sometimes the side effects were so severe
they actually killed the patient! Sadly, many patients were not even told
what the risks of these drugs were or how they were going to affect them
before starting treatment.
Worse yet, these treatments weren’t even helping us win the war
against cancer. Despite $200 billion dollars invested in conventional
cancer treatments since 1970, as of 2002, Western medicine hadn’t made a dent in the rate of cancer deaths.1 In fact, the U.S. death rate from cancer
remained unchanged from 1950 to 2002.2 So what we had were highly
toxic treatments that were not actually saving people’s lives. I started to
wonder if there was a better way.