First, some hard truths about cancer.  Then, what can be done

    Each year more people than ever before die from cancer, a disease that will affect one in three people alive today, and sad to say, medical treatment hardly affects that grim statistic. Cancer has defied the best efforts of the best doctors for over a hundred and fifty years - that is, since we found what the disease really is. Until pathologists started using the microscope, beginning about 1850, everything was ignorance.
    Cancer is the body's own cells gone wrong, a gang of rogue cells, psychopathic criminals but difficult to discriminate from normal so that treatments designed to strike at them must hit law-abiding neighbours as well; also they reproduce, spread and hide away so that it is difficult to find them all for arrest or execution.
    So, what shall we do? Put out heads in the sand? Appeal to magic? Look for emotional support? Pray? Those are not daft reactions, everything about a patient is important, but right here the subject is cold, hard reason - how to handle the physical disease.

    If you have to deal with a stab wound, don't bother with sticky plasters. In cancer, there is no time to waste on alternative or complementary treatments: the people who peddle them rely on diagnosing 'cancer' where none exists or muddling up outcomes so that no-one can understand them. We concentrate on the logic of how real cancer is or may be treatable.

     In principle a cancer might be cured or controlled by removing or killing all the rogue cells, reversing the abnormalities that made them evil, restoring the normal cellular controls that have been lost, or assisting the body's own procedures for dealing with out-of-order members of the community. Let's examine these ideas.
     Surgical removal of a cancer is a vital part of treatment, but it is notorious that very often a few of the rogue cells evade the knife and give rise to recurrence even many years later. In one example reviewed in detail on the Research page there was nine years in between, and we can be absolutely certain that the recurrent tumour was the same evil bastard as what they thought they had totally removed, because we can read its genetic signature.
     Radiation and chemotherapy mostly rely on the tumour cells being more badly hurt by the drug or the radiation than are normal cells, simply because they are growing and dividing more rapidly. But the normal cells DO suffer damage which is why patients get so sick; so the dose used must kept to a minimum and will not kill all the rogue cells except in very special circumstances. Lack of selectivity is the reason for limited success; nearly always the disease will recur if the patient lives long enough.

     The remaining principles will seem to a patient as examples of chemotherapy, but they differ very much from the ordinary sense of that word, and even more between themselves.
     - We might reverse the abnormalities that made the rogue cells evil, by correcting the faulty genes; but it seems very unlikely that this can be done any time soon because there are so many abnormalities and because it means getting gene therapy into every one of many millions of abnormal cells. (Let anyone else say what they like, cancer is a disease caused by mutations in the cells that gave rise to the tumour, usually many thousands of mutations including some of extreme kind.)
    - Cancer cells behave as they do (growing, dividing, spreading, killing) because a few critical mutations among the thousands present in the ancestral line obstruct the body in applying its ordinary control mechanisms, which otherwise would kill or restrain the cancer cells. The best recent developments in cancer treatment act by restoring those control mechanisms or replacing them with makeshift alternatives. This is not a bad idea, quite the reverse, and perhaps it will prove the most successful means in the long run: we wish only to point out that perfect success is unlikely because a cancer cell line is forever trying to seek out ways to evade restraint, and will probably succeed in the end by introducing further mutations that bypass the restored controls.
    - There is no doubt that immune mechanisms remove nearly all abnormal cell lines, that otherwise might proceed to form a true cancer. We see only the few that escape this surveillance. Many attempts have been made to emphasise or enhance this activity; again, not a bad idea indeed quite the reverse; but the practical results are so meagre that we can not rely on this approach as a final solution.

    However, the gold standard must be extermination of all cancer cells, requiring first a better way to distinguish cancer cells from normal. We have a few examples to show that it can be done and just one is mentioned here because we know exactly how it works. Treatment of cancers of the thyroid is relatively successful, simply because thyroid cells are very good at picking up iodine whereas no other cells have any use for it. So, we substitute radioactive iodine for the ordinary kind and the cancer cells kill themselves - our aim must be selectivity of that quality, but for all cancers!
    The development of co-bodies is expected to yield such selectivity, and directed to the individual cancer of the individual patient. That is why we are here; that is the reason for this website.
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