We all fear that dreaded word… cancer. It represents so much fear in most of us that it is enough to completely convert everything we do and feel in an instant. I will be honest, my biggest motivator for doing this blog and wanting to study naturopathy is to avoid me getting it. My whole family seems to be riddled with it and that history, seeing the way that cancer just takes all life-force and vitality out of someone, is enough to make me do just about anything! You can read my personal struggle with my dad’s passing here.
So, I have studied elements of cancer and how it affects the body and more importantly why we might get cancer. Often people feel that cancer is some mystery disease, like they were perhaps unlucky or that their gene pool just meant they would get it. Though our gene pool doesn’t help matters, there is actually a bigger reason why we develop cancer.
Ultimately, cancer is a defense mechanism by the body to help us live longer. I know this sounds kinda ironic, when it feels like it is the cancer that is actually the cause of our potential death, but there were imbalances in the body, which we didn’t recognize or address way before the cancer set in. It is in fact these imbalances, which are the cause of the cancer. In most cases, they are an imbalance with the number of toxins that are residing in your body. Here is a fabulous article which addresses this topic in further detail.
Estrogen Dominance
Breast cancers, uterine cancers and I guess what I would call cancers of our “womanly bits” are stimulated by an imbalance in our hormones. In particular the excess of estrogens in the body. With excess xenoestrogens from our environment, the contraceptive pill, hormone replacement therapy and a number of other factors, our bodies become estrogen dominant. It is this imbalance which creates “growth” in the body. Estrogen is designed to create growth BUT it needs progesterone to keep that growth in check. Most women don’t connect the imbalance and it runs rampant in the body.
There are obvious signs of an imbalance:
- PMS symptoms
- Painful, heavy and longer periods
- Being very emotional or sensitive
- Often feeling overwhelmed
There is a full self assessment test which you can do, which could indicate that you might be estrogen dominant. Please hit the search button above to find more articles on estrogen dominance or check out the category on hormone treatments.
Milk consumption
There are also some interesting studies done in relation to milk consumption and breast cancers. It relates to the growth hormone found in milk. By drinking lots of milk and having dairy in our diet, it indicates that it may increase the likelihood of breast cancer. When comparing countries that consume large quantities of dairy and matching those statistics with breast cancer statistics, they matched very closely. There were also some interesting studies about how statistics changed within the Japanese culture, where milk is not commonly consumed. Though I can appreciate that there are other factors involved in making this correlation, it is still interesting to see an increase in statistics—personally, it makes me just want to stay away from milk completely!
At the bottom of it all is that as long as we look after our bodies, give it the tools to heal and provide it with good detoxification every now and again, we are unlikely to ever develop cancer. To me, it is a massive motivator to stick with it and to keep healing.
What is your personal experience with cancer? Did or do your parents have cancer? Have you seen someone suffer from it? Feel free to share.
This Post Has 3 Comments
Hi Adina,
Thank you for sharing your personal story and welcome to my blog. I can so relate to the pains of seeing a parent pass from cancer. I found it really traumatic and it is partly my current motivation to keep writing and sharing what I know about Endometriosis. I can sense that you are meant to meet. Looking forward to hearing more from you in the blog 🙂 Hugs, Mel
yes I have endometrial carcinoma!
Hi Mel,
I also follow your group in fb. My mom died of ovarian cancer almost two years ago. She was diagnosed when she was in terminal phase. The cancer had already spread to the liver and the lungs. For years she complained about pain in her right shoulder. She felt bloated and had minor pains and aches in her pelvic area. When she went to doctors, they would tell her that it was colitis or irritable bowel syndrome… she even had an emergency surgery 4 year before her diagnosis due to “appendicitis” (which later we figured it was the cancer)they would prescripe pepto-bismol and told her that she was depressed and that she only needed to “talk” to someone. A year before being diagnosed, she started losing weight. Then, she would say that her body wouldn’t have enough room for food, so she became anorexic… the last few months she couldn’t digest, she said she felt that everything smelled funny and that food and everything tasted like an aquarium smells.
After a doctor finally did an ultrasound to see her liver, it was too late, her liver was full of circles… then they did an exploratory laparoscopic surgery where they found the primary tumor… it was in her left ovary. They did a liver biopsy and found that it was actually ovarian cancer that migrated to the liver and it was already spreading to her lungs. That was July/August 2010. She went through a couple of courses of chemotherapy, by almost the third, she passed away. At that time, her kidneys gave up. All her veins were burnt by the chemo and all her skin was purple in the area of the catheter (on the chest). Her legs were completely swollen. One of the things I noticed and that nobody mentions… is that in the white of her eyes, there were dark spots on the sides of her iris… as if some black shade was spreading under her cornea. I later read in a book about preventing cancer with macrobiotic diet, the author mentioned characteristics of the eyes, nose, etc… the eyes, he mentions about these shades… he described it as related to malignant growths in the body.
In her early 40’s she had a partial hysterectomy because she had heavy bleeding, myomatosis, so they removed her uterus. She specifically told the doctors not to touch her ovaries, since she saw how her friends were going crazy without the proper hormonal balance after the complete hysterectomy. Although they never told her that she may have had endometriosis, I had the suspicion that she did.
She was diagnosed a couple of months before her 64th birthday. She passed away 4 months after the diagnose.
Thank you for writing about this topic, I am really grateful to have found your blog, and to all the research and good work that you have done. You are what the world needs…
Kind regards,