Why Cancer Happens - According to Chinese Medicine

More than anything, the big bad wolf, i.e. the scariest illness or disease of our times, is without a doubt cancer. Now I think understanding why cancer happens according to Chinese medicine is very very interesting because it's not a point of view you'll typically hear in conventional medical care and it's also something that helps explain other aspects of cancer, for example why it comes back after treatment. Now in this video I thought we'd talk a little bit about why cancer happens according to Chinese medicine. Hey I'm Dr. Alan Tine, doctor of Chinese medicine, author of the health book Master the Day. So before we jump into this video there are two very important links right below. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can contact my private practice right below this video. The second link is for a free guide which is five daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. Now let's talk about the progression of cancer for a minute because I think it's important to understand that in many ways cancer is a chronic disease fundamentally for many of the kinds of cancer, not all of them. Some occur in young people and are very aggressive. Obviously there are more aggressive kinds of even breast cancer while many are not. So there's a lot of nuances here but generally speaking we think of cancer as primarily a chronic disease and that's important to think of because most of what kills us in America is chronic disease. It's heart disease, cardiovascular disease is a big category, cancer is a big one. A lot of people that are chronically ill are chronic digestive diseases, even pulmonary diseases, so chronic lower respiratory diseases. According to the CDC kills about 152,000 people per year and other chronic conditions like I think Alzheimer's is considered a chronic condition and diabetes, strokes. So a lot of this is cardiovascular in nature but cancer in one part and for some cancers we still think of as a chronic disease and chronic illness and that's very important because it means it does not come out of nowhere. It comes from somewhere and it's typically slow growing and slow progressing. So that's very important, number one. So let's talk about a simple progression, right. Let's talk about someone who has acid reflux every day. They're experiencing burning, burping, indigestion, sourness or bitterness, other digestive changes and that's a very common disease or pathology, pathological progression that for many people leads to nothing. It's just chronic reflux. But some people will develop Barrett's esophagus where the actual cell type changes. Reflux can be a risk factor for Barrett's which is more severe than reflux and Barrett's a certain percentage will turn into actual esophageal cancer. Last time I checked the stat was around five percent, anywhere from three out of 100 to 10 or 13 out of 100. So you have the chronic disease, a lifestyle disease, acid reflux which is very common. A small percentage may progress to Barrett's or maybe one of the risk factors in addition to other factors leading to Barrett's esophagus which is more severe and then a small percentage of Barrett's will become esophageal cancer, statistically speaking. So that's how we can look at one example of how a fundamentally lifestyle problem progresses and then progresses to a point where now there's neoplastic, there's cancer, neoplastic activity, okay. So this progression is very important to understand because we're going to talk about this from a Chinese medicine point of view right now. The mentors I worked with and my doctoral work studying spontaneous cancer remissions, for many kinds of cancer there's first and foremost what we consider a yang deficiency. A yang deficiency in Chinese medicine basically just means there's either an overuse of resources, an exhaustion, a chronic functional disruption for a long period of time whether it is something digestive like reflux or it's something else going on like hormones or something else going on in that way. But fundamentally first there's often some kind of yang deficiency. So what that means is that the person's resources have been taxed just like someone who gets sick frequently, right. If you're overworking, you're not exercising, you're not eating well, you sleep six instead of seven and a half hours and suddenly you're like you know this year I got sick four times once per season and that's not common for me. That is a yang, a resource deficiency leading to the development of catching a cold or catching the flu. We do it the same frankly regarding cancer, some of them, in Chinese medicine. So there is a resource depletion that leads in the terrain, in the body, in the immune system that leads to a susceptibility for something else to be brewing and that's very important number one. Now yang can be depleted through stress, through overwork, through over exercising, through all these lifestyle factors that can damage us and basically make us weak for lack of a better word. Anything that makes you exhausted is damaged to your yang basically in one way to encapsulate it. Now some people are genetically weaker yang. This is kind of the person who tends to run cold, weak digestion, often thinner, paler. This is a yang constitution. So this is a person who's prone to more deficiencies and typically more chronic disease than the average person. It doesn't mean they're more prone to cancers but this kind of person has a weak yang genetically. This is a weak constitution, right? This is a real thing in Chinese medicine. You see it clinically all the time and again many cancers are still primarily correlated with age. That's a very important correlation because it shows that this yang deficiency, this depletion of resources is one of the predisposing factors. It's one important, very important correlation. Now phase two is that typically there's a prolonged period of using up our vital resources, right? We're overworking, we're stressed out, we're just not resting enough, we're only sleeping six hours a night but we get through the day and we do that for like 10 years and we don't think it's a problem. So this underlying exhaustion, if I can call it that, is running behind the scenes. Now often yang deficiency from our perspective then leads to something that's stagnation. Yang deficiency is like you have a river and the river is filled with all this junk and all this crap, right? There's bottles that people threw, there's hay and dirt and logs and stuff and the water isn't flowing very well anymore. So the yang, let's just say the river is your yang and the river is not flowing very well anymore. It's like half the water, right? We've used up some of that vital resource. Half the water and now you're no longer able to move those logs, the branches, the water bottles all these kids threw in there, the junk, the leftover hay from the farm nearby, the pesticide runoff, whatever it is. The river is only at half so it can't effectively move all this junk that's in there accumulating. What happens? The river becomes stagnant, right? Now we have what in Chinese medicine is called stagnation. A most common scenario where there's stagnation is long-term digestive disruption leading to gallbladder issues or reflux. Very, very, very important because it's so common and it is a big canary in the coal mine. It doesn't mean that if you have acid reflux you're going to get cancer, esophageal or liver or whatever. It doesn't mean that. But understanding the progression of pathology is very, very, very important because when yang is weak, the river is weak and then more stuff can accumulate and one of the most common scenarios is a person has long-term digestive problems for a while or they have weak digestion genetically. They've just always had problems and then they start to get gallbladder distension and then eventually pain and gallbladder attacks and they have gallstones develop. So this is where long-term congestion, right? The river is not as smooth, digestion is not as smooth and now we have a kink in the system and this produces a localized area of what we call heat or stagnation, all kinds of different things. Sometimes this is just lymphatic congestion but this can go on undiagnosed for literally years. I mean, it commonly does. Now, if this process goes on long enough, this congestion can produce what Chinese medicine often considers a kind of toxic heat. So for some people, the fact that they're already getting acid reflux and burping and indigestion and sourness or bitterness, that is that already. That is what we consider this toxic heat. There is an inflammatory process going on in the gallbladder and sometimes even the liver as well. So that is a clinical progression within Chinese medicine that is common. You see this day in and day out in clinical medicine. It's one of the most common issues in certainly America and developed countries. So that's the example of resource depletion, weak yang, leads to junk accumulation. Now we have stagnation and even that is not by itself, does not necessarily promote cancer but then that can lead to a next level which is now we have this kind of toxic heat. Now that's only one kind of cancer, right? This is more common in digestive cancers, colon cancer being one of the biggest one. It's obviously one of the, maybe the most common cancer in men in America right now and so this is very important to recognize because if that's the most common cancer type and this is often the progression, then you have a few canaries in the coal mine to watch out for. You have that resource depletion. River gets junked up, stagnation and then festering. Let's just call it that, right? Festering. So now you have this nest of logs and junk and plastic bottles and fish are going in there and dying and animals are eating the plastic and dying and it's like this mess of just junk and garbage. Now you still have yang deficiency, resource depletion but now you have this pile of junk, this toxicity over here and now you have both of these issues at the same time simultaneously. Underlying and the acute picture. This is the neoplasty activity. And one final thought here, why does cancer come back? This is a very important thought experiment. Why do people go into clinical remission and then three, five, ten years later the cancer comes back? Well the most obvious answer, let me cite some research first. One research paper I found, found that for breast cancer there's about a 30% overall recurrence rate. That varies wildly depending on the kind of cancer, the stage, okay? But 30% is pretty high. For a medical treatment that's not minor. I mean if modern oncology was not permanently disabling and permanently bankrupting to the patient that's sick or dying, then who cares? Have them do chemotherapy every day until whatever. But it is so maiming to the patient and so harmful to the person that this is important to talk about. Why does it come back? The most obvious answer is because the underlying physiological process, the river, was not fixed. Surgery is curative for many different kinds of cancer and tumors depending on location, severity, all this stuff. Surgery can be curative. But what it is curative of in many cases is we've removed all this crap but still the river is low. And still new junk is accumulating the whole time, the whole time, the whole time. The underlying pathological process has not changed. And so it's not surprising that it comes back, right? It's like giving someone lipo and they just keep doing the same standard American diet and then in 10 years like, why did I gain weight? Because conventional medicine typically mostly treats the symptoms of diseases. They don't really have, in my experience, very good tools for treating the river, the underlying Yang deficiency. And in my experience, this is the forte of Chinese medicine even used with chemotherapy or even used with conventional care. Patients tend to do a lot better and there's a lot of research on that. Understanding what is running in the background, this whole river analogy, this junk accumulation, that's just one type of cancer. It's different, slightly different in some ways from breast cancer, but the same general picture is the same. And breast cancer being, I think, the most common cancer in women right now in history. So understanding this underlying process that then leads to this localized process elsewhere before things are metastatic and that we have to repair this and that my experience, conventional medicine doesn't do a very good job of that at all. And so it's no surprise that things often come back. But that is just my two cents. I think it's very important to think of cancer from a integrated point of view, even doing conventional care, but also understanding how else can we work on this. Very, very important. All right, guys, that's all I have for today. Some very important thoughts on a very, very disabling disease. And cancer is often the hardest one to watch people go through, cancer care, because the treatments are so destructive by itself, not just the disease, which is destructive. But these are some tips that I hope can help you or at least help you understand it from another point of view as well. Two other videos for you right there that may help you. And I will catch you soon.