CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE HAS LOST THE BATTLE WITH CANCER. But that doesn’t mean the war is over. Let me explain why we may finally be heading in the right direction.
I just returned from TEDMED, an extraordinary gathering of brilliant minds from science, medicine, business, and technology—a veritable intellectual orgy. During the conference, there was a theme that emerged: Synthesis.
Instead of dividing everything into diseases and labels, emerging science is pointing to a different way of thinking about diseases. The thread that ran through the conference was that disease is a systemic problem and we have to treat the system, not the symptom; the cause, not the disease. This completely redefines the whole notion of disease. The landscape of illness is changing.
At TEDMED I spoke about a new way to define disease, to navigate the landscape of illness. It is called functional medicine, which is a systems-biology approach to personalized medicine that focuses on the underlying causes of disease. That definition of functional medicine is a mouthful. But in a word, it is the medicine of WHY, not WHAT.
Conventional medicine is focused on naming diseases based on geography, body location, and specialty, instead of by the cause, mechanism, or pathway involved. Doctors say you have a liver, kidney, brain, or heart disease. But this approach to naming disease tells you nothing about the cause, and it is quickly becoming obsolete as we understand more about the mysteries of human biology.
Instead of asking what disease you have and what drug should be used to treat it, we must ask WHY the disease has occurred—what are the underlying causes that lead to illness and how do we look under the hood to find out what’s going on. Modern medicine is like trying to diagnose what’s wrong with your car by listening to the noises it makes without ever looking inside to see what’s going on. Functional medicine allows us to look under the hood. It gives us a method for identifying the conditions in which disease arises and shows us how to begin changing those conditions.
This shift toward a more functional, systems-based, environmental approach to treatment is happening in cancer research right now, and this change was one of the main topics explored at TEDMED this year.
Looking at Cancer a New Way: Treatment in the 21st Century
The problem with conventional cancer treatment is simply this: We look at the disease the wrong way. This reality was illustrated over and over again by the leading thinkers in the field of cancer treatment at TEDMED.
For example, Greg Lucier, Chairman of Life Technologies, talked about how thinking about specific cancers is essentially flawed. How we label cancer is no longer synced up with what we know about the origins of cancer or the fact that two people who have cancer with the same name—like breast cancer—can have two completely different diseases which require different treatments. Just because you know the name of your disease, it doesn’t mean you know what’s wrong with you or what to do about it.
Classifying tumors by body site—lung, liver, brain, breast, colon, etc.—misses the underlying causes, mechanisms, and pathways involved in a particular cancer. The fact that cancer appears in a given region of the body tells us nothing about why the cancer developed in the first place. What’s more it gives us no information about how it manifested in a given patient. Two people with cancers in different parts of the body may have developed it for same reasons. Similarly, two people with cancers in the same part of the body may have developed it for different reasons. A patient with prostate cancer and one with colon cancer may have more in common with each other than two patients who have colon cancer. Historically we have practiced medicine by geography – where a disease occurs in the body. That doesn’t make scientific sense anymore. Now we have the potential to treat illness by understanding the underlying mechanisms and metabolic pathways.
These and other misconceptions about cancer and cancer treatment are leading to terrifying results. From the perspective of curative and preventive therapy, we have lost the war on cancer. Clinton Leaf explained how fancy statistics manipulate the data to show that cancer deaths are going down, while they are in fact going up. Overall cancer rates or incidence is significantly increasing. Deaths from cancer are also increasing. In 2008, there were 565,000 deaths in the US alone. One in three people will get cancer in their lifetime. While few are aware that solid tumors grow slowly for thirty years before they can be detected, 17 million Americans are walking around with cancer somewhere along the continuum from initiation of a cancer cell to detectable tumor.
In the “war” on cancer, we are fighting a losing battle for one simple reason: we’re focusing on the wrong target. As a physician I was trained to focus on the tumor—to burn, poison or cut it out, and then wait, watch and pray for the cancer to stay at bay. Newer gene-targeted treatments will help to improve chemotherapy and improve survival rates, but they won’t prevent cancer in the first place or even prevent it from coming back once you‘ve had it. Hope is not the only way to straddle the scary territory between remission and recurrence. There is a different way of thinking about how to treat the system, not just the cancer that holds promise for a proactive approach to helping both prevent occurrence as well as recurrence.
Cancers arise from a disturbance in your physiological state. Addressing that disturbance is the foundation of future cancer care.
Tending Your Garden: Treating the Soil in Which Cancer Grows
Dr. Anna Barker, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, explained how new groups of researchers are collaborating to think differently about cancer—to understand and treat it as a systemic problem.
The problem with cancer—one which almost no oncologists think about—is not the tumor, but the garden in which the tumor grows. In caring for a garden, if the weeds get too big, we pull them out, just as we do with cancer using conventional therapies such as chemotherapy, surgery or radiation. But then what?
Traditionally, we have focused on late-stage curative care, and in doing so, we have missed the thinking and the treatments focused on changing the underlying conditions that led to the cancer in the first place. Diet, lifestyle, thoughts, and environmental toxins all interact with our genes to change the landscape of our health.
We have been asking the wrong question about cancer. We have asked “what”: What tumor do you have? What kind of chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation is needed for that tumor? What is your prognosis? Instead, we need to be asking “why” and “how”: Why did this cancer grow? How can you change the conditions that feed and support cancer-cell growth? How did the terrain of your garden become a host to such an invasive weed?
Surprisingly, scientific literature is abundant with evidence that diet, exercise, thoughts, feelings, and environmental toxins all influence the initiation, growth and progression of cancer. If a nutrient-poor diet full of sugar, lack of exercise, chronic stress, persistent pollutants, and heavy metals can cause cancer, could it be that a nutrient-dense, plant-based diet, physical activity, changing thoughts and reactions to stress, and detoxification might treat the garden in which cancer grows? Treat the soil, not the plant. It is a foundational principle of sustainable agriculture, and of sustainable health.
In my oncology rotation in medical school, I asked my professor what percentage of cancer was related to diet. Expecting a gracious but insignificant nod to the role of diet as a cause of cancer, I was surprised when he said that 70 percent of all cancers were related to diet. The 2008-2009 report from the President’s Cancer Panel found that we have grossly underestimated the link between environmental toxins, plastics, chemicals, and cancer risk. They have yet to acknowledge how thoughts, emotions, and overall stress impact that risk—but it is sure to come. The facts that gravitate around cancer support evidence that will motivate us all to take a deeper look.
Consider this fact: 16 percent of all cancers are new, primary cancers in patients who have already had one cancer, not recurrences. This means that people who have cancer are more likely to get a second and independent cancer. Could it be the garden? I recently saw a patient after her third cancer, wondering what she could do to prevent cancer rather than waiting around for another one.
Consider this fact: The lifetime risk of breast cancer of those with the “breast cancer gene” or BRCA1 or 2 is presently 82 percent and increasing every year. Before 1940, the risk of getting cancer for those with the cancer gene was 24 percent. What changed? Our diet, lifestyle, and environment—both physically and emotionally. Might these factors be a better place to look for answers on how to address our cancer epidemic?
Cancers arise from a disturbance in your physiological state. Addressing that disturbance is the foundation of future cancer care. This approach might be called milieu therapy. Rather than treating cancer per se, we treat the milieu in which cancer arises.
And this is manageable. We can enhance immune function and surveillance through dietary and lifestyle changes, nutrient or phytonutrient therapies. We can facilitate our body’s own detoxification system to promote the elimination of carcinogenic compounds. We can improve hormone metabolism and reduce the carcinogenic effects of too much insulin from our high sugar and refined carbohydrate diet. We can help the detoxification of toxic estrogens through modulation of diet, lifestyle, and elimination of hormone-disrupting xenobiotics or petrochemicals.
We can also alter how our genes are expressed by changing the inputs that control that expression: diet, nutrients, phytonutrients, toxins, stress, and other sources of inflammation. And we can focus on less divisive and more generative thoughts that, in turn, create more uplifting emotions—all good fertilizer for the soil in the garden of our body.
The future of cancer care must use medicine’s understanding of the mechanisms of disease and we must use this information to create physiologic and metabolic balance, to design treatments that support and enhance normal physiology. The future of cancer care lies not in finding the best cocktail of chemotherapeutic agents, the right dose of radiation, or a new surgical technique, (all of which are still important and will continue to be refined) but in finding the right way to personalize treatment according to the individual imbalances in each person.
The pieces of the puzzle that hold the answers for cancer prevention and treatment are strewn about the landscape of medical science. They need only be assembled into a story that can guide clinical care. The time is ripe to accelerate this process. Thankfully, more scientists are now exploring the story of how to tend the gardens of our body, mind, and soul.
To learn more about how to tend your garden and create metabolic and physiologic balance for yourself see www.drhyman.com
To your good health,
Mark Hyman, MD
The functional medicine approach to illness has invigorated my approach to obesity, depression, autoimmune disorders, and overall health and well-being. I haven’t been this excited about medicine since medical school 25 years ago. Rather than a draining, miserable hamster wheel of prescription writing, I now am gaining the tools to actually empower the patients back to health – thanks to Dr. Hyman and the Institute for Functional Medicine.
The irony is that is takes us back to simpler times before technology and industry took over medicine!!
Sara Stein MD
Author, Obese From The Heart
Really exciting stuff, Dr. Hyman. My husband is a research scientist at Lifetech and I recently discovered functional medicine as I work on healing my thyroid/adrenal issues through the Dr. Kharrazian protocol. As a healthcare writer and communications strategist for the last 20 years, I look forward to sharing more ideas like these! Then my talents and skills would really be aligned with my life’s purpose.
This is encouraging news, as my passion is cooking healthy foods for those with cancer. My hope is that people will start to connect the dots, linking diet, environment and lifestyle to disease occurrence, and make dramatic changes in their lifestyles now, as opposed to waiting until they find out they have a disease.
I totally agree with your approach. Unfortunately, we don’t always have time to eat right. We are too busy to prepare several servings of fresh fruits and vegetables daily. And, lets face it, many people complain about the taste of fresh fruits and vegs.There is no substitute for actually eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables every day, of course but there is Juice Plus+® ; an all-natural, whole food based nutritional product made by juicing a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, then concentrating the juice into powders using a proprietary, low-temperature process. This doesn’t mean that Juice Plus+® is the full nutritional equivalent of fruits and vegetables, nor that Juice Plus+® could or should replace the frequently recommended 7-13 daily servings of fruits and vegetables. Juice Plus a healthy choice and sound nutritional insurance.
Wonderful article, thank you for sharing this important information in a way we can all understand. This info is relevant for all lifestyle diseases, not just cancer. I’m glad that brilliant medical minds are finally catching up with what us grass-rooters have been saying all along. Looking forward to the day that diet, exercise, thoughts, stress relief and fewer chemicals are primary and standard medical practice. Until that day…
Mark,
Thanks for a great post! I think that your assessment (or at least how you analyzed the assessments of others at TEDMED) is spot on. We (i.e. scientists) are too focused on local pathway analysis and on giving everything a name. We are very myopic. The system is the key. With all of the tools that we have nowadays for macroscale genomic and proteomic analysis we must pay more attention to what’s happening on a global scale. Changes in one part of our body have a definite affect on other parts.
We are definitely seeing more global scale analysis such as GWAS and the human microbiome project and hopefully such initiatives will continue to lead us down the path towards a systems based research approach.
Kudos!
Cancer scares me. Like most people, I have friends and family who have been diagnosed with various cancers. Some have “won” their battles, many have not. The whole idea of chemotherapy and radiation horrifies me. When you are sick, those treatments make you sicker and weaker, and I have watched treasured friends desperately search for “a new treatment” or to be part of an experimental program as their lives surely slip away to the ravages of cancer. I have read your blogs for some years and find your functional medicine approach not only refreshing, but logical, so I will follow with interest your writings and links about this approach of asking why instead of how. Thank you.
Dear dr. Hyman,
Reading your articles regularly gives me hoop, not because I am ill or obese, I take good care of my self. It gives me strength and supports first of all in what I believed always, also it helps me to support people are very dear to me, to make them aware, read and rethink many habits which are problematic. I find it easier now to explain my child in a more clear way, why some things are not desirable en what are the enjoyable alternatives in a playful way. I had a nice moment with my son saying ”mom I thought about things you were explaining to me. I found it interesting and weird that we humans do things that harms us and we are willing to pay money for it as well. Why knowing all this, they produce these things anyway? Are we in a way an economical garbage?” Not that I can give all the answers, not that I am always right or successful in explaining him. What gives hoop is the ability to think and dare asking your self and others.
I noticed that not only food matters in being well or sick. I was amazed to see that my brothers blood sugar level dropped from 9.8 (clear stomach in the morning) to 5.6, after relaxation exercise! After eating a portion of blue berries, it dropped to 5. It is fascinating to follow and learn …
to your good health as well, kind regards from Amsterdam
Lisya
how do we know what the incidence of cancer was in people with brca 1 or 2 before 1940?
Yes, I truely believe we have to “take” our own health in our “own hands” and to not give in to all the fast food temptations in our fast lane life. We need to take our time, and not neglect nutrition, because nutrition is how our body heals and repairs itself on a daily basis. When the bodies nutritional needs are not met, day after day, month after month, year after year, it can help itself heal and repair.
We can not go years without nutrition, “suddenly” have cancer and go expect someone else to cure us!!! Why have we lost the inability to see this? It’s like driving recklessly through life, with our eyes closed to the real truths of our own lives that we need to know!
I agree 100% with you Doctor.We need more doctors like you to educate people on how to stay healthy and prevent suffering from curable diseases.
For most patients,their doctors have the ultimate decisions for them.It is frustrating to know
that patients believe whatever their doctors tell them. If they suffer from knee pain for example, some doctors tell their patients it is part of getting old
We need more information about health challenges and what the right supplementation can do for us.
Education is the key.
I would have more time for this article if it didn’t start with the words “CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE HAS LOST THE BATTLE WITH CANCER.” Thank you, but if I get cancer I will take everything that modern medicine has to offer because for many cancers it gives a real chance of a cure or greatly extended, good quality life whereas all of the alternatives promise only death. Go look at the stats.
Very good article, well written and very thought out. I am looking forward to reading more of your posts in the future.
Thank you Dr. Hyman for your insightful and well rounded article on the perceived causes and cures for cancer. You are ahead of your piers and add serious credibility to the medical profession with your forthright and thoughtful analysis. Although I am not a doctor or even a medical professional I have done extensive research on this subject in order support loved ones who are or have suffered from this treacherous disease.
If you are not aware of the product line 4Life, I encourage you to check it out.
Keep up the good work.
Respectfully,
Victoria Harris
it’s kind of bothersome that this website literally forms EVERYTHING about the way you eat. I’m sorry, but i really dont think that eating fruits and veggies and pooping twice a day is gonna cure lung cancer or something like that. also, i dont know anyone on the planet who has cancer and when a doctor tells them to take a certain medication that has a good chance of helping or will help, decides to get on the computer and then be like ohh maybe i should eat an apple that will definately cure my cancer! uhhh, no. Chemotherepy is bullshit, i agree with that part of it because all that does is make the patient weaker and kill their immune system, so yeah, i get that. but there’s no way in hell eating some brussel sprouts is gonna eliminate cancer. no sir. medicine and treatment will, sure. but not some fruit or veggies. yeah, eating well can PREVENT cancer, but once you already have cancer, why wouldn’t you take the medicine your doctor(s) are telling you to take just because one doctor put some words on a computer talkin bout eatin. forrealdo.
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I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma about 2 1/2 years ago. Looking back, it started probably 10 years before that, but I ignored it, which in this was probably a good thing. The initial prescribed treatment was a chemo cocktail which had numerous and life changing side-affects (several of which I refused to accept). I declined this and working with my oncologist, decided on 8 weekly treatments of Rutuxan, a mono-clonal anti-body. While on the treatment, I researched and read as much as I could find on the nature on my disease, learning that cancer cells are present in virtually all of us from the day we are born, but our immune system has the ability to keep them in check. In other words, we develop cancer colonies (tumors) because of a breakdown or failure in our immune systems. My focus since this has been directed toward healing my immune system through diet and exercise. Diet is most important because what’s in our gut defines the health of our immune system.
I don’t regret the treatment I took, because it gave me a quick start on attacking my cancer (it reduced the size of my primary tumor over 30%), but by changing my diet and focusing on my immune system, that tumor has diminished roughly 95% in size in the 8 months following treatment. According to my oncologist, my cancer will never go into remission and it will re-manifest itself at some point in time. I believe my approach will help keep it in check, but i am still looking for that magic bullet.
Dr. Hyman and his colleagues are on the right track. Keep following that track into understanding the root causes of diseases rather than the maintenance band-aids that only obscure festering infections. We are what we consume!