Hardware of our body

The cause for cancer is officially unknown. It is true that there is no single cause of cancer. There are varied reasons for this disorder. The most important cause of cancer is postulated to be of a genetic origin. Cancer is a disease of unregulated cell growth. In a normal individual, cell growth happens naturally, as is required of nature, life proceeds from the womb to death in an organized manner. The individual grows, becomes an adult, ages and dies. This requires an orderly progression of events from the macroscopic aspects to the microscopic.

For me, the microscopic aspects are more important since they reflect on macro anatomical changes. Everything about an orderly progression is about regulation. The individual cell behaves in a regulated manner resulting in normal appearance and structure of an individual. Microscopically, the cell which retains almost all the character of an individual keeps itself within the collective that we call, an organism. The greater goals of the said organism trumps the goal of any individual cell. This behavior did not start with the multicellular organism. Bacterial supercolonies, biofilms as well as slime molds exhibit this behavior in a graded manner.

Cancer is an unregulated multicellular growth phenomenon. The urge of a cancer cell is to be an individual and leave the collective to multiply and thrive. It has a lesser inclination to sacrifice its individual functions for the betterment of the collective. There could be many reasons for a normal cell to turn into a cancer cell. Let us examine briefly, some characteristics of a cancer cell.

There are six main macroscopic features exibited by a cancer cell.

When cells grow and divide, the signals from the organism that controls these activities are aberrant or absent. Cell division proceeds without any central control.

The cells grow and reproduce continuously even when the cell signals are present. In this case the cell does not heed to the control signals. We will look into the reasons in subsequent blogs.

Every cell has a program that it executes that controls its birth, existence, functions and death.The programmed cell death signal is not given or received in a cancer cell causing the cell to postpone cell death. This is a prime cause of the cancer load.

The above reason also means that the cell divides uncontrollably.

New blood vessel growth. The uncontrolled cell mass that grows constantly requires nourishment. This is made possible by the cancer cells secreting some factors that promote blood vessel growth to itself.

Invasion and Metastasis occurs after a certain stage of growth. 

In this blog series, I am more interested in solutions for cancers that complement any medical care already received by you or are still receiving. My target is everything that is left untouched by your caregiver. This includes on how to stop or retard the metastasis, how to increase the cell apoptosis or programmed cell death, how to convince the individual cells to be a part of the collective and how to revert slightly changed cells and bring them back into the fold. I will go into details in my upcoming blogs.