Can Cancer Be Healed?

This week I was sitting in a cafe and struck up a conversation with a young woman sitting next to me.

A fifth-year medical student.

She told me about the internship she's doing here, and I told her about the healing center I'm building.

I thought to myself: here are two people, both working in health, and at the same time coming from very different methodologies.

When I said that to her, she said it's important to combine the two.

I wondered what that meant to her.

She said that in the case of cancer, for example, you do need to change your lifestyle, but

"you can't heal cancer without chemotherapy."

I asked in response whether she'd heard of other approaches to healing cancer, like water fasting.

She immediately said that fasting is very dangerous and that it's irresponsible to say something like that.

So I told her that not only do I personally know people who healed cancer through fasting, I've also met experts who talk about this and who have used fasting to heal challenging illnesses, cancer included.

In response she asked for the scientific evidence.

I asked her whether she didn't think people's firsthand testimonies were enough.

She said no.

She went on to say it's a subject that should be researched.

And I argued that it would be very hard to find someone who would directly prove that cancer can be healed through fasting, because fasting isn't profitable for any industry. Nobody makes money from it, since fasting is free.

When I asked whether she'd be willing to look into it and research it herself,

she froze and got rattled by the question.

I won't bore you with every detail of the story, but it was a conversation that was pleasant on one hand and complicated on the other.

She encountered so many things there she had no idea about.

Like the fact that Hippocrates, who founded the Western medicine she's studying, used to use fasting to heal. Yet today you won't hear about that in an allopathic (drug-based) medical school.

Or the fact that autophagy, the process that takes place in the body during a water fast, helps the body clear out damaged cells up to 400 times faster than usual.

What happens during a fast, when we abstain from food, is that the enormous energy that constantly goes toward our digestion gets freed up, so the body can cleanse itself of toxins and do its work properly.

Most diseases are caused by toxins, and fasting gives us an opportunity to clean ourselves out.

She believes that chemotherapy is the only way to treat cancer cells, so I asked her: if she had the option right now, as a healthy person, to choose between

1. drinking only water (dangerous, in her view) for 24 hours,

or

2. feeding herself chemotherapy,

which would she prefer?

Of course she said she'd prefer the water, and the conversation only got more tangled from there.

At some point I suggested we take a step back, and I asked her what she thinks causes cancer in the first place.

She said a lot of things.

I asked, like what?

The first thing she came up with was the sun. So I presented her with a few studies showing how important the sun is in healing.

And a study showing that vitamin D deficiency is directly linked to melanoma and to more severe cases of melanoma.

But what else creates cancer?

Which, by the way, doesn't have to be treated as some terrible disease. It's all a matter of perspective.

Cancer cells develop in our bodies at every given moment, and just as they appear, they disappear.

It's the meeting of those cancer cells with the environment, with processed food, and with a person's habits that turns them into something life-threatening.

If the body weren't acidic or inflamed, cancer cells wouldn't settle in and develop, in most cases.

There are quite a few foods in our diet that have been linked to the creation of cancer cells in the body: white sugar, seed oils, processed dairy, food coloring.

Any processed food that creates oxidative stress can lead to the development of cancer.

The personal care products we've gotten used to using regularly are rich in substances that are, by definition, carcinogenic.

In many cases we can find them even in sunscreen.

Heavy metals like aluminum or mercury, which can be found in certain foods or vaccines, have also been linked to cancer.

And what about our thoughts?

When a person is under constant stress, anger, hatred, negative thinking, lack of meaning, unhealthy relationships, and so on,

all of these can lead to the development of disease.

After all, what is illness if not our body's request that we change something in our lives?

Illness can be a gift.

It's no accident that we hear stories about people who got cancer, left their jobs and relationships, and started over.

And now they're healthy and their lives are more wonderful than ever.

The illness was an opportunity for them to change what they'd grown used to suppressing.

During our conversation I realized just how much I know about health thanks to my podcast.

At some point she asked me whether I'm a doctor,

since I'd shown such fluency in the body's processes and in healing.

As a medical student, she's learning one very specific narrative about disease and treating it with drugs, and there's so much knowledge missing there.

All because there's no financial interest in healing disease.

As the conversation went on, she got less and less comfortable.

After all, what is she discovering in this conversation? That there's a great deal she doesn't know.

And that what she does know and believe isn't necessarily in sync with reality.

If her whole life she's told herself she's going to save lives and heal people,

that she chose the most important and pure profession in the world, and then she realizes in a short conversation that the financial interests of drug companies shape the work she does.

She isn't learning about health or healing (beyond slogans like "choose a healthy lifestyle" or "eat nourishing food").

She isn't really learning how processed food, an unhealthy lifestyle, and the overuse of drugs create disease.

And she certainly doesn't know how to channel nutrition and routine toward healing a person.

As the conversation progressed she developed an aversion toward me, despite my pleasant tone and the questions I was asking.

It's easier to dismiss people, or any other "natural" approach to healing.

Most people won't be convinced that food creates disease.

They won't believe there's even a way to heal disease without harmful methods.

And they don't know that allopathic medicine, by its very definition, means symptomatic treatment, not healing.

Now let's set things straight.

I'm not against doctors.

Emergency medicine is incredible.

And there are also wonderful doctors who combine various approaches to treat a person and their health.

I've interviewed some of them, and they bring a lot of healing into the world.

After all, a person who has studied the human body so deeply for so many years can work wonders if they use the laws of nature to heal people.

But if we're not willing to question the accepted methods, what chance do we have of healing ourselves and understanding that the power is usually in our own hands?

Self-healing requires a very frightening encounter with yourself and with life.

In the end, most people choose chemotherapy. (And heaven forbid, I have no criticism of that.)

Why? There are a lot of reasons.

The first: because they don't know any other way.

The second: because they're afraid to try something unconventional, since most of the time the people around you, and the experts too, will scare you away from trying something different.

The third: because they don't believe in the way of nature.

The fourth: because they'd rather someone else (the doctor) take responsibility for them.

After all, fasting, dietary change, meditation, leaving your job, changing the way you think, moving to a different country, changing the hard things in your life, setting out on a journey around the world or living on a green mountain with a blue view,

these are the things that make you the sole person responsible for your own life,

and that's just too much for most people. Because we were raised differently.

It's no accident that I was sick for eight years, dependent on pills and on experts to tell me what to do.

Only when I understood that there's another way, and that health belongs to no one but me, only then did I heal myself.

So I'll keep raising awareness about real, natural healing,

because it's (usually) free.

The purpose of this text is, of course, to open our minds to new approaches, not to present a finished fact about how to deal with cancer.