Women and Cancer

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Dr. Kathy Maupin and Brett Newcomb discuss the the causes and treatment options for cancer in women.

This week Brett Newcomb and I are talking about women and cancer. It is a word that is scary for most people because they hear it and immediately associate it with death. In reality, however, most people who get cancer in this day and age do not die from it, as the survivability rates for all forms of cancer are improving. It can still be deadly, but it does not have to be. The reason we are talking about it is because of its fear factor when talking about women’s health; especially in the areas of Breast, Ovarian and Uterine Cancers.

All of our cells have a finite number of times they can multiply, and once they hit that limit, they die off naturally. A cancer is a cell that loses its ability to die, and so continues to multiply and divide past what it’s natural limit should have been at. Cancer cells change their DNA marginally and continue to replicate. They grow and replicate so fast that our immune systems cannot destroy them. As we age, we lose our ability to make killer T cells that can find and attack cancer cells. We lose these killer T cells because we lose our hormones that produce them.

There are several habits that decrease our immune system. The most common of which is smoking. Smoking damages cells all over your body, not just in your lungs. It suppresses your immune system with nicotine and carbon monoxide. Smoking can also limit your oxygen intake and thereby limit your free radicals, limiting the amount of T cells available to help the immune system. The risk of cancer from smoking is the simplest risk to avoid. All you have to do is to quit smoking!

The second habit to avoid in order to help our immune system has to do with the way we eat. We need to avoid unnatural sprays and pesticides by washing our food, by eating whole foods, and by avoiding preservatives and salt.

Other auto immune diseases are impacted by a third various cases of inflammation (swelling.) Conditions such as Lupus, Psoriasis, Multiple Sclerosis, and Rheumatoid Arthritis are all diseases of inflammation. Inflammation causes all of the areas in your body that depend on your white blood cells to fight foreign objects or tissue to occupy those white blood cells. However, these cells start attacking your own healthy tissue that is swelling and reddening due to the inflammation. When this happens, the T cells are occupied with fighting your own body instead of fighting the cancerous cells elsewhere.

Replacing hormones can help prevent inflammation, reduce auto immune diseases, and help generate the T cells that will fight cancer and other attacks on the immune system. These hormones are not known to cause any cancers, although if you get cancer then we usually take you off of estrogen. That is because the estrogen can mutate and change, so we monitor it.

At BioBalance Health, we monitor the latest in research that deals with issues of breast, ovarian and uterine cancers. We want to help women stay healthy, and we believe that we can best do that by replacing their lost hormones and by helping them live active and healthy lives, with good nutritional habits and healthy lungs.

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