By Robert A. Eslinger, DO, HMD
It is no secret that since President Nixon “declared war on cancer” we have not come very far. To be sure we understand the workings of the cancer cells themselves and in some cases have helped people live slightly longer lives once they are diagnosed with the disease…but!
The big BUT is have we learned how to really extend people’s lives, improved the quality of those lives, and in the end eliminate the disease?
The answer is a resounding…not so much!
There was a study published in 2017 in JAMA Oncology that showed of 62 new oncology drugs approved between 2003 and 2013, only 43 percent offered a survival benefit of three months or longer, 11 percent offered a survival benefit of less than three months, 15 percent had an unknown survival benefit, and 30 percent offered no survival benefit at all!1
There is proof now that cancer is not fundamentally a disease caused by genetic abnormalities. What underlies and drives the genetic changes does not lie in the cell nucleus. The cause of these is a fundamental shift in the metabolism (the cytoplasm) of the cell that causes the genetic changes.2
In fact, the concept that the DNA is masterminding the life of the cell (and all life for that matter) is wrong! The DNA is the map not the brain.
Today the field of “epigenetics” is growing rapidly. What it basically says is that the environment (the composition of the cytoplasm) in the cell is what triggers which genes get “turned on” and which get turned “off.”
It used to be that most of our DNA was considered “junk” DNA. Essentially what that meant was we didn’t know what it does. We know now that we all have a huge number of genes that are just kept inactive until the epigenetics dictates their activation.
So, the big question is what controls the epigenetics? We will get to that.
The most important organelle (tiny organs inside each of our cells) to comprehend when trying to understand the origin of cancer is not the nucleus, but the mitochondria.
The mitochondria are the energy furnaces that produce the energy that our body uses to perform all its functions from the nutrients that we consume in our diets and the air we breathe.
Usually there are thousands of mitochondria inside each of our cells.
Normally the two main nutrients they consume are sugar and oxygen. They are combined and burned chemically to produce all the energy we need.
This is why we breathe and eat. The energy producing reaction inside the mitochondria is called “oxidative phosphorylation”; this will generate ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is the fuel that all our cells run on.
It is called aerobic metabolism and it is how we all get through every single day. By this process our mitochondria can produce 36 molecules of ATP for every molecule of sugar burned.
Our blood carries the oxygen and nutrients to all these cells and carries the waste products from these reactions away from the cells and to the lungs, kidneys, bowel or lymphatic fluid for disposal.
Now we do not have a direct blood vessel into each and every cell. The vessels get smaller and smaller until they reach the smallest ones called the capillaries. From here the oxygen and nutrients diffuse out through the vessel walls and through the interstitial spaces dissolved in the lymphatic fluid.
The waste products and carbon dioxide then diffuse back into the capillaries to be carried away.
If all goes well, we maintain a state of health, and everything works the way it is supposed to.
For a cell to be healthy, it must have mostly
potassium inside and mostly sodium outside the cell membrane.
This is where the importance of normal cytoplasm comes into play. It is said that our bodies contain somewhere between 70-80 percent water, but our cells do not just contain plain water. They have many compounds dissolved in it that change its composition into what has only recently come to be known as the ”fourth phase of water”3 or structured water.
Everyone understands that water exists in our world in the three forms of steam (gas), liquid and solid (ice). What most people don’t understand is that there is a fourth phase that water can take. The best way to understand this phase is to think of it as an orderly lineup of all the water molecules and their electrical charges.
It turns out that all the water inside every one of our cells exists as a gel. This is the true form of the cytoplasm, and it consists of “structured water.” The composition of this gel is what determines its function.
What I mean by that is the normal composition of our cells consists of the electrolytes sodium and potassium among many other compounds. For a cell to be healthy, it must have mostly potassium inside and mostly sodium outside the cell membrane. This “sodium/potassium gradient” is determined by the composition of the gel and the amount of ATP produced by the mitochondria.
One extremely important function of this gradient is that it creates a “halo” of an electric charge around each cell to leave space so the oxygen and nutrients can diffuse through to reach all the cells and they can discharge all their wastes and carbon dioxide back into the capillaries.
If this gradient is not properly maintained the space between the cells can begin to shrink to the point where the cells start to clump together, and this diffusion of products cannot take place properly. Then the cells further away from the capillaries will not be able to get enough oxygen or nutrients.
Every one of our cells has a backup system to produce ATP if it is not able to obtain enough oxygen. Nobel Laureate Otto Warburg, MD, PhD, claimed in his research in the 1920s that if a cell has a drop of more than 30% in its oxygen supply it will switch over to its backup energy production, which consists of a process called glycolysis or anaerobic metabolism.
That is burning sugar without using oxygen. A way of producing energy that is 18 times less efficient than aerobic metabolism. The very hallmark of cancer!
This change into abnormal metabolism can then shift the epigenetics of the cell in such a way as to activate any dormant oncogenes (cancer triggering genes-if they are present) that could then go on to perpetuate the abnormal metabolism and begin to grow a tumor.
The most important research that has been done recently in this area has been performed by Dr. Thomas Seyfried. He has done his work at Boston College and has established that cancer is, first and foremost, a metabolic disease, not an abnormal genetic disease arising in the nucleus.2
Some relatively new information is revealing several very interesting results.
Those of you who have heard of Gerson therapy probably did not know that it was an early attempt to restore the normal sodium/potassium gradient across the cell membranes through dietary means. Most people also don’t know that his diet was not totally vegetarian or even vegan. He recommended smoothies with raw liver in them!
He did have a certain degree of success in curing some cancer cases.
Digitalis is a drug that has been known about and utilized to treat a number of heart conditions for many years. Originally it was developed from an extract of the foxglove plant.
More current research (2009 in American Journal of the Medical Sciences) has shown that it can also block cell proliferation triggering apoptosis (cell death) in different malignant cell lines,
A 2006 article in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment stated “ouabain and related digitalis preparations possess potent anti-breast cancer activity” and called it “a new paradigm for development of anti-breast cancer drugs.”
The underlying theme of this research is that these cardiac glycosides at appropriate doses have a strong effect on restoring the healthy sodium/potassium distribution across the cell membrane. This will begin to return the electrical charge (the “halo”) between the cells back to normal.
Another simple way to promote the restoration of the cell spacing back towards normal is the regular consumption of structured water.
This is where the fourth phase of water comes in to play.
“Normal” or “Regular” water consists of a liquid made up of molecules of water (a polar molecule with a positively and a negatively charged end) bonding with each other in a very random pattern. This makes it harder for it to penetrate through the cell membrane.
Victor Schauberger was an amateur engineer in the late 19th and early 20th century in Austria who figured out that much of the power in vortexes (whirlpools) comes from their ability to line up the molecules in such a way that they create structured water.
This structure is made using principles of “Magnetohydrodynamics.” It is applied to the water using a simple inexpensive apparatus that creates a vortex and uses a magnetic field. It changes the structure of the water so that it has a much easier time penetrating the cell membrane and helping restore the proper sodium/potassium gradient.
This allows for greater cellular communication, intracellular water movement, enzyme function, cleansing of the cells, efficient transport of nutrients into (and waste products out of) the cells, greater stabilization, superior energy flow, electrical communication between cells and many other metabolic reactions.
I am not saying this information offers anywhere near a magical solution to a very dreadful disease. It does however offer some ideas about new areas of research that need to be explored in greater detail.
References
- Cowan T. Cancer and the New Biology of Water. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2019.
- Seyfried T. Cancer as a Metabolic Disease-On the Origin, Management and Prevention of Cancer. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; Hoboken, New Jersey: 2012.
- Pollack G. The Fourth Phase of Water-Beyond Solid, Liquid, Vapor, Ebner and Sons Publishers; Seattle, Washington: 2013.
Robert A. Eslinger, DO, HMD, has been practicing medicine for 45 years. After completing his education and training in 1978, he joined the US Public Health Service. He was stationed, as the medical director, in a clinic located on an Indian reservation 70 miles from the nearest hospital in Neah Bay, Washington. After about two months, he started noticing that much of what he was taught in his conventional medical training just wasn’t working or at least it wasn’t working as well as he wanted it to. Then he met and started training with one of the local tribal medicine women and learning about herbs, supplements, homeopathy, and nutrition. In 2002 he passed his boards to receive the HMD (Homeopathic Medical Doctor) in the state of Nevada. He is currently licensed to practice medicine in Idaho, California and Nevada and certified in family practice by the American College of Osteopathic Family Practitioners. A Fellow of the American Association of Integrative Medicine and a founding member of the International Organization of Integrative Cancer Physicians. he is now the owner/medical director of Reno Integrative Medical Center in Reno, Nevada.