A New Alternative Cancer Treatment Successfully Fights Fire with Fire

There's something strange happening in the world of cancer treatment these days. The American Cancer Society is beginning to find that there are fewer people dying of cancer each year than the year before. Cancer related death rates are falling at 2% a year. When women are diagnosed with breast cancer, they actually live so long after it that when they die, it's through old age and not cancer. A great deal of credit for these figures can go to how the government and nonprofits have done spectacular work spreading word about what needs to be done to prevent cancer - like giving up smoking. But a great deal of attention is now focused on how the success can in large part be attributed to an alternative cancer treatment that has come up recently.

The reason cancer is so hard to battle is that it is an evolutionary process that brings it about. Cancer is a kind of accelerated evolutionary process. When cancer happens, it is in fact the effect of a cell of the body suddenly deciding to just evolve on its own, trying all kinds of new mutant genetic combinations. The cell rapidly multiplies, trying out all kinds of new stuff, going over in a few months, what it would take thousands of years for natural selection and evolution to achieve. When you try to fix the problem with a drug, it doesn't kill all of your cancer cells. You have all kinds of cells with varying genetic makeup. Some of them will be resistant to the drug and some of them won't. What happens when you start out on a new drug is, it kills off all the mutant cells that are unable to resist the drug. You usually feel better and believe the drug is working. The cells that have the genetic makeup to resist the drug take a few days to regroup and come back with a vengeance. This is why the best that cancer drugs often do is to allow patients to live a bit longer. They just buy you a little time.

The new alternative cancer treatment that scientists are trying out now tries to harness the natural selection process that cancer uses so as to be able to fight it on an equal footing. The immune system is the only part of the body that uses natural selection with the kind of rapidness that cancer uses. The immune system is designed to respond to microbes attacking the body by quickly designing new antibodies one after the other. Scientists are trying out alternative cancer treatment that uses the immune system against cancer. It's called immunotherapy.

They call immunotherapy cancer treatment a kind of cancer vaccine. The doctor takes a sampling of your immune cells and trains them, much like you would train a dog to go after a particular scent, to attack your cancer cells. He then puts those trained in cells back into your body. And then he says "Go get 'em, boy!". They multiply and successfully wipe the cancer out. At least that's what happens in theory. In practice, it doesn't work that well. But it's a promising new hope for the future.