5 Ways to Prevent and Treat Cancer

Today’s house call focuses on a topic very personal to me.

“Mark, what would you do if you were diagnosed with cancer?” a friend recently asked. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. I’ve sadly seen a lot of cancer in my life, both with my own family and with patients.

The problem is that conventional medicine protocols have a lot wrong when it comes to cancer. We are good at cutting it, burning it and poisoning it with surgery, radiation and drugs, but many doctors fail to treat the cause of the cancer.

We can enhance immune function and surveillance through dietary and lifestyle changes, as well as nutrient and phytonutrient therapies. Photo credit: Shutterstock

You see, conventional medicine focuses on naming diseases based on geography, body location and specialty, instead of by the cause, mechanism, or pathway involved.

Doctors say you have liver, kidney, brain, or heart disease, but this approach to naming disease tells you nothing about the cause.

Instead of asking what disease you have and what drug should be used to treat it, we must ask why the disease has occurred. What are the underlying causes that lead to illness?

Modern medicine approaches illness like a mechanic trying to diagnose what’s wrong with your car by listening to the noises it makes and never looking inside to see what’s going on. Functional Medicine allows us to look under the hood. It gives us a method for identifying the conditions in which disease thrives and shows us how to begin changing those conditions.

A Functional Medicine Approach to Cancer

Functional Medicine empowers patients and practitioners to achieve the highest expression of health by working collaboratively to address the root causes of disease. It is an emerging, personalized model of diagnosis and treatment that better addresses the need to prevent and manage chronic disease. In a word, it is the medicine of why, not what.

Functional Medicine doctors are like soil farmers. They create a healthy soil, so pests can’t come and weeds can’t flourish. A healthy soil means disease can’t take hold.

So with cancer, a Functional Medicine practitioner would say that yes, we still need radiation and other conventional approaches, but what else can we do? How can we properly cultivate a healthy soil?

Cancer results because of in an imbalance in the system. So many people are walking around with tumors and don’t know it. We can do something to prevent them from growing by maintaining a healthy soil.

Instead of dividing everything into diseases and labels, emerging science points to a different way of thinking about diseases. Rather than divide the body into organs, Functional Medicine approaches disease as a systemic problem and we have to treat the system, not the symptom; the cause, not the disease. This completely redefines the whole notion of disease. The landscape of illness is changing.