Infections And Cancer-You Won't Believe How They're Connected!

PatrickQuillin, PhD, RD, CNS: It's a very good question. We know that somecancersare caused by infections. Much of the stomach cancer is caused by helicalbacteria pylori. It's a pathogen in the stomach, and when it becomesinvasive, it can cause cancer. We know that cervical cancer can be caused bysome Chlamydia organisms. We know that HIV, human immunodeficiencyvirus, can cause a brain cancer or lymphoma. We know infectiousorganisms can cause cancer. The only question is, how often. Is it 100percent of cancers? Is it 10 percent? We don't know. And we don't reallyresearch that, because instead of asking the question, "Why did this cancerend up here?" The bulk of our research, the National Institutes of Health,spends roughly 80 billion dollars of US dollars to try to find out:  How canwe clobber this thing? We never ask, "How did it get there?" Can we changeits mind? Can we reverse cancer?

And so,is cancer an infection? Sometimes, yes. We don't know how often.  And doesthat change our approach to it? This is where we start looking at...Louis Pasteur spent decades trying to pasteurize the planet Earth.  "Pasteurize,"of course, means, "Let's cook it. Let's kill them." You take milk,it's got some bacteria. If we cook it, we get rid of the bacteria. Is that agood thing? Maybe not always. But he found on his deathbed, he said, "Ihave been wrong. It is not the germ, it is the terrain." And so, whether it's acancer cell or an infectious organism, the most important thing is theterrain, which is our body. And that's where nutrition, psychoneuroimmunology,detoxifying, and these other integrative fields play aninvaluable role in changing the terrain.