How can cancer just dissapear?!?!

[Ganoderma]

So a member of the family, late 80's, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer 1-2 years ago. really bad, all though the abdomen...up to the stomach and lungs (no idea how it got so huge without being detected!!!! but thats a bit of a hot spot in the family to say the least!)

she did chemo, despite my pleading not too, and after the first run they stopped as they figure it would likely kill her....so that was that.

She eventually stopped taking all meds except pain killers and a few things to help keep food down and vitamins etc. nothing for the cancer really, only the side affects. she was placed into the care area where they treat people really nice before dieing (we tried not to let her know that!). so we all took on the make it worth while while we still have her. so aside form the obvious pain, she was relatively upbeat and positive. she was eventually taken out of there cause she was not dieing, and she was put into a nursing home, but she can walk and take care of herself...just basically a place where she doesnt need to clean, and has people to help her with her meds or if she has a sick spell kind of place.

now i am out of country so i can only call her on the phone, but the family back in canada are taking her out to family camps, vacations to places she has always LOVED and makes her truly happy, with the people she truly loves...even the relatives that live far away they are making the trips to see because she is so happy to see them (after 20 years etc).

anyway she was really bad for a while last year. i had been reading a lot of stuff on reishi mushrooms at the time and gave that route a shot. and seeing how it has been studied and show to help the immune system fight cancer i tried to get her to drink as much. that doctor was more open minded and we asked him if its ok, and he said if anything, it will get more liquids in her....it cant hurt...so we did.

now i am not saying its the mushroom, the true happiness, prayers (i am not religious but the rest of the fam is and prays etc) or what....but this month the doc calls and says

the cancer is gone

huh?!?!

what do you mean gone???

very shocked!!!^^^

It not there anymore

now i know i am jumping the gun, cause as far as my mind can stretch (and i have stretched it long distances lol) i just cannot comprehend cancer, a cancer that is through 1/3 of her body, just dissapearing. now they have only done a blood screening and an x-ray....which makes me even more skeptical...i mean, impossible. she is scheduled for a cat scan soon which they say will give the full picture.


now my question, is this possible? i mean i hope to anything it is and the whole family is grinning ear to ear with tears down their face, but i think its a bit of false hope....is it possible? has it happened?


excuse the rather non-scientific aspect of my post....not that i am ever that scientific....but i am still in shock.

[CraigD]

Glad to hear of you family member’s recovery, Ganoderma.

Originally Posted by Ganoderma

now my question, is this possible? i mean i hope to anything it is and the whole family is grinning ear to ear with tears down their face, but i think its a bit of false hope....is it possible? has it happened?

Spontaneous remission – cancer just disappearing, unexpectedly and without clear explanation – is a documented occurrence, and certainly possible. To be able to speculate as to precisely how this happens, you need a fairly deep understanding of how cells work, what cancer is, and the many ways that cells deal with cancer. Even those who understand this most deeply, such as oncologists and microbiologists, don’t understand it entirely.

At a shallow level, however, we can summarize by noting that cancer is a class of diseases in which cells own internal machinery – their nuclear DNA and the many metabolic systems that interact with it – malfunctions and begins reproducing unusual numbers of copies of their abnormal selves, interfering with the function of normal cells in important organs and tissues.

Our bodies have many mechanisms for detecting and curing cancer, so that we’re rarely aware when it occurs on a small scale. Only when these natural mechanism fail do we say we have cancer, and take steps to treat it.

We can roughly categorize these self-curing systems as:

• The cells’ own DNA-maintaining “factories” detecting and repairing the defective, mutated DNA sections causing the cancer
• The cells’, on its own or responding to special immune cell messages, “committing suicide” (a process usually referred to by the literally flowery term apoptosis) to prevent its continued reproduction and spread of the cancer
• The cells programmed failure due to excessive reproduction – know as senescence, literally “getting old”. Telomeres appear to have something to do with this, and the worst, most successful cancers usually have tricks that allow them to re-lengthen their host cells’ telomeres, becoming effectively immortal.

Like most diseases, our bodies become inoculated – learn from exposure – how to recognize and control cancer, so it’s possible to create vaccines that greatly reduce the chance of getting certain cancers. Currently, there are only a few such vaccines, HPV vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, being the best known.

Like most diseases, if our bodies are fatigued due to worry or other illness, their ability to cure themselves of cancer may be reduced. Our bodies naturally encourage us to relieve stress when this occurs, via the “mandatory downtime” we call “being sick”, but we can enhance this by intentionally reducing stress.

When our bodies natural defenses fail, medicine, such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy, can assist them. Recovering from cancer that progresses to the severity of being diagnosed and treated is due to the combination of built-in defenses and external therapies, so it’s inaccurate to say one or the other is responsible for a “cure”.

i mean i hope to anything it is and the whole family is grinning ear to ear with tears down their face, but i think its a bit of false hope....is it possible? has it happened?

I understand this concern, but recommend you take any good news as good news, and not worry overmuch that your relative’s recovery may not be permanent. Human life itself is (or at least appears to have been to date) not permanent, and for someone in her late 80s, a few additional months or years of high-quality, pain-free life is about as much as anybody, cancer or not, can reasonably hope for.

You should, and I’m sure your relative’s medical caregivers will encourage you to, monitor her for signs of the return of cancer. However, not even an expert with all of the pertinent medical history can predict with certainty if it will or not, just as they can’t predict with certainty if a young person will live to a good old age or not.

We should all, IMHO, be glad for the lifetime we get.

[Turtle]

perhaps epigentic changes play a role? just chanced on this program the other night and i've said all i know after just one watch. here's the horse's mouth.


NOVA | Ghost in Your Genes | Epigenetic Therapy | PBS

[HydrogenBond]

Are there any virus that target cancer cells? The hypotheticals of this idea would be to have a virus compete for the DNA machinery of the cancer cells, making the cancer cells sick, so they can't replicate at the same rate. The immune system is then able to target the composite, due to the virus paper trail (viral output).

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Turtle

perhaps epigentic changes play a role?

Given that most cancer is caused by something other than the normal expression genes in nuclear DNA, it is in itself practically by definition a epigenetic change, I’d say.

Cancer has a lot of causes. I suspect the malfunctioning of normal epigenetic processes contribute in many cases.

Originally Posted by HydrogenBond

Are there any virus that target cancer cells? The hypotheticals of this idea would be to have a virus compete for the DNA machinery of the cancer cells, making the cancer cells sick, so they can't replicate at the same rate. The immune system is then able to target the composite, due to the virus paper trail (viral output).

I’ve never heard or read of such a thing. Given the huge amount of research into cancer treatments occurring all the time worldwide, and how well its organized and published, I suspect this means its rare to nonexistent as a naturally occurring prophylaxis, but when it comes to biology and medicine, it’s unwise to label anything impossible, especially if we’re considering the possibility of artificially engineered therapeutic viruses.

It would be challenging, though, as we’re talking about making a virus – far from the most complex and capable class of players in the biological world – perform a trick with which the complex and highly evolved to the purpose immune system has difficulty – recognize and cancerous cell.

It’s pretty much a standard of medical science fiction that tiny robots – “nanites”, in conventional terms – might be able to do what you describe. Such medical technology is, however, barely in its infancy yet.

Viruses are well know to cause cancer, a well known one being the human papillomavius (HPV).

A key thing to understand about cancer is that it’s a catch-all descriptive term for essentially any dangerous disease in which an organism’s cells reproduce in a runaway manner. As such, it has many very different causes, is controlled by many natural mechanisms, and can be medically treated in many ways. Thus, when we speak of a cause of cure for cancer in the singular, we’re obscuring the fact that we’re talking about many fundamentally dissimilar diseases with many causes and potential cures.

[pamela]

she was relatively upbeat and positive

vacations to places she has always LOVED and makes her truly happy, with the people she truly loves...even the relatives that live far away they are making the trips to see because she is so happy to see them

i cant help but think that her being happy may have something to do with this.When the body is happy the thymus opens and when it is sad or depressed, it shrivels like a raisin.The thymus is a an endocrine gland that produces t lymphocytes.This of course is the base camp for the soldiers to go out and rally to fight against infection.In the elderly, its function has greatly dimished but still serves to boot the immune system. So maybe her happiness and of course this is speculation, has jumpstarted or further opened the processing center in the thymus and greatly improved the immune system to rally against the cancer

[Boerseun]

Hi, Ganoderma.

I'm glad things worked out so well. When it comes to cancer, after all known treatments have been applied, all bets are normally off.

Coincidentally, I've had the same experience over the last year with my aunt. She had cancer in the early '80s, and had to have a double mastectomy. She was in the all-clear until about two years ago, when the cancer came back with a vengeance. I'm not too sure of the specifics, whether it was remaining cells that just came out of "hibernating" for 20+ years (I really don't know much about the specifics of cancer) or if it was new malignant cells having no connection at all with her previous case. But nonetheless, she was totally gone, the cancer having spread throughout her abdomen. So, she went for chemo, and after chemo went for a flickergram (I don't know if that's the right term, but that's what we call it over here) and the doctors all agreed that she had only about three months on the outside. She made her peace with it. The whole family did. It was not nice. Very depressing, and I'm still not too sure how to handle situations like that.

Then, the Third World Medical Service took over: She had to go back a month later for another scan. All the doctors were in agreement that the chemo did not work. They gave her about three months on the outside. She had to go back again, and then her files got lost. They sent her back to repeat the whole process from the word go, because according to their records, she had tonsilitis. And somehow her name is not Marlene Keulder anymore, but Sophia Shabangu. It was chaos. There was no way to recover her file that included her entire treatment history. She basically gave up and went home to die. Six months later she realised that she should've been dead three months ago. So we took her to a private clinic and started the whole procedure again. And the docs found not a single cancer cell. Keep in mind that the cancer was still around and growing after her chemo bout.

I suppose the answer lies in what cancer is. At a cellular level, it's merely a malfuntion. DNA polymerase runs up and down your DNA strands to ensure fidelity in DNA replication. But every now and then they screw it up. That's not necesarrliy a bad thing, because it does supply future generation with mutations that the environment can select from. But where and how cancerous cells mutate is unpredictable. Liver cancer is only called liver cancer because that's where it's growing. But the DNA replication malfunctions that lead to liver cancer in two individuals will not necessarily result in two identical mutations. They just happen to both be in the liver.

Thus, as to HydrogenBond's "Are there any virus that target cancer cells? The hypotheticals of this idea would be to have a virus compete for the DNA machinery of the cancer cells, making the cancer cells sick, so they can't replicate at the same rate.", the answer (in my cancer-illiterate mind, at least) is definitely "No". A virus evolves with the host cell over many years in order to subvert the cell's evolving defences. Because the specific mutation in cancer cells are unpredictable, a virus cannot evolve to discern between cancerous and healthy cells. I am sure that a cure for cancer lies somewhere in the future, and it might be even that if the mutated section of DNA can be identified, a virus might very well be "programmed" to target those cells exclusively, but that will have to be done on an individual case-by-case basis. But I suppose a more effective and universally applicable solution might be to investigate why the DNA polymerase fails in the first place, and prevent that. I suppose if a solution to that can be found, then a "cancer innoculation" might be possible - but it will be preventative, and not actual treatment after the fact.

[freeztar]

Can viruses be used to combat cancer?
Yes!

Viral vector - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Virus Linked To Colds May Cure Cancer, Scientists Say - The New York Times

Science fiction? Aerosol delivery of an engineered virus halts lung cancer progression in mice

[Ganoderma]

Now thats some pretty far out stuff! right from the pages of a classy sci fi book. amazing what is being done, or thought of being done.


on a side note, she went for her CAT, waiting on results....fingers crossed. I also decided to fly back next month to visit and get the low down on everything in person.

[Michaelangelica]

If you can watch this documentary , it may give you a few suggestions. Or it may answer your question.
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