From the first moment
my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from
the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer
seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did
little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known
reason, I started this blog…
Every month, I’ll be
highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from
different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into
understandable English and share them with you. Today: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141020121408.htm
This article and an advertisement running on the same page
of the Science Daily website gave me pause to consider...
When my wife was first diagnosed with breast cancer three
years and seven months ago, the initial horror was soon replaced by the overwhelming
necessity to decide (or so it seemed) EVERYTHING. We were caught in a flood of
queries and opinions and counter-opinions on everything from how many days the
victim should take off from work and how many days the caregiver should take
off from work, to asking, “How are we going to...” and then having to find an
answer (“How are you going to shower with 5 drainage tubes in your chest wall...”
– “Oh! You have to do sponge baths until the tubes are all out...”)
After the initial surgeries, then came the decision about
chemotherapy. Drowning in a sea of opinion, one of them involved a friend who
pressed my wife to go the “natural route” of various and sundry megavitamins,
etc. One of those minerals/vitamins, of course, is selenium.
What IS selenium?
Most simply, it is element number 34 on the Periodic Table
of the Elements. You don’t find selenium laying around on the ground – it’s
typically part of the ore we get copper from. After the copper ore is crush and
treated to get the copper out, selenium remains, though it’s locked up the
another element called sulfur. Mostly used today in making glass, agricultural
fungicide, and as a color in paints, it forms salts that are both extremely
toxic in large amounts – and absolutely essential to all animals on Earth in
TRACE amounts. This includes humans.
So – we need it; it helps us stay alive...so why not just
give breast cancer patients selenium pills?
Because it’s toxic – and even thought the ADVERTISING on the
page (“Fight Cancer With Rawfood – Learn how raw foods help fight cancer”)
suggests that eating right will help you defeat your cancer! – you can’t just
run around eating selenium. The fact is that this advertiser is clearly capitalizing
on possibility that the only two things you read in the article are selenium –
and the ad directly below with the words “raw food” made into one MAGIC word, “Rawfood”...
As you can tell, this really bugs me – because the article
and the research in it has nothing to do with eating OR with food! “Selenium,
when attached to a monoclonal antibody [an identical twin cell grown from
another, parent cell that is effective against cancer] presently used to treat
breast cancer, has shown greater success in destroying cancer cells in a
patient who has developed resistance to the chemotherapy...” is what the
article is talking about!
There is nothing in the research about “if you eat Raw Food”...it’s
about attaching selenium atoms to monoclonal antibodies – what you see in the
illustration to the left! You can’t attach selenium to a monoclonal antibody
(made by humans in a medical research lab) by eating raw foods any more than you
can create gasoline for your car by grinding charcoal briquettes to dust and then
running over them with a steam roller.
So the article is saying, quite clearly, that when selenium
is added to monoclonal antibodies ALREADY being used to treat breast cancer and
who become resistant to the therapy, attaching selenium atoms to the monoclonal
ramps up the effectiveness of the treatment by sneaking past the cancer cell’s
defenses.
And THAT’S good news!
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