Cancer and the immune system
Cancer is a disease defined by a number of cells that have become abnormal. Cancer can affect any organ, tissue, or type of cell.
These abnormal cells can become cancerous and form a lump (tumor) or circulate in the blood (leukemia).
Tumors can grow and stay relatively in their place or invade surrounding tissue, or even break away from the tumor and migrate through the blood and lymph to form what we call metastases.
Cancer is a complex disease with so many possibilities for a cell to change shape and behavior.
When a cell deviates from its normal structure and function, our soldiers, the immune cells, recognize it as modified SELF and eliminate it.
Let us remember this difference well: a foreign cell is the non-SELF, a cancerous cell in our body is the modified SELF.
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We can rejoice in our immune system’s incredible efficiency because it constantly eliminates the dysfunctional cells that can become cancerous when it is functioning well.
Problems start when our immune system is dysfunctional and let these cancers cells organize into tumors.
These tumors can take several years to develop until they become detectable in an early diagnosis made by conventional medicine.
For example, a 1 cm tumor already contains around 1 billion cancer cells, yet it is often at that size that it will be detected, not before.
To learn more about how your immune system works and what to do to help it thrive, please visit our free library full of topics like these covering a wide range of topics written by Holistic Natural Health Experts.
