When the Body Says No

by Gabor Maté

It is customary to conceive of cancer as an invader against whom the body—like a country under foreign attack—must wage war. Such a view, while perhaps comforting in its simplicity, is a distortion of reality. First, even when there is an external carcinogen like tobacco, the cancer itself is partially an outcome of internal processes gone wrong. And, of course, for most cancers there is no such identified carcinogen. Second, it is the internal environment, locally and throughout the entire organism, that plays the major role in deciding whether the malignancy will flourish or be eliminated. The malignant transformation of normal cells, in other words, is a process determined by many factors that have at least as much to do with the biopsychosocial state of the organism as with the type of cancer itself. Once a cancer reaches the stage where its cell surfaces display molecules different from the normal body proteins, it ought to be destroyed by immune responses of many different kinds. T-cells should attack it with noxious chemicals; antibodies should be formed against it; specialized blood cells should chew it up. Under conditions of chronic stress, the immune system may become either too confused to recognize the mutated cell clones that form the cancer or too debilitated to mount an effective attack against them.