To understand fully the implications of these suggestions, it is best to review a few basic facts about cancer.
Cancer cells are not necessarily powerful, dominant engines of destruction. They may be thought of as weak, confused, abnormal cells, which appear in all of our bodies from time to time. Their primary abnormality is that they continue to divide and subdivide long after a normal cell would have stopped. If they continue unchecked, they form a continuously growing clump of cells called a tumor , which, when it becomes large enough, will interfere with the performance of nearby organs.
If these abnormal cells are of the type that can grow only at the place of origin, they form a benign (non-cancerous) tumor that can usually be surgically removed. If they are of the type that can travel and spread to other parts of the body, the illness is categorized as one of the more than 200 illnesses called cancer.
One theory holds that although cancer cells may appear in everyone's body from time to time, all of us do not develop cancer because our immune systems are strong enough to destroy the cancer cells as they appear. That's what the immune system is for. According to this theory, then, for cancer to develop the cancer cell must appear and the immune system must be weak enough not to be able to handle it.
Recovery and the Immune System But how important is the immune system to someone who already has cancer? What part can it play in the fight for recovery? Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that the immune system had no part to play in the fight. That wisdom said that the only way to fight cancer was to try to remove the cancer cells from the body surgically or to kill them with chemicals or radiation.
