Posts Tagged ‘social contact’

Reinventing cancer treatment will bring about enhanced health. Identifying what really works for this condition, you have to look no further than your lifestyle. Cancer may be a wake up call that something in your life isn’t working.

Study

A study in which mice were given larger living quarters, more playmates, lots of toys, and an interactive environment shrunk their tumors.

This was reported in an issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication. The evidence showed that cancer in treatable by providing an enriched environment, and a strong social network.

Emotional Health

If social connections and emotional state play a role in the formation and remission of cancer, the allopathic treatments are way out of line.

Geneticist Professor Matthew During from The Ohio State University offers powerful new evidence that social connections and an individual’s mental state may play a role in cancer.

This makes sense, since our thoughts produce chemicals that have a profound influence on our health.

Observations

These are some observations that were made in the Lab:

What was found is that if you take mice from a nice environment and put them into an even better one their cancers regressed.

Laboratory animals are usually housed in groups of five or so, and are given all the food they want and get to play the whole day.

In this case they were placed in an enriched environment with 15-20 playmates. Then they are provided with more space, toys, and things to do. Their tumors shrunk when they were placed in these new living conditions.

The researches found the animals’ interaction with the environment had a profound influence on the growth of the cancer. The effect was more profound than they thought possible.

We may not be mice, but we all know mind over matter, and the placebo effect. All our body chemistry is influenced by what we eat, think, feel, and our environment.

When During and his colleague Lei Cao placed mice with cancer in that enriched environment, the animals tumor mass shrunk by 77 percent and the volume by 44 percent. On top of that five percent of mice that were given cancer showed no sign of the disease after only three weeks in their new home.

Outside the lab alternative practitioners have seen the exact same things in patients. They have seen cancers disappear when people got rid of what they didn’t want and started doing what made them feel good.

Cancer is Tied to General Well-Being

Cancer is tied to general well-being. It shows that you can’t look at a disease without looking at the whole person. The surgery, chemo, and radiotherapy hasn’t worked well for all the above reasons. You have given people what they don’t want. Making someone feel sick to get better makes no sense.

There has to be a new perception of disease, one where environment counts. Mice may not be humans, but somehow this make sense. If medicine was logical we would be doing everything differently.

Humans are social Animals

Mice are social, and so are humans. This could be another important piece to the puzzle. If fact for humans it is so important that it influences lifespan.

People who have good social ties are shown t o survive longer. This is important in the age of computers, television, and stressed filled work days.

It can be it takes a village to raise a child, and it also takes a village to help you attain a long healthy life. Perhaps, isolation with a combination of toxic treatment isn’t the answer to cancer.

The facts are that low social interaction harms you as much as some nasty habits such as alcoholism, smoking, and not exercising. It is more dangerous than obesity according to some studies.

One of the features of a cancer diagnosis is people may avoid you.. Friends fall away, when they are needed the most. Now, it seems that it helps the patient and the people that keep the friendship strong. Social ties and optimism turn on the longevity genes.

What This Means

What this means is we have been looking in the wrong places for a magic bullet. A comprehensive look at people’s lifestyle is unprecedented. Looking for dysfunction in a cancer’s patient’s life may provide a clue to this condition. Neutralizing the effects of some harmful thoughts is important. You are what you eat, think, believe, and do.

The environment that you are surrounded by has a huge impact on your life. Cancer may just be a sign that things in your life are not working well for you. The best defense is all around you. Your thoughts monopolize and influenced your life.

Thoughts release hormones that impact our health; this means we have to rethink how we approach cancer. What if it isn’t a sentence, but a wake up call?  We need to view this as an opportunity to change our life.

Lifestyle is the answer to stress. Lifestyle is more than just the food you eat, though that is a big part of the picture. Most alternative physicians are aware that body, mind, and spirit are a package deal when it comes to overall health status.

Keys To Health

Optimal performance is the sum total of nutrition, activity, optimism, and mood. Everything listed for health effects one’s mood. From emotional eating to isolation are indicators of overall survival abilities. All these actions demonstrate immune-modulating capabilities.

 Lethal Dangers

Human studies validate the benefits of social contact. Studies have shown that socially isolated female rats develop a larger number of more aggressive tumors than rats living in a social group. This is according to researchers at Yale University and the University of Chicago.

The dramatic increase in mammary tumors among isolated Norway rats – which, like humans, are a highly social species-illustrates how loneliness can be deadly, the authors report in findings to be published the week of December 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There is a growing interest in relationships between the environment, emotion and disease. This study offers insight into how the social world gets under the skin,” said Gretchen Hermes, first author of the paper and a resident in the Neurosciences Research Training Program in the Yale Department of Psychiatry.

 Stress

Isolation seems to bring with it a stress reaction. Stress is linked to the activation of cancer-promoting genes. Social isolation triggers fear and anxiety. What the study doesn’t do is tie stress to diet. A good diet with optimal nutrition mitigates dangerous stimulus that disrupt the body’s normal biological and psychological equilibrium.

The way the body handles stress is key to the effect it will have. Stress is a fact of life in these times. Not only is the pace of life frantic, but social isolation is more prevalent. The pressures are exacerbated when other factors such as poor health are part of the equation.

A Better Way

Stress can also cause heart rate and blood pressure to increase. There are a number of things that send people to the doctor’s office, which are stress related. You need good cellular energy to deal with something as energy draining as stress. Stress causes a deficit in mitochondrial energy.

Exercise is a stress modifier, but much less publicized is the fact that certain vitamins, minerals are stress busters and mood enhancers. Nutritional strategies are key, and also are other strategies. Overlooked and just as important is something called the biology of belief.

Health, by definition, is the sine qua non (condition) of everything else. It’s all in your head has meaning. Reality is from the Inside out, it’s all in your mind is the truth. It boils down to your interpretation of the world, and that becomes your view. How you experience something is the sum total of what you were taught, past experiences, and your health status.

Meditation, prayer, social interaction will all define your lifestyle, as well as nutrition and exercise. When using rats for models, these are the variables that can’t be part of the equation. However, it shows that isolated rats developed 84 times the amount of tumors as those living in groups. These were also faster spreading than the tumors of the social animals, and were of a larger size.

Environment, Emotion and Disease

To disregard the lifestyle components that affect every aspect of our lives is a formula for disaster. Our environment is more problematic. Emotional health is the ability to cope with the stresses of life. This is where the environment plays a key role. The internal environment must be healthy enough to protect one from the effects of stress from the outside.

Lifestyle is the sum total of nutritional status, activity level, belief system, and outlook. Rats are gregarious and social, and so are humans. So when it comes to health it is the whole package, which is the whole as in holistic. Turning to modern medicine will not get you the answer you need. We are not parts, and systems, we are a whole entity, that needs all parts operational.