ABSTRACT
Conventional treatments of cancer include surgery (to cut out the evil with a knife), radiation (to destroy it with ionizing rays), and chemotherapy (which uses alkylating agents and other cellular poisons to kill the cancer cells at a rate much higher than the same poisons kill healthy cells). Alternative therapies stress psychophysiological “cleansing,” “purification,” and detoxification and may include dietary restrictions and restructuring, physical exercise, and mental or psychological techniques. Medicinal plants, and medicinal foods that mainly include edible plants, provide a gentler form of treatment in most cases (although they may also include plants with high degrees of toxicity) but differ from simple regimens aimed at detoxification per se in that the medicinal botanicals presumably work because of the anticancer phytochemicals that they contain. Not necessarily, but sometimes also, poisons, these phytochemicals target processes in the cancer cells to prevent them from dividing, migrating, or dedifferentiating. The last refers to the mechanism by which normal cells become free of their normal restraints to stay differentiated with specific functions within the mammalian internal biochemical and cellular “community” and thus can be seen to “run amok” to form cancers. Normally, small cancers are said to form at the microscopic level in mammals all the time, but these are destroyed by the mammal’s immune system, which conducts ongoing “ surveillance” to recognize such neoplasms and then its destructive capacity kills these “foreign” bits of genetic matter that are at the heart of all cancers. Herbal medicines and medicinal foods may thus also work effectively by potentiating the immune system’s capability for both surveillance and destruction, and this constitutes another type of botanical therapy.
