Being diagnosed with a cancer mass is the result of something about your mental and physical health being wrecked. Diagnosis is not in any way, a death knell, but it is a wake-up call, telling you that there are other deeper issues taking you away from a potential ‘sweeter path’ that you could be living. If doctors really understood the ecology of this disease process they would know that you cannot beat this illness by simply amputating a part of the body, without treating the disrupting lifestyle factors that caused the disease in the first place—or the disease will simply re-emerge in a different form, in a different part of the body. I’m not the first person to think this way. There have been many before me who have attempted to influence the powers of our civil systems that guide the health of our populations, and yet are blind to the disrupting influences of civil living to certain individuals.
For example, Dr. Stanislas Tanchou, a physician, and one of Napoleon’s surgeons, gave a lecture to the Paris medical society in 1842 at the time when France was a world leader of science and medicine. This was an era of scientific focus to support the political intention for Europeans to conquer and civilize the world to make it safer for Christianity. Against this political culture, Tanchou in his lecture claimed he could predict the exact incidence of cancer in all the major European cities over the next fifty years, and it was mostly dependent on the percentage of grains in an individual’s diet.
Tanchou’s recorded predictions proved true—a certain percentage of people in Berlin fell to cancer, a different percentage for Munich, and so on. This set off a major outrage across the civilised world, since the great mission of this European age had been to civilise every inch of the globe. Here was somebody in the centre of civilisation who declared that uncivilised people following a more indigenous hunter-gatherer diet and lifestyle, were free of cancer. Probably nothing is more damning about the extreme influences of our civilised lifestyles than the fact that it is the harbinger of cancer to those who fail to thrive in its structure.
Civilization started about twelve thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The civilising process can be thought of as the process of controlling certain resources of nature in order to benefit one particular group of people over another. Its relative complexity is dependent on population density and expansionism. It is characterised by urban development, monumental structures, social stratification, specialisation of labour, recorded laws, taxation, and a separation from and domination over, nature. It is directed by a cultural elite minority, who control centralised power to ensure their supremacy, by forcing other people with lesser authority, to be followers of their culturally ingrained ideologies of progress.
There have been many claims by researchers that cancer masses were virtually unknown in hunter-gatherer clans. For example, Harvard anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson lived with Inuit peoples for 10 winters (1906-1918), without seeing a single case of cancer (http://uudb.org/articles/vilhjalmurstefansson.html). While there, Stefansson shared the typical Eskimo diet of almost-raw fish and blubber, supplemented by an occasional chunk of meat. There were no carbohydrate vegetables (sugar based), no fruits, no grains, and no nuts/seeds. He and the Eskimos were lean and active and cancer free.
Unfortunately as typically occurs following first contact between technological people and hunter-gatherers, the material advantages of civilised living are alluring. By the late 1920s, these Eskimos began to adopt a Western lifestyle and diet—and they started getting cancer, The first recorded case of the death of one of these Eskimo’s (from liver cancer) occurred in early 1933 with a second Eskimo death from colon cancer in the same year. Since then, cancer death rates have steadily risen in these people to parallel civilised records of cancer. Stefansson noted this in his 1960 report: ‘Cancer: A Disease of Civilization?’ (https://www.amazon.com/Cancer-disease-civilization-anthropological-historical/dp/B0007DXZQG).
Another well known example is that from the diaries of the Nobel laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who founded a hospital at Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa in 1913, and except for relatively short periods of time, spent his life maintaining this hospital for nearly half a century. During this time he reported no occurrence of cancer among the people who ate their ancestral paleolithic diets and expressed a way of life that nurtured contribution equally to themselves and to those clan peoples with whom they connected as a reflection of themselves.
While there are many, other examples, I have my own observations of health challenges while living with traditional and semi-traditional aborigines of the Wik-speaking aboriginal people in Cape York Peninsula during the 1970s, Those who rejected the mission life offered at the Archer River Mission established at Aurukun in the early 1900s (https://www.qld.gov.au/atsi/cultural-awareness-heritage-arts/community-histories-aurukun/) and had maintained their traditional eating and cultural lifestyles, were far more mentally and physically healthy, than those who took up the civilised lifestyle and eating practices during the time of the mission and following.
The ancient philosophy of Traditional yoga, expounded in both ‘The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali’ and the ‘Hatha Yoga Pradipika’ by Yoga Swami Svatmarana, are also very practical attempts to buffer suffering due to particular forces of civil living. Both texts proposed methods to get the best out of civil living, yet retain peace, contentment and satisfaction with the moments of a one’s life.
The diagnosis of cancer is a signpost indicating that you are living a life that is giving you poor overall mental and physical health, compared to what you could be experiencing. You have been led astray by aspects of civil living, and you are advised to change your lifestyle to reflect a ‘sweeter pathway’ for your life. Besides taking natural medicines and having therapy, there are nine lifestyle influences that directly relate to civilised living, that should be addressed in most people diagnosed with cancer.
Powerful systems in civilisation can cause so much grief for the unwary. For example, currently across the internet is the following story that the ‘Sugar Industry’ had paid Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to overturn the original findings from extensive research in the 1950s, which was showing a link between increasing coronary heart disease and increasing sugar consumption. Their two-part review was published in the respected New England Journal of Medicine in 1967 where the scientists chose only those studies that minimized the link between sugar and heart health and suggested saturated fat to be the dietary bad guy.
Following this, the industry spent $600,000 ($5.3 million in 2016 dollars) to teach the average citizen who had never had a course in biochemistry, that sugar is necessary to keep every human being alive and provide enough energy to face their daily problems. The sugar industry subsequently boomed and so did heart disease and the incidence of cancer throughout the civilised world (See https://www.billgiles.com.au/anti-cancer-diets-one-follow-know/).
The Warburg Effect describes the observation that all cancer cells ferment glucose to energise themselves, even when adequate oxygen is present for normal cellular respiration. And so, if you have a diet which provides elevated blood sugar, this will allow cancer cells to feed and proliferate. However, while understanding that sugar directly fuels the growth of cancer cells, this fact now creates confusion and stress in many people from the last three generations, as they come to realise that an ‘Anti-cancer Diet’ is one that is low in carbohydrates (both simple and complex—this means grains, and certain vegetables), high in fats, and moderate in proteins—and this is the reverse of the message that they had been taught throughout their lives.
For nearly 45 years now I have examined how to fit a yoga lifestyle into modern civil living, through its practice and as a philosopher and teacher I have used the yoga tools, and others I have gathered as a clinical immunobiologist over nearly three decades, to assist people to overcome chronic immune-related illnesses that are related to civilised living.
I am hosting a free information session at the clinic where I will talk about how considering your health from an ecology and immunobiology perspective will help you see where the root cause of most disease originates and what you can do about it.
To RSVP please email us here.
You might also like to look at some of the books I have available – both around yoga philosophy and chronic health issues. Click here for the shop.
For more information on my signature programs – see Healing From Cancer Support Program
Cancer Is A Disease of Civilisation
