Curious cases of self-curing cancer
There is no more dramatic event in medicine than the cancer that cures itself, the theme of a recent book by Harvard psychiatrist Jeff Rediger featured in this paper last week. It happened to a family doctor acquaintance who, soon after retiring from 30 years in general practice, was found to have a tumour of the pancreas. He declined any treatment that could only have been palliative and resolved to live out his last few months in Italy, his chosen country of retirement.
While waiting for his plane at Gatwick, he fell into conversation with a Japanese doctor who suggested a macrobiotic diet, cutting out all meat and dairy products in favour of beans, lentils and so forth. With nothing to lose he cast aside his natural scepticism about “alternative” cures and sure enough over the next few weeks he began to feel a lot better.
This called for a repeat scan that showed his tumour was much diminished. Accordingly, he ditched the dreary beans and lentils macrobiotics in favour of the joys of Italian cuisine and lived on happily for another decade. The only two possible explanations for his “miracle cure” is, first, that the original diagnosis was in error, and indeed the appearance of the benign condition known as a pseudocyst of the pancreas can sometimes be mistaken for a tumour.
The further possibility was that his tumour had “spontaneously regressed”, a phenomena that has been noted, if rarely, in virtually every type of cancer and at every stage. “Many oncologists have encountered patients who have refused treatment and survived,” notes Israeli specialist Tamar Tadmor in a review of the subject published last year in which he suggests the several biological processes that might account for it merit further investigation.
They include “autoimmune immunotherapy” where some event such as the trauma of an operation or an infection stimulates the immune system to generate antibodies to destroy the cancer cells. Several viruses and a generalised inflammatory reaction have also been implicated in initiating an “antitumour cell immune response”.
Spontaneous regression, it must be presumed, is just one instance, albeit a remarkable one, of the vis medicatrix naturae, those potent if mysterious ways by which the body sustains and heals itself.
He ditched the dreary beans and lentils in favour of Italian cuisine and lived on for a decade
A peak in weeks?
Not surprisingly the inbox has been busier than usual, the main concern for those “at high risk” because of their associated medical conditions, being the grim prospect of several weeks of self-imposed purdah. It helps to recognise that while the cumulative number of cases of coronavirus inevitably appears to be taking off into the stratosphere, as of last Friday, 99 per cent of those currently diagnosed are designated as “mild” with just 1 per cent “serious or critical”.
Further the toll of 144 fatalities as of Friday needs to be placed in the wider context of a total of 27,000 deaths from influenza and pneumonia in England and Wales in 2018. Meanwhile, the news from
China is certainly encouraging with just 39 new cases, which, if the UK follows a similar trajectory, would imply the epidemic is likely to have peaked in the next few weeks.
The policy of self-isolation will have contributed to controlling the spread in China, but at some cost as revealed by a survey of 2,000 citizens on whom it was imposed, with four out of five reporting feeling anxious and depressed.
It would seem sensible, then, if you don’t have any underlying health conditions and are showing no symptoms, to adopt “qualified isolation”, avoid public transport where possible but make an effort to get out and about in the healthy air and sunshine of springtime. Physical distancing should not extend to social distancing from family and friends, as long as you are following government guidelines. Remember, we have been through similar in the past – 8,000 children paralysed in the 1947 polio epidemic – without the country grinding to a halt.