Your health could be
seen as a bucket
which gradually fills up with things harmful to your life. The
more toxins fill it up, the worse your health, although for many years it
may just show up as the odd health problems here and there, none of which
seem to be linked. Suddenly your bucket overflows and you get a
serious illness.
Although
cancer is a major health challenge, it should not be considered in
isolation.
Cancer is only one of many illnesses that can be caused by the exposure to
toxic chemicals but it is a leading cause of death as "overflow" often
does show up as cancer. Therefore, when chemicals are described as
being toxic, it often means that they are carcinogenic.
Toxins and carcinogens are practically interchangeable words, based on the
effects they have on our health.
One of the most exciting light treatments is photodynamic therapy, or PDT,
proven to be highly successful in treating certain types of cancers. It is
also used to treat skin ailments such as acne and eczema.
PDT utilizes porphyrins, a light-sensitizing component of hemoglobin.
These porphyrins have an iron atom inside the nitrogen square and are the
means by which we can carry oxygen, attached to the iron atom, around our
body for delivery to respiring tissues.
Why oxygen? Because oxygen can
accept the unwanted electrons left over after the process of energy
synthesis is carried out within cells. Otherwise, the electrons, in the
form of unpaired free radicals, might upset our other cells and damage
them. So porphyrins play an important subsidiary role in energy creation,
both in plants and animals.
When the respiration process of cells goes wrong, they can become
cancerous. Normally, energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP),
the energy molecule of nearly all living creatures, is created by
organelles called mitochondria inside our cells in a process known as
oxidative phosphorylation ( the "ox-phos" metabolic pathway). This simply
means that the process adds a phosphate to adenosine diphosphate (ADP),
and uses oxygen as an electron "dustbin" or final electron acceptor for
the spare electrons.
If
any carcinogen blocks this amazingly efficient energy machine, the cell in
desperation turns to a more primitive means of making energy, glycolysis.
By this it can only make a third as many ATP molecules from glucose as it
did before, 12 instead of 35 to be precise. So the cell can stay alive,
but only just, because nearly all its reduced energy goes into maintaining
the essential pumps that maintain the integrity of its plasma membrane, or
"skin". About 40 percent of the energy made by a cell's mitochondria goes
into keeping the plasma membrane intact.
Now the poor cell has a desperate choice: either to stay like that, half
dead, or to obtain increased supplies of glucose and make more energy. The
easiest way to make more energy is to resorb the sugar-candy sticks on its
plasma membrane surface called glycoproteins. But these glycoproteins are
its signal transduction means, telling the cell what is happening in the
outside world, so the cell then becomes blind to instructions from other
cells or from the brain's controlling signals. This in turn means it no
longer behaves as part of the body, but abandons regulatory growth
control, and may start to divide unregulated, no longer controlled by the
body's genetic electric fields.
That this is so is confirmed by three facts. First, cancer cells almost
always have no glycoproteins on their plasma membrane surfaces. Second,
they do not obey the rules of normal contact inhibition (when normal cells
touch any other cell they stop dividing). And third, cancer cells are
intensely glucose hungry.
It is this
problem in cancer that is being tackled today by photodynamic therapy.
Energy Detox
gives the body the needed boost to start to return integrity to the body,
enabling it
to
detoxify on a long-term basis and also to support better elimination.
It does not treat disease.
The information provided is intended for educational purposes;
it is not to be construed as providing medical advice or
substituting for professional services.
