Re: re peter-CHEERS TO OUR MODERATOR.

[Guest guest]

List, Moran is an Australian surgeon and active member of

Quackwatch. For many on the list this would make him Satan

incarnate. I don't see him that way. He is a vigorous defender of

his faith. I can say the same thing about many on this list.

If you take a objective look at healthcare from, let's say the

probable future, it will be hard to distinguish the conventional from

alternative medicine. You will see a pitiable and often willful

ignorance, a blurred and narrow focus, amazing fantasy, overweening

little minds, and group-think not unlike schools of fish. And don't

forget that both philosophies are huddled under the same capitalistic

umbrella, so one eye is always on the money.

It is only a matter of time till we see cancer as nothing more than a

locally corrupted phenotype and all we have to do is reboot.

[Guest guest]

> It is only a matter of time till we see cancer as nothing more than a

> locally corrupted phenotype and all we have to do is reboot.

We would have to reboot our civilization, all of its goals, all of its

methods, and all of its ideology, especially its perilous, disastrous,

and erroneous idea of " progress. " Cancer is nature's response to what

we think of as " progress, " i.e. a _rapidly_ and _drastically_ changing

environment with an exponential rate of change. Cancer is the only

way nature is hardwired to respond to " progress " -- cancer is a

desperate attempt to get creatures exposed to too many new things too

fast and all at once to try to evolve in a hurry if there's no other

options left, if there's no adapting to the new environment via old

phenotypical organs and functions. Evolving in a hurry is a very bad

idea, biologically speaking. In the past, when changes were suddenly

introduced into the environment at a rapid rate (e.g., as the result

of a massive meteor striking the planet and abruptly changing the

climate), they typically resulted in mass extinctions of species

rather than evolution. Cancer is the extension or, rather, the

outcome of the misused/overused innate capacity for evolution,

hardwired into everything live on this planet, a capacity to respond

with new/different growth to new/different environmental

circumstances. When these new circumstances are TOO new and TOO

different and TOO numerous and keep changing TOO fast, making the rate

of environmental change exceed the rate of possible adaptive

responses, we get cancer, a haphazard, erratic, frantic " let's do it

differently " attempt of the body to find an adaptive way to handle too

much.

If we keep the rate of alterations to the environment the same or even

higher (as we've been doing for the past several decades, with no

precedent in the whole history of life on this planet), cancer will be

there no matter how we tweak with our phenotype for as long as we keep

doing what we're doing. In fact, the more we tweak, the more cancer

we'll get. If we speed it up, if our " progress " becomes even more

rapid, the rate of cancer will exceed the rate of non-cancerous

adaptive responses left available to the body, and we will be a 100%

cancer rate species for a while, just like those lab mice strains we

selectively breed to develop cancer in 100% of cases for our

experiments. We're in the course of the same kind of experiment on

ourselves. Its outcome, however, is so predictable that it isn't

really worth bothering to carry out to the final outcome, extinction.

Elena