Digest №19: Can a Treatment Be too Effective?

For most people, a cancer diagnosis is akin to a death sentence. Of course, there are some cancers, which we are much more capable at treating, such as polycythaemia vera, however, the median overall survival from diagnosis for the vast majority of cancers is exceedingly short.^1–2 So, when a doctor informs you that you've got cancer, it fells like you just got a little letter from the underworld that you are soon to be collected.

Thus, when a treatment regimen finally does work and begins to kill cancer cells, the instinctive reaction is to double down. God forbid one give cancer time to adapt and become resistant. Death itself has just been halted and mustn't be allowed to advance again.

So, when your read the title, it might have been impossible for you to imagine that there could be such a thing as too many dead cancer cells, for isn't that the whole goal of any treatment? To kill cancer cells?

To answer this question, we must take a look at what actually happens with cancer cells when they die and how this process differs from the majority of healthy cells.

When cells, whether healthy or cancerous, die off, they don't simply vanish from existence without a trace. The debris left over from their death has to be cleared away by the waste management systems of the body. The difference between healthy and cancerous cells is in the composition of the debris they leave behind.

In order to protect your body, healthy cells will normally use a form of controlled cell suicide, called apoptosis to die. During this process the contents of the cell are organised into manageable packages that can be efficiently handled by the body's waste management systems and cause minimal disruption to the surrounding tissues. This is basically like us humans putting our trash neatly into separated bins so that it can be picked up and carted away, instead of simply throwing it into our own gardens.³

Apoptotic cell death in this manner occurs all the time throughout your body when cells are too old or too damage and need to be recycled. So, cell death itself isn't a problem.³

However, when a highly effective treatment begins to rapidly destroy cancer cells, a vast majority of these cells will not undergo the orderly process of apoptosis, but begin to break down uncontrolledly. In doing so, they fail to package their internal contents properly, instead spilling them into the surrounding tissues and blood stream.^4–5

If cancer cells continue to die from the treatment, the debris won't be cleared quickly enough and will end up accumulating. This phenomenon, known as tumour lysis syndrome (TLS), can cause major damage, both locally in the form of swelling and inflammation, but also globally, leading to issues like kidney failure, heart arrhythmia, and seizures, or even multiple organ failure and death.^4–5

Since the goal of any treatment is to enable the patient to live a longer, healthier, and more enjoyable life, it's pretty self explanatory that TLS is going too far in the direction we want. Since tumour lysis is the direct result of too many tumour cells dying rapidly, it also answers our initial question. There can indeed be such a thing as too effective a treatment, at least if one defines treatment effectiveness by cancer cells killed.

Viewed more holistically, the most effective treatment is the one that benefits the patient the most. This means we want to kill as many cancer cells as we safely can, without placing the patient at risk of TLS. Implementing interventions, which reduce cancer cell growth, in addition to those, that cause cancer cell death, allows for greater reduction in overall tumour growth, without increasing the risk for TLS to occur.

The whole point of the Mosaic Method is to do two things:

1. Lower the growth rate of cancer cells, so that we can
2. Kill enough cancer cells to put the disease into remission, without putting the patient at risk of TLS or other toxic side effects.

I hope this digest could bring some clarity to the approach of cancer treatment. It may well be daunting, but it's not impossible.

I wish you best health,
Cedric L. Marquard