Cancer, Part 2

Day 28 of the twisting and folding human embryo.

Following on from last time, the thing about cells, and it's cells where cancer is said to happen, is that they're part of a wider system i.e. us, our bodies. But traditional cancer research, even the cutting-edge stuff they put on fundraising Biggest Morning Teas for, is obsessed with the cell, and increasingly with the components of cells, particularly genes. That reductionist illusion that infects so much modern science, thinking if you can go small enough you'll find the magic which causes everything else. This is why they build ridiculous atom smashers costing billions of dollars, trying to smash atoms into smaller and smaller pieces, thinking that eventually they'll find THE particles that drive everything.

Life and existence are smarter and much more simple than that. As Donald Ingber discovered, and we shouldn't be surprised, but scientists are (those who can look up long enough from the constant battle for new research grants to study ever more restricted things), cell behaviour is part of a whole pattern of things stretching from the innards of the cell through the tissues that the cells build, and organs, right up to the wider systems like circulation and respiration, and bone and muscle. The whole lot, all at the same time. The 'micro' and the 'macro' are false distnctions - it's all a completely interconnected set of systems within other systems. Cells within tissues, tissues within organs, organs within the wider body framework, all communicating and changing each other every time anything happens.

What Ingber has shown experimentally is that whatever you do at what you might call the everyday macro level, like go for a walk or pick up a shoe, flows right through all of those other levels or systems, through the organs and tissues and cells. So that everything you do, every day, is changing everything inside of you, right down to the biochemistry and genes in your cells. Further, when you look at your body as this entire interconnected system, on every scale, the mechanism you'll find at each scale is tensegrity. Cells are tensegrity structures, as are tissues, as are organs, as are muscles, as are bones, as is the skeleto-muscular system, the digestive system - the whole lot (again the earlier post I did on tensegrity talks about what it is in a lot more detail).

Now the defining thing about tensegrity is that all forces are distributed evenly across whatever tensegrity structure you're looking at. So force in general is what it's all about. By changing forces you change the actual, biological, make-up of who you are. There's not physical force on one side, and chemical and genetic things on the other. Those things are all the one thing. The forces you apply to cells change their biochemistry and genetics. As Ingber has shown in the laboratory, a cell will behave completely differently, turning on or off various different programs (like growth or death), depending on the force that is applied to it. And this is what embryologists have always known, that after cells have divided during embryonic development, the resulting mass starts to twist and fold in all sorts of ways, and Ingber's work now suggests that it's the forces generated by that twisting and folding which then cause the cells to develop in certain ways i.e. to turn into tissues and organs, and in the end human beings.

Now to get back to cancer, it all suddenly becomes a lot clearer if you realise that we really don't ever stop being embryos. Our cells continue to change and grow in different ways, according to the forces we put on them in our everyday activities. Cancer is a 'disease' of development. It's your body reverting to an earlier stage of its growth, because of unbalanced forces you're putting on it. The cells and tissues go back into embryonic programs because of these forces, and you therefore start to grow things (tumours) in places you don't want them. (And in fact some tumours if left long enough grow into recognisable body parts, like an ear growing on a kidney.)

This is why disease, particularly with cancer, is literally dis-ease. It's the absence of ease, it's you violating your basic tensegrity structure and generating unbalanced forces across the different levels of your body. Which then reactivates these embryonic programs. It's 'effort', which is nothing but an unbalanced force. It explains why mutated cancerous cells alone can sit in your body for decades and do no harm at all, unless they're tied into to all of those other levels i.e. unless the tissue archietcture changes as well, and the organ etc.

You can see how much more simple this is than the hugely complex biochemical and genetic theories which dominate both cancer and other medical research today. It's one of the greatest revolutions of understanding in all of human history, if not THE greatest. As that earlier post on tensegrity says, all of matter itself is likely a tensegrity structure, these insights stretch way beyond biology and medicine.

It's also why I have thinly-veiled contempt for medicine as it's understood today. Doctors and medical science have chopped the body up into discreet (billable) bits and pieces, and have then tried to treat these independently. Which every patient experiences - you have a sore ear, and you're off to an Ear, Nose and Throat man, who won't be able to do a thing for your sore hip - you'll need an ortho man for that. And each of them will more or less financially rape you for the privilege of their treatment. None of them have even the first clue about how those lovely bits and pieces actually form part of a whole, beautifully coordinated pattern, so their treatments very often end up damaging other bits of you, and you end up seeing yet another money-hungry specialist to correct the fall-out of the other specialists' work, in other parts of your body. Many of them mean well, but the model of the body they're using is beyond hopeless. And I'm yet to meet one who doesn't suck at that public tax teat, and private insurance teat, and gap payment from you personally, with more ferocity than a tick gorging itself on your blood.

So if you want to minimise your chances of getting cancer, learn to use your body as a completely effortless tensegrity structure. I've written about how to do that previously, a few times, and will likely end up there again in different ways as time goes on.