Lee Zeldin was running for governor of New York when his life almost ended. While delivering a public outdoor campaign speech and surrounded by a large audience, a man walked up to him onstage. Lee attempted to continue his speech until the man reached out towards him. At that point Lee sensed danger. The man was reaching towards the side of Lee’s neck, and as his closed fist approached, Lee quickly reached out to grab and block his arm. The man continued to try to reach Zeldin, and the two men went down in a brief wrestling match until bystanders took the attacker off of Lee.
Lee didn’t have time to notice the tiny razor-sharp protrusion on a ring of the attacker’s fist. Had the attacker succeeded in reaching Lee’s carotid artery with that ring, Lee would have died. Lee simply reacted by instinct. Having served as an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel may have honed those instincts. The attacker was arrested, arraigned overnight and then released on his own recognizance, an outcome that Zeldin had predicted on Twitter just hours before the release; Lee was campaigning against such catch and release policies that he felt had been plaguing New York. The criminal justice system of New York was no protection for Lee, and he had to rely on his own instincts to survive.
Survival instincts are powerful. If someone reached out to you in a threatening manner, you would physically respond — instinctively. If you were a drowning swimmer you would be so desperate to survive that you would attempt to climb any rescuer who approached you, even if that would push your rescuer under the water. Survival instincts are primal, and every creature has them. Even individual cells have survival mechanisms: they can try to repair DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) damage, actively pump out toxins, and invoke a number of cellular metabolic pathways to handle a threat. They will do so automatically, and the greater the threat, the greater the cell’s attempt to counter the threat. A cell can look through its genetic code, quickly searching for answers to a threat, and can do so at an accelerated rate of up to a 1000 times normal when under extreme conditions.
A tough cell
Just as your body has self-repair mechanisms, so do your cells. DNA damage threatens future generations, so fixing DNA is a high priority. But how can a cell repair its own blueprint? DNA tells it what to do, so how can it fix its own controls? The answer is redundancy: DNA has extra information stored in it that can tell it when there is something wrong with some portion of the DNA code because the redundant, complimentary portion no longer matches its counterpart.
The DNA code is made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). A and T team up with C and G to form “base pairs”, and there are about 3 billion bases in human DNA. The sequence in which the bases are stranded together is the genetic code. Bases are tied together with a sugar molecule and a phosphate molecule, and this combination is called a nucleotide. Nucleotides form a “double helix”, where the base pairs connect the two outer strands of sugar and phosphate, much like a spiral staircase with the base pairs being the steps and the strands being the railings. During cell replication, the staircase is split open like a zipper and uncoiled through the action of enzymes and a protein known as helicase that breaks the hydrogen bonds between the bases. Then a special enzyme, DNA polymerase, wraps around the half strand and provides the A, G, C, and T bases to the exposed strands. Since A attracts T and C attracts G, each exposed base attracts its mate and the full DNA double helix is rebuilt — this is called complementary base pairing. Human DNA replicates at a rate of 50 nucleotides per second.
The biochemical process rarely fails, although it occasionally makes errors. Even then, only some errors have any impact on the DNA function. But radiation can cause errors very quickly, because it directly damages the chemistry of the DNA. Photons, the energy of all EMF’s (electromagnetic fields), are much more potent at higher frequencies, and frequencies above the visible light spectrum, such as ultraviolet, and even more so x-rays and gamma radiation, have enough energy to break base pair bonds inside the DNA. It’s like taking a sledgehammer to a step of the spiral staircase. The broken bonds are unstable, and the A or C may link up with a neighboring T or G above or below the step rather than with its proper mate, forming a break or lesion in the double helix. If left that way, the next replication of that DNA will misread the code and cause a transcription error — the transcription changes the lesion into a new, mutant code segment. So if any repair is going to happen, it needs to occur before the DNA replicates.
Cellular processes that build new DNA can also be used to repair existing DNA. When the cell detects a problem with the code, it can cut away a damaged section (this is called excision repair) and replace it with the information from the redundant code template that it has, doing a partial replication. DNA replication is very rapid, and so is repair. But first the cell needs to detect the need for repair. Stress signals kick off the DNA verification process, and higher stress makes this process more urgent. Threatened cells trigger their survival instincts, which devote energy to DNA repair. This is vital to healing from radiation damage in particular, so that the damage does not become a mutation. Cells with detected DNA damage halt their replication cycle while repairing the damage, then resume after a successful repair. Cells have three “checkpoints”, where they can block normal cell progression towards duplication while DNA repair is underway. Certain stress signals will trigger the checkpoint.
A good thing made bad
Cancer cells did not come from the outside — they are from your body. Your cells are skilled at DNA repair, and cancer cells are your cells; therefore cancer cells are good at DNA repair. Of course, they are good at repairing DNA that they currently have, so any previously permanentized errors will be repaired to their erroneous state. From the cancer cell’s point of view, it is returning itself to a proper and normal condition. We would prefer that the cancer cells did not have the advanced skills of normal cells, but they inherited excellent DNA repair abilities from them.
One popular cancer treatment is radiation therapy (RT). The intent is to expose a cancer tumor to so many high energy photons that the DNA damage is too extensive for the cancer cells to survive. That’s great in theory, but the radiation won’t only hit the cancer cells. Modern RT techniques try to pinpoint where the radiation goes, but many healthy cells still get hit. Now we have two problems: cancer cells are repairing themselves, while healthy cells will not always repair properly, resulting in mutations that can lead to more cancer.
Radiation damage kicks off the cell’s survival instincts; however cells don’t really have instincts, they just have various metabolic pathways that can become more or less active as needed to survive. This process is explained in detail in a research article published in Diagnostics (Basel) — here researchers from the University of Nebraska Medical Center trace the process that is triggered by radiation damage. “ATM (Ataxia Telangiesctasia Mutated) and ATR (Ataxia Telangiectasia and Rad3-related) kinase-mediated signaling pathways play essential roles in the activation of cell cycle checkpoint response and DNA repair following radiation-induced DNA damage.” Also they explain that certain signaling pathways affected by radiation, such as PI3K/AKT, will inhibit the cancer cell death response to extensive damage. Radiation treated cancer cells that survive are now in survival mode, better prepared for the next RT attack. They develop “radioresistance.”
So we have cancer cells adapting to the radiation threat, while normal cells under radiation stress are looking for a way to survive, sometimes turning to cancerous behavior to do so. And there is yet a third problem…inflammation.
Turning up the heat
When cells die naturally because they are signaled to do so, the process is clean, but when cells are blasted by radiation and die, they make a mess which the immune system has to clean up. Also damaged cells may send the equivalent of “SOS” signals which trigger an immune system response. Radiation calls out the immune system, which then triggers inflammation. Inflammation does damage beyond the direct DNA damage done by the radiation. Published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, researchers from the Suzuka University of Medical Science, Suzuka, Japan explain that chronic inflammation releases reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS) which can directly cause DNA damage, resulting in even more inflammation. Local oxidative stress is one of the reasons that inflammation can lead to cancer development, in addition to inflammation-induced hypoxia and released chemicals which stress cells. So radiation therapy causes direct damage as well as indirect damage through inflammation. Inflammation and radiation damage help each other in supporting cancer development. As noted in this article, “crosstalk between DNA damage and inflammation may play important roles in cancer development.”
While we talk of cancer development, we are really referring primarily to the development of the cancer stem cell (CSC). A “worker bee” cancer cell doesn’t have the ability to differentiate into the various cells needed in the complex tumor environment. Cells take the genetic steps downward towards stem-like behavior, which they do under environmental stress. Radiation speeds the process massively. Radiation therapy leaves destruction in its wake which spurs more cancer development. Like an octopus with many tentacles, the side effects of RT are numerous. In the process of killing the less hardy worker bees of cancer, RT hardens the CSC’s, triggers their DNA repair survival activity, and damages and inflames surrounding tissue that now may become cancerous.
Survival is a game that cancer stem cells play very well. They learned from you — your own cells taught them. Trying to beat them at their own game isn’t easy. A different game is needed: good signaling instead of stress signaling, and a normal, safe, healthy internal environment rather than a toxic, harsh, radiation-laden environment that favors cancer.
Dr. Nemec’s Review
Let’s go over these key points:
1. The high frequency photons in x-rays and gamma rays — both can be part of radiation therapy. Gamma rays are much more damaging than x-rays. When you have these radiation damages it affects normal cells as well as cancer cells; it will cause DNA damage to both which increases the likelihood of more DNA mutation in both normal cells and cancer cells. Yes, it will kill some cancer cells, but it will also kill a lot of normal cells and increase the likelihood of both cancer cells and normal cells to repair their DNA abnormally and then reproduce more abnormal cells, more cancer cells. Both the normal cells become cancer cells and the cancer cells become even more aggressive to survive.
2. Inflammation is the root of all disease and radiation therapy greatly increases inflammation. Some of the byproducts of inflammation are reactive oxidative stress (ROS) and free radical damage. These processes also produce damage to the DNA and increase the likelihood of mutations and more cancer cell production.
3. All cells in the body, including cancer cells, are very plastic — meaning they’re very adaptable to change in the environment. Your cells are programmed to survive under the worst circumstances, and they do that through mutation of the DNA to survive and grow fast in any toxic or damaging environment. This is where the birth of cancer stem cells comes from: normal stem cells which create all your other cells becoming damaged and mutating into cancer stem cells that grow abnormally fast without the checks and balances of normal cells. Most deaths from cancer happen because the cancer tissue keeps growing and crowding out the normal tissue and the normal function of the tissue. Cancer tissue does not function the way the tissue is supposed to function. It just grows fast to survive, but does not have the functionality of the normal gland or organ.
Let’s look at an example. Your liver is one of the most important organs in your body, that controls a tremendous amount of cellular functions including immune function — so let’s say a person has a tumor in their liver that is growing acceleratedly. As the tumor grows, it’s cells do not perform all those cellular functions, so the bigger it gets it the less the liver functions properly. This is the problem: cancer just grows, but doesn’t do its job, the function that each cell has in the body. Liver cells do many many vital functions that affect all the other cells in the body, so with tumors in the liver you decrease these multitudinous functions that affect every one of the hundred trillion cells in the body.
Are you starting to understand how it works? One cell affects all the other cells in the body; one organ, one gland affects every other cell in the body — so that’s why cancer is so dangerous and life-threatening, because it never stops growing and crowds out normal cellular function, which is absolutely necessary for the body to live.
Your next question might be, “Well, what if I have breast cancer? What function is that going to crowd out that would take my life?”
Very good question. The breast cancer cells can only crowd out breast tissue and damage it, and if you’re not nursing or breast-feeding, you don’t need much function from the breast. The problem is cancer stem cells do not stay in one area like the breast: they travel through the blood to other locations in the body to set up new colonies in new tumor locations, so this is the problem even when the tumor is in non-vital tissue.
So how does radiation and chemotherapy increase cancer risk and aggressiveness?
It’s from all the above that we just spoke about and by stimulating normal cells to become cancer cells in order to try to survive. You have two types of normal cells: normal differentiated cells — this is the liver cell or the pancreas cell or the breast cell; and normal stem cells — these are the cells that do not die and that make all the other cells. So when you apply radiation and or chemotherapy you damage normal cells’ DNA, causing them to potentially become malignant, and you damage normal stem cells and turn them into the worst cell to be resident in your body — the cancer stem cell. Why do I say worst? Because you cannot kill a cancer stem cell, just like you cannot kill a normal stem cell, unless you use a high enough radiation or chemotherapy dose that would kill all the cells in your body, which means ending your life — so you see that’s the problem with trying to find a cure for cancer.
You will never do it by killing. You will never do it by radiation or by poison or by any other means to artificially manipulate the cells. Remember and never forget: your cells — whether they’re normal or cancer cells — they are your cells and they are very intelligent, and they are going to survive in any environment.
So what’s the answer? Stop trying to kill them and start making a very healthy anti-inflammatory environment so that they can change back to normal stem cells and normal differentiated cells. This just makes common sense. Let’s say you go to war against the nation that is 10 times stronger than you. You are not going to win, so your only hope is to make peace — make a peace agreement because no matter how much you fight, your whole nation will be decimated or be put into slavery, if not completely annihilated. The way you make peace with cancer stem cells, and non-stem cancer cells that were made by the cancer stem cells, is by producing an anti-inflammatory, highly oxygenated, nutrient rich environment with no chronic stressors.
What is the worst stress on the body that stimulates cancer the fastest?
It’s not toxicity; it’s not chemicals. It is an inflammatory environment that is produced by your thoughts: first and foremost subconscious, secondarily conscious. The subconscious stored programs started early in life and you do not remember them, and with the conscious programs you do remember you still carry an energy towards a person, place or thing.
These are the root of all disease. Yes, you have to clean up the physical environment. Yes, you have to eat an anti-inflammatory diet, drink sufficient water, eat low chemical, low toxin, nutrient rich plant food. Yes, you have to get sufficient sleep. Yes, you have to get sufficient exercise to move the oxygen and nutrients to your cells, and to get the waste products away from your cells. If you do not do these, you will open the door wide to disease. But the greatest inflamer are the subconscious stress programs, and the second greatest are the conscious stress programs. This is why at Revolution New Medicine® we have formulated a protocol over the last 40 years to address, release, and reprogram these subconscious and conscious stress programs with our unique protocol. We do 3-D brain imaging to locate them and do advanced physical treatment to release them, and then retake 3-D images to make sure they are released. This is the biggest game changer in cancer and in all of health and healing. You must do all the steps, but the biggest step of all is the mind affecting the body in ways you never even could imagine.
So if you’ve been diagnosed with cancer, or you have a friend or family member that has, or you just want to make sure you never get that diagnosis and live a long, healthy fruitful life — that’s what our program is all about: helping you live life to the full in body, emotion, brain, mind, and spirit.
Here are the ways we can help you in your health journey:
- Outpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-has the most benefit of teaching, treatment, live classes and personalized coaching. This program has the most contact with Dr. Nemec with 3- 6 month programs that can be turned into a regular checking and support program for life. This is our core program that has helped so many restore their health and maintain that restoration for years.
- Inpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-is our four-week intensive inpatient program for those that are not in driving distance, usually over 4 hour drive. This is the program that is an intensive jumpstart with treatment, teaching, live classes and coaching designed for all our international patients along with those in the US that do not live in Illinois. This program is very effective especially when combined with our new membership program support.
- Stay at Home Program-is offered to continental US patients who cannot come to Total Health Institute but still want a more personal, customized plan to restore their health. This program also includes our Learn Membership Program.
- Membership Program is our newest program offered for those that want to work on their health at a high level and want access to the teaching at Total Health Institute along with the Forums: both Dr. Nemec’s posts and other members posting. And also, to have the chance to get personalized questions answered on the conference calls which are all archived in case you miss the call. The Membership Program has 3 levels to choose from: Learn, Overcome and Master. The difference is at the Overcome and Master levels you received one on one calls with Dr. Nemec personalizing your program for your areas of focus.
