On Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:14:36 -0700, Jim Swayze  
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> It seems to me that, to use a city analogy, even if you are right and  
> you cannot constrain a tumor as it grows to a small town, it is not when  
> it is small that it is dangerous.  The question is can you cut off its  
> food supply when it is New York City or Hong Kong and can kill you.
A cancer has to do a lot of work to continue to grow; it has to get a
good blood supply, for one thing, while continuing to fool the immune
system into thinking it's friendly.  Autopsies have found that nearly
every man who died in his 80s had a malignant tumor in the prostate,
but that was not their cause of death.  For some reason, the tumor
was unable to keep doubling.

Just a hypothesis: I think it's common that cancers stall at a
small stage, but if a person is bereaved or goes through a traumatic
experience, that lets the brakes off.  How often have we heard of
someone dying of cancer a year or less after such a loss?  And there
are statistical studies of such things (though I don't have a link).

I was also interested to see in the article that a fair number of
people with the aggressive cancers were totally unable to control
their appetite for sweets.  That's the cancer talking: Give Me
Sugar.  My father died of metastasized prostate cancer, 27 years ago,
long before I was nutritionally aware.  He went through a one or
two lb bag of candy a day!

	Lynnet