The Geology of the Modern Cancer Epidemic

Through the Lens of Chinese Medicine

Tai Lahans

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9789814436311
• eBook ISBN: 9789814449731
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Alternativ- & Komplementärmedizin

Cancers are on the rise across the world. Except for viral-based cancers, overall cancers are diseases that may be preventable. This book looks at the many levels of determined, probable, and possible causation for several common cancers. These causes include realities found in culture, anthropology, sociology, politics, the environment, agriculture and food, beliefs, and the modern lifestyle. These realities are filtered through the perennial science of Chinese medicine — an ecological system of knowing and understanding the human body as it relates to the world around us.

The book covers lung, colorectal, breast, prostate, and virally-caused cancers. It interweaves conventional medical knowledge of these cancers with modern realities of everyday life we all live, and with Chinese medicine interpretations and strategies for treating probable pre-cancerous conditions. This makes it a book that is useful for the practitioner of Chinese medicine. It is also useful for the patient suffering a cancer diagnosis in terms of survivorship and for other medical practitioners who wish to understand how integrated care for cancerous diseases and conditions may relate to Chinese medicine and prevention.

The final chapters of the book are dedicated to finding answers for a cure for cancer through making connections between how we live, what we believe, the environment we are creating based on those beliefs, and the social and political mechanisms we now have in place that keep us from change and, therefore, from the cure for cancer.

Contents:

• Water: The San Jiao
• Air — Lung Cancer
• Earth — Colorectal Cancer
• Yin and Qi — Breast Cancer
• Yin and Yang — Prostate Cancer
• Fire — Chronic Viral Infection and Cancer
• Epigenetics, the Source, and the Precautionary Principle
• The Geology of Hope
• Connections

Readership: Chinese medicine practitioners and other medical practitioners, patients, care givers, interested lay public.

CHAPTER 1

Water — The San Jiao

Ecstatic love is an ocean, and the Milky Way is a flake of foam floating on it.

— Rumi

Water is the basis of life and the lowest common denominator. Everything flows downward to water. And all actions taking place within the global atmosphere and on the Earth eventually find their way to water. Water makes it impossible to get away with any misuse or abuse that takes place in our world. Eventually payment comes due, usually via the lack of clean and pure water with which to sustain life. Water is the basis for the circle of life — the hub.

Only about 3% of the world’s water is fresh. And it is becoming more and more precious. We are initiating wars for water. Water is no longer emblematic of life — a much-overused metaphor. Water, air, and Earth are life. And we are at the edge of the world looking for a bridge to span the inevitable chaos that will accompany the loss of pure water because of drought, global climate change, misuse, lack of recharge in our aquifers due to overuse, contamination by industrial wastes that have used our waterways as a dump, and agricultural techniques that waste and abuse water as though it would last forever.

As the lowest common denominator, water has become a delivery system for most contaminants that are known to be carcinogenic and those whose health effects are unknown.^1-4 Even contaminants released into the air eventually end up in water. Since the human body is largely made up of water, and since we are at the top of most food chains in the modern world, and since many contaminants are bioaccumulative, we are at high risk for injury from contaminants coming through water. This is the primary reason that this discussion of cancer prevention begins with water and the attitudes toward it that drive decisions that end up fouling and drying up waters across the world — decisions that ultimately cause diseases that end in death.

Not all of such discussions are about carcinogens. They are about all of the conditions that result from a limited view about water. Cancer is often a multifactorial disease, no matter what type. The multiple factors that can be taken into account about water, water use and contamination are manifestations of an underlying condition of the human mind and heart that overlooks and is in denial about these issues. This is the real and first injury. The waste of water and the modern cancer epidemic are but symptoms.

Water and Africa

The continent of Africa is the largest continent below the equator. As such, it is at greater risk for the effects of climate change. For many reasons, including climate change, the desertification of Saharan Africa is spreading into sub-Saharan Africa.⁵ The large landmass of the continent is primarily below the equator and absorbs heat from the sun more than any other continent. The Nile watershed carries approximately 30% of all the runoff from sub-Saharan Africa, more than any other watershed in Africa. The concentration of the watersheds of Africa into only two or three major river systems makes for a higher risk of water shortages, flooding, salination of the soil, deser-tification, and famine. Africa is far more delicately balanced to begin with.⁶

Central Africa is home to one of the world’s largest rainforests, and serves as one of its most important carbon sinks.⁷ Carbon sinks capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus reducing global greenhouse gas levels since carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas.² Climate change is already diminishing Central African rainforests. These rainforests are under the same pressures as the Amazon rain-forest.⁸ Besides climate change, deforestation for lumber (much of which is sent to Japan and the United States for construction purposes) and deforestation for local agricultural needs and fuel will have depleted three-quarters of the forest cover in Central Africa by 2025. This leads to downstream flooding, reduced water quality, sedimentation in rivers and lakes, dust storms, air pollution, health problems, and an increased effect on climate change. It is a vicious circle.⁹

Water has gone scarce in India and sub-Saharan Africa partly because the World Bank, run primarily by the US and other developed, well-funded, and mostly European countries, has prescribed the mining of groundwater in areas that are very arid; these groundwater sources have an extremely low recharge.¹⁰ This is why the ancient system of agriculture in these areas is a profound design of balance between crops that require less water, recharging the groundwater, and the use of hand-dug wells rather than deep tube wells. Areas in northern India that have fed thousands of people for millennia are now in drought and famine because modern techniques of irrigation and modern genetically engineered food crops have wasted the water and failed in the long term to feed the people.¹¹

The great dams of Africa have also been funded by the World Bank as a means of providing drinking water and energy in places where water and energy are scarce.¹² Only well-funded corporations or landowners have been able to afford this water and energy for the drilling of deep tube wells for irrigation water. Poor farmers, for whom this intervention was supposedly meant, cannot afford to drill the wells, buy the water, or irrigate their farms. Almost 100% of the income of the poor is spent on nutrition. These people cannot afford to buy water provided by a dam or from a deep well. As a result, in India and Africa people are starving and unable to grow enough food as they once did, only 50 years ago.

These issues are issues of the commons.¹³ Every living thing on Earth has a right to live. Air, water, and sustenance are all part of the commons — that part of life that contains the essentials that sustain life. When these essentials are owned and then sold, not everyone has equal access. The individual human body also has a right to the commons; and defining what the commons are now is a major task not only in the developing world but also in the developed world.¹⁴ Clean air, clean water, clean soil, and clean food are all essential to everyone, living anywhere. Cancer is a disease often caused by contamination of these essentials and, as such, is a public health crisis that requires a definition of what the commons in the developed and the nondeveloped world will look like. What should the commons be based on in the prevention of chronic diseases and the many forms of cancer? These questions on the commons are political, social, moral, and spiritual. They include the exterior truth as we know it now, combined with the interior truth, the wisdom of a holistic view that combines exterior and interior — spirit and science, meaning and identified need.

Over the last several centuries the exterior truth has changed based on knowledge and information that is itself continually changing. Wisdom truths do not change. They are based on inner knowing that is perennial in nature. They tend to be moral, intuitive, and essentially complete. Consciousness is not the same as wisdom but is part of wisdom. Consciousness as it drives the scientific view is limited by the evolution of humanity at any given time. Wisdom is perennial in that it remains whole and has as its foundation grounding in the connectedness of inner and outer life and of humanity and nature.¹⁵

The history of Africa regarding colonialism and the slave trade has contributed immensely to the “meaning side” of its current condition. There is no way to quantify the damage done to the commons, the consciousness, and the spirit and local wisdom traditions of Africa by the colonial rape of the land and its peoples over the centuries by people looking to own the African commons. In fact, it has consistently been mostly European peoples who have colonized areas of the world where the concept of the commons in each case made it inconceivable that another people would arrive and cause such destruction and actually steal land and resources they them-selves had always considered sacred and as part of their commons open to everyone and for which everyone was responsible.^16-18

Paul Rohrbach, as head of German immigration in South-West Africa,¹⁹ in his bestseller, (1912), German thought in the World,⁸ stated: “No false philanthropy or racial theory can convince sensible people that the preservation of a tribe of South Africa’s kaffirs...is more important to the future of mankind than the spread of the great European nations and the white race in general. Not until the native learns to produce anything of value in the services of the higher race, i.e. in the ser-vice of its and his own progress, does he gain any moral right to exist.”²⁰

This intensely racist and arrogant quote tries to justify the European Christian white man’s usurpation of the right to life of African peoples and the lands on which they and their ancestors had lived since the advent of humankind. The racism and colonialism that all of Africa has had to endure for so long, not unlike the native first peoples of North and South America and many people of color, exacts a deep wound that takes many generations to heal and recover from.^21-24 These wounds are in the people and in the land, and continue today. These wounds were perpetrated by people who were so split from the truth in their hearts that they actually thought that they were right in dominating and destroying cultures of people unlike themselves. Of course, the primary purpose was to own the land and extract the resources from it by using the labor of the people who knew and lived as a part of that land.

The Africa we find now is not the same Africa of even 200 years ago. The climate change driving the desertification of northern and now sub-Saharan Africa is not due to activities taking place in Africa based on African peoples’ philosophies of life but is due to activities taking place primarily in North America and Europe and based on philosophies of North American and European peoples. The climate change occurring in Africa is due to greenhouse gases formed in the developed world, where policies usually formulated by non-Africans for Africa result in deforestation, the products of which are then used primarily in the developed world and not in the part of the world from which they came. A modern colonization continues to occur.^25-26

Water Around the World

Climate is the generator of water. When climate changes, it exacerbates all other changes that also contribute to a lack of clean and available water. Through a complex hydrology cycle, weather, climate, and the land relate to one another in a ballet of movement and energy.²⁷ One could say that the global hydrology cycles and all that they create are the San Jiao (“triple burner”) of the Earth. Water physiology, temperature regulation, immune function, interconnected bodily communications, absorption, and the very spirit of the Earth are expressed in the Chinese medicine theory of the San Jiao as manifested by the global hydrology cycles.²⁸ The Taoist map of the macrocosm and the human microcosm expresses very beautifully this ancient theory of ecology and the ubiquitous nature...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halt Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Endorsement
• Content
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Water: The San Jiao
• Chapter Two: Air — Lung Cancer
• Chapter Three: Earth — Colorectal Cancer
• Chapter Four: Yin and Qi — Breast Cancer
• Chapter Five Yin and Yang — Prostate Cancer
• Chapter Six Fire — Chronic Viral Infection and Cancer
• Chapter Seven: Epigenetics, the Source, and the Precautionary Principle
• Chapter Eight The Geology of Hope
• Chapter Nine Connections
• Addendum: Books and websites that are worth reading and monitoring
• Index