Your Immune System: The Key to Both Fighting & Preventing Cancer 

Welcome to the Back to Health Chiropractic Podcast

I’m your host, Dr. Marc Dupuis

On Today’s episode we are going to dive in on the immune system, which by the way is absolutely designed to search out and destroy cancerous cells. I will discuss how the immune system does this and what can we do to optimize the function of our immune system. 

Let’s get going.  First let’s define a few terms.  What exactly is Cancer: Cancer is a cell or group of cells that have not properly differentiated or that grows uncontrollably.  Cancer cells do not adhere properly to other cells. 

Every single one of us began as a single cell that divided countless times until we were a hollow ball of cells, then these cells divided countless times until we became a solid ball of cells and then a number these identical cells began to differentiate or morph into specific cell types that eventually went on to form our three main tissue types and then from those tissue types every single one of our organs, tissues and glands developed.  It really is quite miraculous!  

It is normal for cells to differentiate into their mature endpoint type cells.  Some cancerous cells do not go on to this critical next step. Some cancerous cells regress and become undifferentiated. Also, normal cells replicate or grow at a set rate of growth and normal cells have an internally regulated lifespan.  This means that after so much time passes internal mechanisms are triggered that cause the cell to die or turn over. Cancer cells do have behave this way, they replicate and replicate at an unusually high rate and do not have this self terminating life span.  they will continue to grow and divide indefinitely. This continuous replication process is how tumors form. Tumors cause problems by eventually disrupting function in the organs they are either growing near or in.

Now let’s define our immune system: The immune system is the bodily system that protects the body from foreign substances, cells, tissues and abnormal bodily cells by producing the immune response.  The immune system includes the thymus, spleen, lymph nodes, special deposits of lymphoid tissue (remember we talked about GALT in prior shows (Gut associated lymphatic tissue) macrophages, lymphocytes including B cells and T cells and antibodies. 

Now for the exciting part.  Each and every one of us has a cancer surveillance system.  It is run by our Natural Killer Cells. Our natural killer cells are  a special type of T cell lymphocyte designed to hunt down and destroy abnormal, cancerous cells and they do this by releasing damaging cytokines into the abnormal cell.  Cytokines are inflammatory mediators. 

Did you know that each and every person has cancer cells developing in their body, however, not everyone develops CA.  That’s right only when the developing cancer cells either evade the immune system or overwhelm a poorly functioning immune system does cancer develop.

Knowing this information, the next logical question is, what are the key factors that influence our immune system.  Because cytokines are inflammatory mediators, our inflammatory state combined with our bodies hormone balance together play a major role in how well our immune system functions.  Why hormone balance? It’s simple, many hormones play a direct role in either stimulating or suppressing both inflammation and immune system function.

Inflammatory State:  how do we best assess this? My favorite way is with the Omega 3 index performed on many micronutrient blood panels.  Omega fatty acids play a major role in balancing our inflammation in our bodies. Inflammation is neither good nor bad.  Inflammation is essential to proper immune system function as it uses inflammatory mediators when de...