Spontaneous Healing with Diet

From a newsletter from www.drmcdougall.com ;
“For all my 47 years, I (Ruth Heidrich) thought I was extremely healthy! After all, at that time (1982), I'd been a daily runner for 14 years, had run 3 marathons, and ate what I considered a very healthy diet—lots of chicken, fish, and low-fat dairy. Little did I know there was an insidious cancer growing in my right breast. When it grew to the size of a golf ball, I was rushed into surgery. I was then told it was invasive cancer, and later, that it had spread, not only throughout the whole breast but also involved my bones and one lung. While recovering from the surgery I saw a newspaper item asking for volunteers for a breast cancer/diet research study. I volunteered and was soon convinced that Dr. McDougall was on the right track and left his office on a low-fat vegan diet. Since my diagnosis in 1982, I have completed the Ironman 6 times, run 67 marathons, won over 1000 racing trophies, and been declared "One of the Ten Fittest Women in North America" in 1999. I have a Fitness Age of 32 although chronologically am 74!” Cancers are initiated and promoted by unhealthy components of the high-meat Western diet. Vegetarians are generally much healthier with lower cancer rates than others living in the same communities. As discussed, repeated injuries from unhealthy foods are followed by inflammation. Chronic inflammation is implicated in all stages of cancer—initiation, promotion and progression. The relationship is best seen in chronic inflammatory diseases; including ulcerative colitis, gastritis, pancreatitis, prostatitis, endometriosis, thyroiditis, bronchitis, mastitis (milk ducts), and microbial infections, which are often complicated by cancers in their respective organs. Many mechanisms for the micro pinprick injuries that initiate and promote cancer have been described, including injuries from radiation, and poisonings from chemicals found in tobacco products and foods. Even though doctors and patients commonly believe otherwise, in the case of cancer the body does not abandon its whole body efforts for spontaneous healing.
Cancers, even when spread throughout the body, can be reversed as seen in the case of Ruth Heidrich. A recent review reported 32 cases of complete remission from metastatic breast cancer. Under the microscope, evidence of ongoing spontaneous healing in colonies of breast cancer cells is clearly observed. Inflammation results in the destruction of these aberrant cells and their replacement with scar tissue. A recent study of women published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that about 22% of mammography-detected invasive breast cancers underwent spontaneous remission—in other words, are healed—over a six-year period of study. Advanced prostate, colon, melanoma, brain cancer (neuroblastoma), and kidney cancer have also been reported to spontaneously disappear without treatment. Precancerous changes in the female uterine cervix and colon polyps also regress. The benefits of a healthy diet were not directly tested during any of these observations. Common sense and available research says that better nourished, healthier people are more likely to be cured by spontaneous healing.