Like other highly skilled professionals, we physicians make a living by solving other peoples’ problems. Or at least that’s what we should be doing.

Solving problems is the very essence of being a service professional. The ability to efficiently solve problems is based on one’s ability to understand cause and effect relationships pertinent to the specific problems one is asked to solve.

View of an advanced stage 4 metastatic melanoma before and after reversing oximation and restoring autonomous homeostasis. Photos courtesy of Dr. Roby Mitchell.

In my past articles here in Holistic Primary Care, I’ve sometimes referred to the Law of Parsimony. This law states that when seeking to explain the cause for an event or series of events, the simplest explanation is likely to be the most valid. I think it is the single most important concept for physicians to grasp.

The Law of Parsimony dictates a logical economy to cause and effect, and helps one arrive quickly at the most logical cause of the problem, usually the one involving the fewest logistical leaps. The detective first wants to know where the spouse was at the time of the other spouse’s murder. The mechanic wants to know if the car always vibrates or just when you hit the brakes. As the old saying goes, if there are hoof prints, look for horses before you start rounding up zebras.

Emergency room doctors understand the Law of Parsimony. A patient comes in hypoxic with shortness of breath, and no breath sounds on one side. If the ER docs wait until they have X-rays and blood work, that patient is dead. The Law of Parsimony predicts tension pneumothorax requiring immediate placement of a chest tube. It is almost always correct.

Connecting the Pathological Dots

Unfortunately, most doctors outside the ER don’t embrace the Law of Parsimony. If a patient comes in with a cluster of symptoms—high blood pressure, obesity, high blood sugar, dyslipidemia, elevated CRP, elevated liver enzymes, peripheral neuropathy, and depression—most likely she will leave her doctor(s) with a different prescription for each problem. It will never occur to anyone to try to connect the pathological dots.

My background is ER medicine. So, even with indolent disease I think in critical care mode. You never try to manage disease in the ER; you try to fix problems. When I started to see, across diverse specialties, the repeated mention of inflammation and oxidation as fundamental drivers of common disorders, it made sense to try and figure out what was causing the inflammation, regardless of how or where it was manifesting in the body. If inflammation is reduced, all its various manifestations start to disappear.

By definition, inflammation implies an activated immune system. Hmmm, so what would the Law of Parsimony predict to be the cause of a chronically over- active immune system? Usually, the trigger is a non-self antigen. In the absence of an obvious external infectious pathogen or allergen, the Law of Parsimony would further predict an “inside” job. The source of that antigen would most likely be a resident with full access to the house-—the proverbial “butler.”

Many studies have drawn connections between diet and diseases associated with inflammation and oxidation (“oximation”). A high glycemic diet promotes these diseases. A vegetable-rich diet reduces them. Whatever is triggering the immune system overactivity thrives on sugar and is subdued by something in fresh produce.

My work with women led me to believe this trigger is Candida albicans. This fungus certainly fits the logistical profile predicted by the Law of Parsimony. It is part of the normal human microbiota (ie, it lives on the “inside”). It thrives on sugar. It can cause an inflammatory response. It has capacity, motive, proximity, and opportunity—the four qualities of any prime suspect.

Reducing Fungus Reduces Morbidity

If Candida were the culprit, is it possible that the benefits obtained from a high-vegetable diet are related to naturally occurring fungicidal or fungstatic compounds produced by certain plants? I certainly think so.  

If you’re already using natural therapies, you’ve probably found certain products that give repeated and reliable benefits in managing common chronic diseases. I’m talking about things like olive leaf, probiotics, garlic, resveratrol, a variety of herbs, iodine, oil of oregano and other spice extracts, vitamin C, and extracts of dark Amazonian fruits such as Acai. Many of these substances do contain naturally-occurring antifungal compounds.

By the way, statins and aspirin have also proven to reduce the incidence of a wide range of seemingly unrelated diseases. The common link between these conditions is, of course, oximation.  It turns out that statins are antifungal! I’ve proven it to myself by adding statins of different potencies to petri dishes inoculated with Candida albicans. The size of the zone of inhibition correlates with the potency of the statin. Aspirin also inhibits growth of Candida. Reduce the Candida, and you reduce the oximation, which in turn, reduces morbidity.

A New Model of Cancer’s Origin

So, what about cancer: the ultimate disease of oximation? Is it simply an unfortunate, inevitable result of bad genes, aging, and bad behavior like smoking and suntanning? Or can it, too, be prevented and even treated by changing the internal environment? I believe the latter proposition.

If you think about it, the basic pleomorphic transformation of a normal cell into cancer is similar to spore formation in fungi in response to certain environmental conditions. Previously, we thought cancer was strictly the result of DNA damage. The reality is, cancer cells have made a “decision” to turn some genes off (the ones that induce apoptosis) and others on (the ones that promote growth) in order to ensure their survival.

The conventional paradigm for cancer views it as an “invasive disease” to be conquered. As we have come to understand more about the process, it is becoming clear that human cells, not unlike microbes, have a cognizance of their ambient environment. If the environment becomes incompatible with survival, cells respond by changing their pattern of DNA transcription to one that is better able to survive a harsh environment.

A low oxygen, altered pH, ischemic environment with chronic inflammation is not a happy place for human cells. That’s precisely the milieu you get when thyroid hormone declines, the diet is heavy on sugar, Candida grows wild and the immune system is in constant over-drive.

Human cells prefer a high-energy metabolic pattern supportive of oxidative phosphorylation. If the ambient environment is changed to support this, human cells will “choose” to return to normal DNA transcription. Abnormal cells will undergo apoptosis, and they will cease to produce vascular growth factors. New cells will adopt normal DNA transcription patterns, basically reversing the mutagenic process.

Many substances derived from plants can help this reversal process to a degree. Curcumin (turmeric) is one good example; there are many others. This isn’t to say that one can “cure” cancer with turmeric. But it points to a new and different direction for preventing and managing cancer.

The vast majority of cancers occur in people already manifesting signs of oximation: elevated insulin, increased abdominal girth, hypertension, low hormone levels, elevated markers of inflammation, cognitive decline, “benign” skin lesions, vascular disease, erectile dysfunction, auto-immune disorders. In patients over 50, I can always go back in their clinical history and show them when they started developing the inner environment conducive to cancer.

It’s been my own personal and clinical experience that cancer can be reversed and certainly prevented through intensive lifestyle and nutrition-based interventions aimed at reducing oximation. And I’m not the only one saying so. Max Gerson MD said so. Richard Passwater Ph.D. said so. Nicholas Gonzales, MD, who is regularly curing “incurable” pancreatic cancer using “environmental medicine” says so.

Stanislaw Burzynski MD, in Houston, combines nutritional therapies with his antineoplastons. His before and after images of hundreds of cancer patients leaves no doubt that his treatments are successful.

I recently spent a week with Reno oncologist James Forsythe, MD, and I had the opportunity to meet a number of his patients. Some shared their charts with me. By combining small amounts of conventional chemotherapy with therapies designed to reverse the oncogenic process, he is getting better results than he got when he used inside the box therapy only. Other conventionally trained physicians are also coming to similar conclusions.

Treating the Untreatable

The photos seen here are of a patient with stage 4 melanoma, being treated by a colleague of mine in Dallas. I was called in as a consultant last Fall.

This woman is 64 years old. The melanoma was initially diagnosed in 2004 and treated with wide surgical excision. When this new lesion occurred, imaging showed metastases to the lymph nodes and liver. She was treated with palliative radiation. Note that there is no accepted, even marginally effective conventional treatment for stage 4 nodal melanoma; the five-year mortality is roughly 90%. Having failed all prior conventional therapies, she was seeking care from an “alternative” doctor.

The initial photo was taken on Nov. 30th 2009. The second one was from Feb 9th. Clearly, we’re seeing regression of this advanced tumor, and this was accomplished with a comprehensive multimodal regimen aimed not at treating cancer per se, but at reversing oximation and restoring autonomous homeostasis. Despite the dire prognosis 6 years ago, this patient is very much alive. She is proudly collecting and saving the necrosing tissue as it deciduates, like leaves in the Fall.

Obviously, this is no slam-dunk miracle cure we’re seeing here, but this woman sure is grateful for the improvement. And it is not a random spontaneous regression. Stage 4 melanomas just don’t behave that way. Something is causing this tumor to regress. The point is, we didn’t treat this lady’s cancer; we treated the environment that prompted once-normal cells to make an adaptive change in DNA transcription.

In presenting this case, I’m not implying that Candida causes cancer. But Candida overgrowth occurs in and contributes to an internal environment that is highly conducive to neoplasia.

Neither am I suggesting that we, as primary care doctors, go taking on stage 4 cancers. We should refer those cases, if we see them, to doctors who are having success with advanced neoplasms. But if changing a patient’s internal environment through dietary interventions and natural therapies can have this much impact on advanced melanoma, it is probably worth taking a look at for less serious disease.

The statistics say that 1 in 3 Americans will have cancer at some point in their lives. That means you or someone you are close to will get cancer. After diagnosis is no time to try to become an expert. You should have some fundamental knowledge about how to make decisions about therapeutic options. Otherwise, you’ll likely end up a victim of one type of quack or another, whether conventional or unconventional.

Lifestyle-based intervention aimed at re-establishing a healthy internal milieu makes good medical sense on many levels.

For more of Dr. Mitchell on Oximation, subscribe to our Premium Web Access and search “oximation.” You can also learn more at Dr. Mitchell’s website.