Caution: Do Not Try to Boost Your Immune System

Rockets Need Boosts, Not Immune Systems

When you fully grasp the power of the immune system to fight cancer, the idea of “boosting” your immune system is enticing. Marketing experts understand this. They know it is our nature to seek short cuts to achieve our goals. “Boost” is a word used by marketing executives when they lure us into thinking that some product or activity will do something better, or faster, or stronger, or more efficient. However, it is a word that leads to fuzzy thinking about our immune system.

Words have power and influence. If you begin to think you can “boost” your immune system, you will end up misdirecting your thinking and your actions.

The concept of boosting immunity actually makes little sense scientifically.

Perhaps, the following analogy will be helpful. Suppose you have a rocket and you want it to deliver a payload into space. If the rocket, working at its optimum level, is not capable of producing enough thrust to escape the earth’s gravity, then you will need to attach booster rockets to its side to give it the added boost it needs to achieve its mission. It is not able to do it on its own. It needs a boost.

However if you have a high performance automobile engine that has a rated horsepower, but the engine has dirty air filters, dirty fuel filters, clogged oil filters, and the ignition timing is off, that engine does not need something added to its fuel to give it a boost. It needs to be returned to its optimum level of operating efficiency.

Likewise, if your immune system has been suppressed then you need to concentrate on restoring it to its optimum. You need to remove the things that suppress its operating efficiency and then maintain daily life choices that promote immune system health.

Why doesn’t the immune system stop all cancers?

It is puzzling that the immune system doesn’t attack all cancer cells. Knowing the design and intent of certain immune cells to attack cancer, what can account for this failure that allows some cancer cells to slip through its defenses?

Many researchers theorize that since cancer is not one disease, but a whole range with varying characteristics, some cancer cells remain hidden for a while. These researchers say that in some cases the altered antigen properties appear so clearly on the tumor cell surface that the immune system immediately finds it and attacks.

In other cases, the change is less apparent. The tumor has time to gain an advantage, growing until it constitutes such a larger conglomerate of cells that the immune system, once it gets started, finds it difficult to keep up. In its advanced stages cancer cells have the ability to proliferate at an accelerated rate..

Obviously surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy (or a combination) are necessary to reduce the tumor mass and enable the immune forces the time to gain an upper hand.

The question is, what causes the immune system to be slow in recognizing the tumor in the first place?

The consensus of current scientific opinion is in 90% of the cases, the inability of the immune system to stop cancer at its early stages is the result of its weakened state. When the immune system becomes suppressed and overburdened, it is no longer able to operate at its optimum level.

This web site is dedicated to discussing the main causes of immune suppression and what you can do to restore immune health to its optimum.