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How to help your body help itself

In this exclusive excerpt from his new book, Anticancer: A New Way of Life, French psychiatrist and neuroscientist David Servan-Schreiber describes how he survived cancer with medical treatment and by boosting his immune system’s natural defenses through diet, exercise and a positive outlook on life.

David Servan-Schreiber | November 2008 issue

Shortly afterward, George, a second patient who’d had a kidney transplant in the same hospital, developed a metastatic melanoma with no original tumor. This time, MacKie could no longer believe in coincidence or blame the impenetrable mysteries of medicine. Thanks to a register of transplanted organs, she traced the kidneys back to the donor. The donor’s general health had met all the usual requirements: no hepatitis, no HIV and, of course, no cancer.

But MacKie persevered, and finally discovered the donor’s name in a Scottish database of patients with melanoma. Eighteen years earlier, the donor had been operated on for a tiny, quarter-centimeter (one-tenth of an inch) skin tumor. The woman had received care for 15 years at a melanoma clinic. Finally, she had been declared “completely cured” a year before her accidental death, unrelated to this old, extinct cancer.

In this patient, for all intents and purposes “cured” of cancer, organs healthy in appearance still carried microtumors her immune system kept in check. These were transplanted into new bodies—George’s and Mary-Ann’s—whose immune systems had been weakened on purpose to prevent rejection of the transplanted kidneys. In the absence of a normal immune system, the microtumors rapidly went back to their chaotic, invasive ways.

Thanks to her detective work, MacKie convinced her colleagues in the department of renal transplants to stop the second patient’s daily immunosuppressants. Instead, they gave him an aggressive immunostimulant, so he’d reject the melanoma-bearing transplant as quickly as possible. A few weeks later, they were able to remove the kidney. Even though he had to go back to dialysis, two years later George was still alive and showed no signs of melanoma. Once it had recovered its natural power, his immune system fulfilled its mission and expelled the tumors.

Researchers were able to show that the white blood cells of Professor Zheng Cui’s mice could eliminate as many as 2 billion cancer cells in a few weeks. Barely six hours after the injection of cancer cells, the abdomens of these special mice are invaded by 160 million white blood cells. In the face of this onslaught, 20 million cancer cells vanish in half a day.

Prior to these experiments on Mighty Mouse and its descendants, no one would have dared hope the immune system was capable of mobilizing to such an extent— not to the point of coming to terms with a cancer that was 10 percent of the body’s weight. No one would have imagined it possible, the immunologists least of all.

The reigning consensus on the limits of the immune system would probably have prevented a conventional immunologist from paying attention to the phenomenal health of Mouse No. 6. That’s what Lloyd Old, professor of cancer immunology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, thought. To Zheng—who didn’t know anything about immunology before coming across Mouse No. 6—he wrote, “We can be thankful that you are not an immunologist. Otherwise, you would have definitely thrown away this mouse without hesitation.” To which Zheng replied, “We should just be grateful that Nature never read our textbooks.”

The body’s resources and its potential for dealing with disease are still too-often underestimated by modern science. Of course, in the case of Mighty Mouse, this extraordinary resistance is related to the rodent’s genes. But what about all the people, perhaps like you and me, who aren’t endowed with these exceptional genes? To what extent can we expect an “ordinary” immune system to perform extraordinary feats?

The answer resides in the fighting spirit of our immune cells, crucial participants in our readiness to foil cancer. We can arouse their vitality or, at the very least, stop slowing them down. The supermice succeed better than anyone else, but each of us can “urge on” our white blood cells so they give their all in their confrontation with cancer. Several studies show that, like soldiers, human immune cells fight harder when they’re treated with respect (i.e., when they’re well fed and protected from toxins) and their commanding officer keeps a cool head (he or she deals with his or her emotions and acts with poise).

Studies on the activity of immune cells (including NK cells) show they’re at their best when our diets are healthy, our environment is “clean” and our physical activity involves the entire body, not just our brains and hands. Immune cells are also sensitive to our emotions. They react positively to states in which joy and feelings of connection with those around us predominate. It’s as though our immune cells mobilize better in the service of a life objectively worth living. (For more on natural ways to boost your immune system, see the box on page 53.)

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