Link Found Between Allergies and Lower Cancer Risk
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Exception for Asthma and Lung Cancer
It seems that an exception may exist for asthma and lung cancer, though. Most of the previous studies analyzed had found a positive correlation between the two. And the study team explained that, “essentially, asthma obstructs clearance of pulmonary mucous, blocking any potentially prophylactic benefit of allergic expulsion”. On the flip side, other lung-related allergies have protective effects.
Should We Be Suppressing Allergic Reactions?
The key takeaway from this study is that, if allergies are the body’s natural means of protecting itself against disease, then why are we turning this mechanism off via artificial intervention?
According to the study team, more research in this area will be needed. “We hope that our analyses and arguments will encourage such cost / benefit analyses. More importantly, we hope that our work will stimulate reconsideration [...] of the current prevailing view [...] that allergies are merely disorders of the immune system which, therefore, can be suppressed with impunity,” wrote the team, which was led by Paul Sherman, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell.
The Importance of Uncomfortable Symptoms
In reality, the findings of this study will not come as a huge surprise to those who are vaguely familiar with the basics of natural health and healing. Running noses, coughs, skin breakouts and other symptoms are the body’s way of eliminating toxins and unwanted materials which it finds it cannot carry out via the more usual channels. While conventional medicine likes to suppress them, natural healers know that they can be valuable for healing.
In fact, some natural healers even deliberately induce symptoms to speed up the body’s recovery processes. One symptom which comes to mind is fever, which helps to kill invading organisms, stimulates the body’s production of more immune cells, as well as increases the activity of these cells.
Suppressing symptoms may bring short-term relief for physical discomfort, but it has the potential to do untold harm to the body in the long run. Unfortunately, that is exactly what most people are doing today via the use of chemical medications, which are themselves a source of toxins for the body. What a strange irony.
Source
The Upside to Allergies: Cancer Prevention (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showStoryContent?doi=10.1086%2F%2Fpr.2008.010.27.1828&cookieSet=1)
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