thanks very much for your response and apologies for the delay in my reply. i have been extremely tired and was away a few days.
thanks for the tips as well, they make sense. its so easy to look up peoples credentials these days and cross reference their information that i don't know how people get away with lying or peddling junk degrees but apparently they do. and yeah, there are certainly bad MDs as well, i've met my fair share!!
i am really interest in what you would look out for to diagnose cancer. the reason for this is because i'm pretty sure most people in my field are like me, and dismiss anything alternative out of hand, but don't get any pointers about how to go about actually verifying what there is evidence for. so it wouldn't surprise me if people in western medicine do not use the same diagnostic markers. if i could work out what cellular processes and molecular pathways might be involved in the things you look for, i can check whether there is anything in the literature for them in relation to cancer, and if not, look at the transcription and protein data we have (or more realistically, public datasets as we only study a few types of cancer) for differential expression related to your markers. i understand from what you said before that this would be individual specific, but if there's anything reasonably common that might do. it would be awesomely cool if anything got thrown up as it could lead to new diagnostic tests.
Like I said, I don't diagnose cancer... but when cancer patients come to me with a pre-existing diagnosis, asking me to balance their bodies, there are some typical signs. Cancer patients all have excess in their bodies, due to some debility with detoxing or they are in a "holding" pattern of some kind. Not to mention the cancer itself is an excess. In the Asian systems, it tends to manifest as dampness and phlegm. There's something unhealthy in there that can't be purged, which inhibits the cellular environment.
Once cancer patients start going the chemo and radiation route, they all have toxic heat with yin deficiency. Yin deficiency looks like... the material substance of the body is depleted and can no longer regulate all the hot, metabolic functions. Yin is cooling and without it, their bodies are on fire. They get night and day sweating, any amount of endurance causes too much heat, their sleep is disturbed due to all the heat, their stomachs are burning when they eat food, etc. Taraxicum is often used in this phase along with other toxic heat clearing herbs. Even modern medicine is now manufacturing drugs based on taraxicum, though they seem to be inferior to the whole plant.
In late stage terminal cancer, the excesses overwhelm the body and deplete it of all its vital treasures. This is what we call excess with deficiency. A lot of modern people have bodily excess but they can live because their underlying bodily resources are still strong enough to fight it. Your arteries can be full of plaque and your blood pressure high, but your heart can be strong enough to force the blood to flow. Eventually when the heart gets too weak to sustain this, the person has a heart attack. In TCM we call it heart yang collapse because all of the fire of the heart dissipates, the person gets cold sensations in their chest, they get cold sweats, and the fire of the upper body begins to go out (the lower fire, or root fire, comes from the kidneys/adrenals). This happens because excess eventually overwhelms the natural yang of the heart, causing deficiency.
Cancer is complicated because it's always some mix of excess and deficiency. Pure excess conditions and pure deficiency conditions are easy to treat, but a mix of the two is complicated.
What I'm describing here is oversimplified. Bottom line, in TCM we don't look at "cancer", we look at what the body is doing. If the body has too much heat, we cool it; if too much dampness, we dry it; if too much cold, we warm it; if too much toxic, we clear it, etc. Modern medicine fights cancer, but they don't know what to do to aid the body. For example, most cancer patients have devastated immune systems... we might give huang qi (astragalus) for that. Modern medicine has no comparable adjunct because modern medicine is concerned only with what the pathology is doing, not what the body is doing. Also, they can't patent herbs, only their pharmaceutical variations, which tend to be inferior... so herbs are not profitable, so they don't use them.
In TCM we fortify the body and then the wisdom of the body rectifies the disease. We don't fight the disease itself -- at least, not traditionally.
That's why a lot of herbalists encourage cancer patients to do herbal medicine + chemo. Chemo gets at the cancer, and the herbs protect the body.
