Righting a Wrong Turn
223
helped his patients greatly improve the quality and quantity of their
lives, as compared to clinical prognoses. This approach also enhances
chemotherapy's effectiveness while minimizing its side effects, and it
dramatically increases the likelihood of a "miracle"—total regression and
cure of the cancer.
All this really shouldn't be so surprising. Under hypnosis the mind
can completely block pain, and research described in the next chapter
has shown that it does so by changing electrical potentials in the body.
How can we be sure it couldn't create appropriate electrical changes
around a tumor and melt it away? There are still major problems with
these psychological approaches, however. Only a minority of people are
able or willing to muster the high level of dedication needed to make
them work, even under the gun of death. Moreover, they require time,
the very thing a cancer patient is short of, and they often don't produce
a complete cure even when practiced diligently. Still, they're encourag-
ing signs that the tide is beginning to turn from the warfare mode to the
simpler—more elegant, as a mathematician would say—ideal of chang-
ing the cellular environment that allows a tumor to flourish.
Could we really do the job more directly by applying the proper elec-
trical input to aim a surefire regenerative influence at the tumor? I'm sad
to say that most of the few researchers who've tried electricity against
cancer have used the "kill the enemy" approach. Tumors are somewhat
more sensitive to heat than normal tissue, so some doctors are using
directed beams of microwaves to cook them without, it's hoped, destroy-
ing too many healthy cells. FDA approval for general use of this method
is expected soon. It has been known since the time of Burr and Lund
that growing tissue is electrically negative, and cancer is the most nega-
tive of all. Hence some researchers have tried to inhibit tumor growth
by canceling the offending polarity with positive current. Early reports
were encouraging, but we now know that toxic metallic ions are released
from most positive electrodes, so this method must be tested with great
caution.
Only one research team has sought a reintegrative effect of electric
current. In the late 1950s Carroll E. Humphrey and E. H. Seal of the
Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins tried pulsed direct cur-
rents on standardized fast-growing skin tumors in mice. Even though
they used both positive and negative polarities, their results seemed sen-
sational. In one series they got total remission in 60 percent of the test
animals after only three weeks; all the control mice had died by then. In
another
series
the control tumors averaged
seven
times
the size of the
ones treated with current. Unfortunately, present evidence doesn't really