Size matters. I’m not talking about the letters of your bra. Singer Christina Aguillera reportedly grew to an E cup after the birth of her baby. Nor the length of your penis. According to a quick Web search, actor Orlando Bloom and singer Justin Bieber have large private parts but the article listed no measurements. I’m talking about human cells.
The human cell varies in size from 8 micrometers (a red blood cell) to 130 micrometers (the female egg or ovum). Not many people, myself included, regularly talk in micrometers.
How big is a meter, millimeter, or micrometer?
To understand the scale of a cell, let’s go over some everyday items and their sizes. It is difficult to conceptualize how many cells a human body has and how small a cell is. But let’s start with some facts. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Science in Leipzig, Germany, estimate that a typical man has 36 trillion (36,000,000,000,000) cells while a woman has 28 trillion cells. To get a feel for how small the cell is, consider that a grain of salt is 500 micrometers, but the largest human cell is about 130 micrometers. But how big is a micrometer, also called a micron?
Let’s start with something we are more familiar with: the meter. A meter is an international unit of measure and is about 3.3 feet.
Some items that are close to the length of a meter: a guitar, a baseball bat, a golf club
A centimeter is 1/100 of a meter. Some things that are roughly a centimeter: width of an average fingernail, a standard staple, diameter of a small button
A millimeter is 1/1000 of a meter. Some things that are the size of a millimeter: a sharp pencil point. A new crayon point is about 2 mm.
A micrometer is 1/1,000,000 (millionth) of a meter. A micrometer is too small for the naked eye to see. Some items that are roughly a micrometer include: a single bacterium, the head of a human sperm cell, the width of a cotton fiber.
One of the smallest human cells, the sperm, is about 30 micrometers while the largest human cell, the oocyte (or egg) is over 100 micrometers and is the only human cell visible without a microscope. An intriguing TikTok video shows how small the human egg is. In this image the dime is compared to a small dot which has about 10 human egg cells.
This next graphic compares the human egg to a frog egg and a chicken egg.
And among human cells, the human egg is gigantic!
By the time a solid cancer (such as breast, lung, or prostate) is detectable, cancer cells reside not only in a primary tumor but they have most likely moved to other places in the body. Often cancer cells that are away from the primary tumor stay dormant until the primary tumor is removed. (This is probably worth a post or two by itself.)
Blood tumors, such as leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma, are often detected through blood tests not by imaging. While medical doctors may want to “scoop” out a solid tumor surgically, they will miss the cancer cells in other parts of the body, which are too small to be detected.
Current medical technology can identify solid cancer at 3 millimeters (3/1000 of a meter) in size, much larger than a human cell, which is measured in micrometers (1/1,000,000 of a meter). Hence cancer patients, who rely on local treatments like surgery and radiation to clean out their cancer, may be disappointed to know how common cancer recurrence is. The Cancer Therapy Advisor (part of the Haymarket Medical Network) published recurrence estimates for selected cancers.
Cancer Type | Recurrence Rate |
Bladder | 50% after cystectomy |
Breast | 30% overall, 5 to 9% with letrozole or placebo during median 10.6 years |
Colorectal | 17% after curative surgical resection with microscopically clear margins |
Glioblastoma | Nearly 100% |
Leukemia, childhood, acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) | 15 to 20% |
Prostate | 24% after prostatectomy at 10 years, 40% for intermediate-risk disease, 48% for high-risk disease. |
Local treatments like radiation and surgery cannot address cancer at the cellular level; they are simply too imprecise. When people get a diagnosis of cancer, their fear may cause them to blindly accept the standard cancer protocol for their cancer, often surgery and radiation without considering possible side effects. Radiation can cause secondary cancers and heart damage while surgery can lead to pain, blood clots, and infections. Medical doctors in the U.S. are required to follow the standard protocol and have no intention of harming their patients. However, by doing your own research, following a whole foods, low-protein plant-based diet and taking supplements/nutraceuticals, you may have better results than following the standard protocol. The sad facts are that conventional methods often cause more harm to the body without treating the danger of microscopic cancer cells.
Mark Simon, director of Nutritional Oncology Research Institute, discourages people from getting surgery, pointing to the animal studies on cancer and surgery. Those studies showed that animals with cancer who received surgery would often get cancer recurrences because removal of the primary tumor stimulated the microscopic cancer cells in other parts of the body. For example, in the article “Potential impact of invasive surgical procedures on primary tumor growth and metastasis” (Clinical and Experimental Metastasis (2018) 35: 319-331 Alieva and others state, “...growing evidence suggests that even a minor surgical trauma can influence several (patho) physiological processes that might promote postoperative metastatic spread and tumor recurrence.”
In short, surgery can stimulate microscopic cancer cells in other parts of the body. You may need cancer surgery for other reasons: because you are in pain from a growing tumor or you have a blockage of a vital body function, such as waste removal. But if you tumor isn't in that category, using precision nutrition, supplements and nutraceuticals is far less risky. See https://howtostarvecancernaturally.com/cancer-surgery
Size matters. Surgery and radiation may clear away large masses of cancer cells in the body, but they won’t get rid of microscopic cancer cells. To manage those microscopic cancer cells, you must use systemic (not local) treatments, such as nutraceuticals and diet, and as a last resort–chemotherapy.
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