Ebbie, you're absolutely right. Andrew Weil made exactly the same point many years ago--it might have been in his book "Health and Healing." He said that the National Cancer Institute should put its money into studying wart cures. A wart is actually a kind of a tumor that is triggered by a virus and that seems to be "hidden" from the normal immune surveillance mechanisms of the body. Once the body realizes it's there and doesn't belong, it's easily disposed of. The interesting thing is that many effective "cures" for warts work largely through suggestion: in effect, the mind tells the body to "wake up" and get rid of the wart. If we could figure out how to do the same thing with other, more dangerous tumors, we'd be in pretty good shape. I've long believed that most of what we doctors do (whether we practice "standard" Western medicine, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, or what have you) is simply to activate the body's natural healing process.

Aloha,
Mark