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Mark Liponis, My Personal Story

Ten years ago I was diagnosed with kidney cancer. I was 37 years old at the time. It was, of course, a fearful experience, but also a very powerful experience that changed my life dramatically. Despite the best of medical care, I couldn't help feeling deeply that something was missing.

Nothing in my traditional medical training in internal medicine could help me with my biggest concern; I asked my doctors, "How did I get it? What caused it?" Unfortunately, none of my doctors could help me with these questions. I wanted to know exactly what caused it, so I could do my best to avoid whatever it was. Some suggested a genetic cause. This theory was completely unappealing, since at the time there seemed little could be done to change one's genes. It also seemed unlikely, since no one in my family had ever had kidney cancer that I know about.

Soon after my own diagnosis, however, research showed that the rates of kidney cancer have been increasing steadily over the past 20 years. Clearly, human genes have not changed appreciably in the past 20 years; this rise in kidney cancer must therefore be largely environmental. This environmental effect was my first major realization.

Second, I was also very interested in how long I had unknowingly had this tumor. I asked several doctors and the best estimates were ten years! This tumor had been growing inside of me for a decade!

The impact of this information and the entire experience hit me like a ton of bricks. The result was the beginning of my own personal search for true prevention.

It was clear to me that if a process that was at least partly of environmental origin and could progress unnoticed for up to a decade before any symptoms developed, there was a tremendous opportunity to correct the underlying imbalances that allowed this process to originate and continue. This does not apply only to cancer. Most of the common diseases that affect us have been progressing for years before the first symptom occurs. This is certainly true of illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, adult-onset diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease as well as cancer. Many of these disorders have environmental and/or nutritional origins.

If these environmental and nutritional imbalances are identified long before a disease can be diagnosed, then balance can be restored with environmental, nutritional and lifestyle intervention, thereby preventing the disease. Rather than the invasive and potentially toxic therapies needed to treat disease, these nutritional and lifestyle interventions employ natural and noninvasive means to prevent disease.

My work and research for the past 7 years has developed a new focus; to understand and identify the key imbalances that often precede the development of diseases by many years. I consider this an approach of true or ultraprevention, rather than one of detection and identification of diseases by the standard screening tests.

To learn more about how you can identify and treat these key imbalances, read on about the Five Forces of Illness and how to eliminate them.