FISCHER ON CANCER
&
BREAST TUMORS - DEATH & DENTISTRY EXCERPTS
CARCINOMA
p. 44 note 39.
“Hunt continues for first ‘cause’ of the
malignant overgrowths. Authority finds
it in ‘hereditary,’ constitutional weakness or infection.
These facts appear: family history
may or may not rise as ghost in
the specific case; the qualities of constitutional change are
universal, not
local as in tumor; infection has not been ‘proved’ but has the best of
it.
“The carcinomas of the alimentary tract,
for example, predominate on lips, tongue, tonsils, gastro-duodenal
triangle,
appendix region, sigmoid and rectum.
They show strange capacity for missing esophagus, cardiac end of
stomach, twenty feet of small intestine and most of the large bowel. The points struck are identical with those
most commonly the subject of infection either direct or metastatic
(focal).
“Similar argument holds for the carcinomas
of the uterine cervix or the mammary gland.
How could any malignancy, beginning as it does in a spot
of
square yards of similar tissue have behind it any kind of constitutional
change? The activity of a
microorganism producing local
change (like the elaboration of an anthracene-like body) could explain
the
total picture.
“Within a month, three years ago, we saw
the following initiations of “cancer”: (a) from the tongue opposite a
single
carious tooth, (b) from the edge of a half-dollar-sized and age-old
pigmented
mole, (c) from the margin of a twenty-year old ulcer consequent upon a
“burn”
initiated by a grenade exploded in the boot.
We have never observed a malignancy, even in the young, in
individuals
not possessed of obviously bad teeth and tonsils.
“To the tumor-like products of infection
(yeast infections particularly) described about 1900 by Henry George
Plummer,
Ludvig Hektoen, W E Coates, etc., Erwin F Smith (Jour Agric Res 21,
593, 1921)
added those consequent upon the effects of crown-gall inoculations into
various
plant structures. In 1920(!) he produced
neoplastic-like structures through direct application of dilute acids
and
alkalies, and by schemes which “limited the intake of oxygen, thus
compelling
the cells themselves to manufacture the stimulus which leads to the
development
of hyperplasias” (Arch Derm and Syph, 176, 1920). C
Bonne and J H Sandground (Am Jour Cancer
37, 173 (1939) ) have more recently described the effects of chronic
infection
of the gastric mucosa in monkeys in the production of what
histologically
appear as malignant overgrowths by what they declare their cause, a
nematode (Nochtia
nochti).”
FISCHER ON
BREAST TUMORS
BREAST “TUMORS” –
disappeared
after oral focal infections were removed, pp. 148-150:
[p. 148]
“The following medical history was penned
by George E. Decker (October 28, 1936).
He asked that a letter enclosed from his fifty-year old married
female
patient, P.J.C., be returned. He had
long taken care of her but she, having moved from Davenport, had not
returned
for counsel until some eight months earlier.
She was ill of ‘heart disease,’, but complained, too, of a
‘tumor’ in
her left breast.
“She had a lot of symptoms in April
1936, all stemming back to myocardial weakness with auricular
fibrillation. This in turn seemed to
depend on the condition of her teeth and x-ray survey confirmed our
suspicions. She had to have her work
done at home but when she consulted her local dentist she was told that
the
extraction of her teeth would be nothing less than a crime. Returning in a state of confusion she asked
me what to do. I told her to go home and
do just as I had ordered. … This small, very tender tumor [p.149] was
under the
edge of the areola. It is the second
subacute inflammation of this type that I have seen disappear after
infected
teeth had been removed properly. I have
another such case pending which promises a similarly good result. It has seemed to me for a long while that
when one of these tumors is discovered because it is tender, it is apt
to be of
inflammatory origin, at first anyway. … I am working with W.W. Herrman
(Professor
of Bacteriology in the University of Iowa) sending him selected
specimens of
infected teeth properly collected and he reports that he recovers
streptococci
in a considerable percentage of them. He
is positive that he gets them out of the pulp chambers and that there
is no
contamination in any of these cases. Of
course I do not send him any teeth in which the pulp chamber has ever
been
opened or otherwise tampered with.
“Word from the patient (October 21, 1936)
included ‘If I felt any better I would have to take something for it. …
The
tumor scare I guess was just a swelled gland that disappeared in a
short time’.
“Of greater interest to the patient than a
subsidence of such constitutional symptomatology as lies in a heart, a
rheumatism ,or a neuritis, is any kind of ‘tumor’ as discovered here in
the
breast. We have had some experiences
like those of Decker in several women.
Surgical diagnosis had in their instances also read ‘tumor’, but
a
happier than anticipated resolution pointed more correctly to the
diagnosis of
a metastatically induced mastitis. The
account of one, follows.
”July 10, 1938,
the
appendectomized, thin, thirty-five year old, farmer’s wife, F.F., the
mother of
four well children, suffered a chill, complained of a ‘stiffness’ in
her
throat, had headache, constipation and aversion for food.
Because ‘so tired’ she went to bed. When
examined four days later she complained
of dull pain in the right subcostal region that went through to her
back; she
had had no bowel movement for four days, and was obviously yellowed. The mouth temperature was 102.5 degrees F and
the pulse, 86. Great
tenderness was
elicitable over the gall bladder, and the edge of her liver could be
felt. Nothing else physically wrong was
discovered
except that her tonsils were smaller and firmer than normal and a
greenish pus
was expressible from them. The eight
posteriors of her thirty-two teeth, too, were blue and some filled with
amalgam.
[p.150]
“ –On Calomel, Epsom salts, bed rest and an unrestricted diet,
she
recovered so that at the end of two weeks she showed mouth temperatures
of 99
degrees F only on some afternoons with mild yellowing continuing of
interdigital skin and eye-whites. She
had lost three pounds in the period of her illness and was still
without
appetite. In this state she continued
until August 19, 1938, when she was tonsillectomized.
Two weeks later she declared herself better
than for a year past; and in the next six months gained ten pounds in
weight,
thus to weigh more than ever before in her life.
“–October 21, 1939, she complained of a
walnut-sized ‘lump’ in the lower and outer quadrant of her left breast
of which
she had become conscious in the preceding month. The
mass was sensitive, and what were palpated
as two thickened and
tender ducts could be made out. Surgical
opinion was that the circumscribed pathologically affected tissues did
not mark
a beginning malignancy and that immediate removal was not indicated. Origin of the mastitis was therefore laid in
her teeth. She consented to the
gradual
removal of five molars (November 1 go December 18, 1939).
February 15, 1940, her surgeon declared that
the mass had so far disappeared that operation no longer seemed
necessary;
since which date all evidence of disease in the breast has gone.
“Both the physician and the surgeon who see
peripheral disease widely spaced as to time or to type incline to the
view that
such separate attacks arose de novo.
Why a series of ulcer or appendix attacks; or why, as here,
heart
disease with mastitis or gall bladder disease with mammary affect? Such things as couples seem unrelated. Yet as Billings and Rosenow early pointed
out, the visual field is cleared at once if these repeated or
differentiated
diseases are viewed as the consequences of metastatic infection from a
persistent focus of infection. Yet
more!
“Such repeated or coincidental pathological
manifestation can be understood on no other ground.
Chorea, endocarditis and joint inflammations
may, therefore, all appear simultaneously; or these afflictions of
nervous
system, heart and skeletal structure come about in succeeding decades.”