There's a relationship between cancer and delusion. Cancer is basically never one mutation. A cell typically has to be damaged in a bunch of ways. One of the most common involves contact inhibition - normally, cells will grow (keep dividing) until they bump into other cells. When they make contact, that inhibits their growth. This way functional tissues form. They don't turn into knots of tumors trying to outcompete each other for blood and other supplies. Knocking out the genetic machinery of contact inhibition is one step on the path to cancer.
Another common step is putting a protein on the cell's surface that is a special self-destruct signal for immune cells. Normally this protects against autoimmune disease: if immune cells learn to attack the self, then this signal on the surface of healthy cells gets the corrupted immune cells to self-destruct (and stop producing even more immune cells that act like racist law enforcement). It's a way to unlearn stray allergies that form against the body's own tissues. Meanwhile, the immune system also wipes out cancer cells. It has evolved to recognize cells that are breaking contact inhibition, and destroy them.
As you might imagine, if cancer cells have mutated to always express that self-destruct signal, now they are free to grow like crazy without much disruption from the immune system. Any immune cells that cotton on get triggered to self-destruct.
Those are just two genetic "fractures" if you will. The first is to my knowledge present in all cancer, while the second is very common. A typical malignant (cancer) cell will have a dozen broken gaskets like this. It's eerie, but cancer actually evolves in place from a healthy cell to a lethally rogue cell, step by step.
The same has been found for people who commit suicide: where evidence can be gathered, the tragedy developed step by step through little changes in what would be normal. Many little things are usually there - internal and external - to support self-preservation. So it's interesting that science now has knowledge of what those damage steps are, or can be. Four examples are being a victim of abuse, chronic pain, cutting, and failed suicide attempts, which act a bit like training wheels. Self-harm gradually gets normalized in the person's mind, or even gets associated with "solving" problems.
These are examples of evolution - not the kind we like, but the kind we don't like.
While a person is in chemotherapy or radiation therapy for cancer, the mutation steps and therefore the evolution comes even faster, which is why doctors consider it critical to use fast-acting and potent methods. If they don't, the cancer develops resistance to the drugs in much the same way bacteria do, and in a matter of weeks. Most cancer treatment actually breeds more lethal cancer cells, so it has to act fast.
However, it would be fatal to believe the stories that you can drink some kind of tea or eat brown rice or hold crystals and that'll work. People have been known to spontaneously get better, but this has been researched now, and it's around 1 in 10,000 cases. You don't like those odds, or shouldn't, however mystical you're feeling. But if you come down with cancer, everyone will tell you about this stuff. Everyone wants you to cheer up, and it's great to have them rooting for you. Everyone has heard of somebody who's heard of somebody who has the cure, or just got better through a good attitude. If I hadn't gone to the doctor and done what the pros said, I would definitely not be here. Survival rate for that kind of cancer without treatment is 0%. With treatment, I was fortunately one of the 70% who make it.
Which reminds me of conspiracy theories and just general delusionality. Delusions evolve into place. It's remarkably similar to what I've described above (which is the point of this post and the setup so far). There are many ways mentally healthy people are protected against inaccurate ideas:
- Other people will tell you if you're sounding too crazy
- The news is mostly factual
- There are many books
- If you know how to use the internet well, you can fact-check almost anything
- Crazy beliefs lead to crazy expectations, and when those don't come to pass, that gives correction
And so on and so forth. The "cancerous" mutations in these checks and balances can include things like these:
- Calling news fake in general
- Asserting without proof that scientists have a hidden agenda
- Saying all sources are biased and implying this means equally biased
- Claiming that anyone who is paid for their work is an unreliable source of information
- Claiming that any money link however lengthy to a disreputable group proves collusion
- Attacking the character of anyone who disagrees
- Using ridicule in place of an argument
- Stirring up guilt, fear, pride, or anger as if merely feeling any of these establishes fact or responsibility
- Casting blame elsewhere for what goes wrong and could have been predicted
- Altering data to fit a narrative
- Cherry-picking data to paint a narrative
- Ignoring dissenting arguments and making no effort to uncover and examine more of them
- The primally persuasive quality of self-confidence or unswayable belief
- Portraying belief itself as a fundamental good and doubt itself as a fundamental evil
- Threats of physical harm
- Disregarding what a person says in anger as clearly not factual or important, when actually angry people usually tell you over and over and over and over why they're angry
- Failing to recognize that anger makes you one-sided by its nature, and everyone who feels angry feels justified
- Accusing the person who says something that ends up making you feel uncomfortable or bad of being a jerk who is merely trying to insult you
- Focusing on whether someone sounds condescending rather than on what they're saying
- Confusing reading a book with being right
- Thinking that because you once held view A and now hold view B, you must have changed from an incorrect view to a correct one
- Thinking that experts are untrustworthy because you aren't smart, trained, or informed enough to follow their professional data and reasoning
- Accepting popularity as strong evidence
- Assuming that when you can poke holes in an argument, the person must not know what they're talking about, the holes are automatically major, the argument is invalid, the conclusion is wrong, and you're so very clever, whereas in truth it's difficult to present a complete argument without making everyone impatient, few people are trained for that, and many flaws are superficial or easily filled in on reflection
And so on. The more of these kinds of tendencies a person has, the more they will tend to suffer from delusions... because these bypass the reality checks that, like the immune system with cancer cells, should be finding and knocking out false beliefs.
