Every Type of Cancer Explained in 19 Minutes

If you or someone you love has been told the word cancer, one of the first things you realize is that almost nobody actually explains what kind of cancer you're dealing with in a way that makes sense. You get a name, maybe a stage, maybe a few scary words, and then you're sent home to Google it. And that's a terrible way to learn about the biggest fight in your life and really how to do it correctly. I'm Dr. Dino Prato, founder of Invita Medical Centers. For the last 25 years, my team and I have helped thousands of patients who were told by the top cancer institutes around the country there was nothing left that could be done. And we've helped them using precision targeting and care that's highly detailed. And one of the most common things we see, our patients are handed a diagnosis, but they're never handed a map. And they may know the name of what they have, but they do not know what family it belongs to. They don't know why it behaves the way it behaves, and they don't know why one cancer can be slow and another one can be explosive. So in this video, I'm gonna walk you through every major type of cancer in plain English that will help you to actually understand exactly what type of cancer you have, where it starts, how it behaves, and what makes it more aggressive than others. So before we get started, make sure you talk to a doctor before you change anything in your healthcare. And let's get started. First, I need you to understand one thing. Cancer is not one disease. That's one of the biggest misconceptions in medicine. People say cancer, it's like a single enemy, and it's not. Cancer is really a massive category of diseases that share one basic behavior. These cells grow and they grow uncontrollably, and they have very different targets when you break them down with precision testing. But beyond that, these diseases can be radically different. Different tissues, different biology, different speed, different spread patterns. Different vulnerabilities, different treatments, different biomarkers, different immune profiles. Even two cancers of the same type and stage can have completely different markers. So it gets even more detailed than what I'm gonna talk about here. So instead of thinking about cancer as one disease, I want you to think about it as a big map. And in that map, almost every cancer belongs to one of the small number of major families. And the biggest family by far is this: carcinomas. Carcinomas make up about 80 to 85% of all cancers. This is the family most people run into. Carcinomas start in the epithelial cells. Those are the cells that line the surfaces of your body and organs, and that's why carcinomas are so common. You have epithelial tissue almost everywhere in the body, and when you look at the surface of the epithelial cells of the lung, colon, or other organs, you're looking at a front line of environmental and metabolic stress. Now, inside Inside the carcinoma family, there are a few important subtypes. Adenocarcinoma, which means cancer that started in a gland, like an epithelial tissue. That's common in colon, lung, pancreas, prostate, and breast. You might hear squamous cell carcinoma. This starts in a flatter surface lining the cells. That shows up some places like skin, esophagus, head and neck regions, cervix, and lungs. Transitional cell carcinoma is also called urethral carcinoma. It's common in the bladder lining. And now let's move through a major categories of carcinoma quickly. Lung cancer is one of the biggest. The two broad buckets people hear about are non-small cell carcinoma and small cell lung carcinoma. Non-small cell cancer is more common. Small cell is usually faster and more aggressive. Breast cancer is usually a carcinoma too. Most people have heard of ductal breast cancer and lobular breast cancer. Ductal starts in the milk ducts. Lobular starts in the milk producing lobules. But even inside breast cancer, the biology can be widely different. Hormone positive in different forms, HER2 positive, which could be responsive for— to Herceptin, or it can also be triple negative. A triple negative is often a completely different battle than the average person realizes. So again, the name is not the whole story. In fact, it's the detailed testing that will tell us even more than these general categories. Colorectal cancer is usually an adenocarcinoma. It starts in the glandular lining of the colon or the rectum. People often think colon cancer is just a local tumor problem, but biologically it can be driven by very different pathways. And those pathways matter if you want a personalized treatment. Prostate cancer is usually an adenocarcinoma as well. A lot of prostate cancers are slower growing, but not all of them. Some of them can actually be aggressive. So the label prostate cancer does not automatically tell you the level of danger. Pancreatic cancer is one of the more feared carcinomas, and for a good reason. It is often found late, and it's biologically tough and difficult to treat. It has stromal barriers, difficulty for treatment to get to the tumors, and it can mutate very quickly. It tends to be aggressive. Most pancreatic cancers are in the pancreatic duct, and they're also adenocarcinomas. This is one of the cancers where early detection can be very helpful and getting the right precision care can make a difference, which is part of why outcomes are often worse. Stomach cancer, or gastric cancer, is another carcinoma, often adenocarcinoma. Liver cancer, especially hepatocellular carcinoma, starts in the liver cells. Kidney cancer, especially renal cell carcinoma, is one that's important subtype that can behave very differently from other organ cancers. Bladder cancer is often a urethral or transitional cell carcinoma. Ovarian cancer is often grouped as one thing by the public, but clinically it can mean several different diseases with very different behaviors. Esophageal cancer can either be adenocarcinoma or squamous cell carcinoma depending on where it begins. Head and neck cancers can often be squamous cell carcinomas, and skin carcinomas like basal cell or squamous cell of the skin are very common and usually much more treatable than, for example, melanoma of the skin. And that distinction matters because not all cancer is the same. In fact, not all of those cancers start in the same lining of those cells or organs and surfaces. So here's some preventative strategies. Obviously eating a clean diet away from foods that are carcinogenic, highly processed foods. We want to eat clean, whole foods. We want to drink lots of water, exercise, and then things like liposomal lizanthins is a very powerful way because it's molecular structures differently, and it matches the thickness of the cell lipid bilayer, and that spans the membrane like a structural bridge. And you can add that to a daily prevention strategy. Phosphatidylcholine, by using these, creates a liposomal barrier, and essentially it's like preloading the bricks to help the, uh, xanthan, the rebarb, work even better for these carcinomas, which thrive on these membrane instabilities. So that's why these fats are very important, and you can include something like 3 3,000 milligrams of fish oil, and these will help with inflammation. So when you start combining these things, you're actually changing the membrane wall, keeping them fluid and helping to alleviate these toxins along with the diet and lifestyle changes. And that's for 80 and 85% of cancer. That brings us to a family number 2, sarcomas. Sarcomas are very different from carcinomas. Sarcomas start in the connective tissue, the things that hold your body together, bones, muscles, fat. Cartilage, blood vessels, tendons. Sarcomas are much more rare than carcinomas in adults, but they matter a lot. And they're relatively more common in children and young adults than many people realize. Here are some of the major sarcomas: osteosarcoma, which starts in the bone; chondrosarcoma, which starts in the cartilage; liposarcoma, which starts in the fat tissue; leomielsarcoma, which starts in the smooth muscle; Radinomiosarcoma starts in the skeletal muscle lineage, and this is more common in children. Ewing sarcoma is another major one in children and young adults. Angiosarcoma starts in the blood vessel tissue. And a GIST, a gastrointestinal stromal tumor, is a specific kind of sarcoma that starts in the connective tissue of the digestive tract. The big thing to understand about sarcoma is that they're structurally based cancers. Because of that, surgery often plays a major role in early detection, though the right targeted chemo and immunotherapy targets can really help improve the strategy and outcomes depending on the type. And here are some of the preventative strategies that we can think about for carcinomas, along with, as I'll always say, the clean diet. But by utilizing liposomal blends that I've just talked about, the axanthins and the phosphatidylcholine and 3,000+ milligrams of fish oil a day, you're effectively reinforcing the structural scaffold, again inhibiting the enzymes that allow these tumors to evade surrounding tissue. These combinations neutralize the biological rust that can happen with toxic exposure. So that's for patients to consider. Mesenchymal cell membranes are really important to be stabilized here and prevent the chronic inflammation and signaling that leads to malignant mutations in these structural foundations. So now let's move on from structural tissue to something very different. Liquid cancers. This family's called leukemias. Leukemia is not a lump of cells. It is really different than that. Leukemia starts in the blood-forming tissue of the bone marrow. That's where your blood cells are made. They're generated. So that's why leukemia treatment looks so different from the treatment of breast tumors or colon tumors or lung cancers. You can't simply remove them. Leukemia is a bit different. Now here's the easiest way to understand the leukemia names. Think of them on two axes. First axis, acute acute or chronic. Acute means faster growing, chronic means slower growing. The second axis is myeloid or lymphoid. That tells you which blood cell line the cancer came from. Once you understand that, leukemia names become so much easier to understand. And this has become one of the great stories in the treatment of cancer and cancer medicines because the targeted therapies are used here, like immunotherapies that have changed the game in these types of cancers. That acute versus chronic and myeloid versus lymphoid framework is one of the simplest and most important mental models in hematology. Here's a prevention for this type of cancer, at least basically with integrative medicine. Again, good diet, lifestyle, no refined carbohydrates, and exercise. But here we're introducing a high-dose or oral quercetin. It acts as a powerful metabolic disruptor and targets liquid nature of these cancers when combined with the xanthans that are liposomal, phosphatidylcholine, and 3,000 milligrams of fish oil, which is changing all those cell membranes, acting as like a powerful three-way attack on those membranes, they can help maintain healthy bone marrow, if you will, soil. Quercetin's foundation is more like a seed treatment. It's capable of inducing apoptosis— that's programmed cell death— so allowing these early leukemic cells to die off. And it helps to modulate some of those epigenetic stresses from the environment, inhibiting pathways like like PIK3 and AKT and others, by combining a structural support with these liposomal supplements, like I mentioned, the azanthin and the phosphatidylcholine, quercetin adds a very nice punch, if you will, in the prevention of leukemias. So that now brings us to family number 4. But leukemia is not the only cancer of blood and the immune system. There's lymphomas. People confuse leukemia and lymphomas all the time. And here's the easiest distinction. Leukemia usually begins in the marrow and in blood-forming systems, where lymphoma usually begins in the lymphocytes, immune-rich tissue, a type of immune cells that often shows up in the lymph nodes, chest, abdomen, spleen, neck, or other lymphatic tissue. So instead of a liquid blood cancer picture, lymphoma often appears as a swollen lymph node or a mass in the immune system tissue. Now lymphoma splits into two huge categories: Hodgkin's lymphoma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Hodgkin's lymphoma is defined as a particular cell type called the Reed-Sternberg cell. It tends to affect younger adults, and in many cases it's very, very treatable. It's one of those treatments that actually chemotherapy worked very well for in its standard form. But then there's non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It is much more common overall. But here's the part that patients need to understand. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is not one disease. It's an umbrella with many subtypes, and those subtypes can behave completely differently. For example, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma is one of the most common aggressive lymphomas. It moves fast, but many cases can respond well to treatment if the targets are correct. Follicular lymphoma is often slower, and mantle cell lymphoma can be more aggressive and harder to manage. Burkitt's lymphoma is one of the fastest growing cancers known. There are also T-cell lymphomas, cutaneous lymphoma, and many rare subtypes. So when someone says, I have lymphoma, that's not enough information. You need to know what type of lymphoma, because two patients can both have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and can be dealing with very different diseases, let alone the subtypes. So here's a simple preventative strategy in the lymphoma category. Beta glucans found in mushrooms. Taking those daily helps our immune system, really helps on the immunotherapy of all cancers. They help macrophages, neutrophils, natural killer cells, and essentially teaching them to recognize a target and these abnormal lymphocytes and get rid of them. By combining these healthy mushrooms into your daily diet along with liposomal lizanthin, phosphatidylcholine, 3,000 milligrams of high-quality fish oil, a good diet away from refined carbohydrates, and so forth, and quercetin, now you're building a really powerful stack to help your body's immune system and go after a broad category of cancer prevention with good dietary supplement support. Let's go to the family that people often misunderstand— melanomas. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. They hear skin cancer and they assume they're all the same, and it's not. Melanoma is not the same thing as basal cell skin cancer. It is not the same thing as squamous cell skin cancer. Those are other skin cancers. This is different. Melanoma starts in melanocytes. Those are the pigment-producing cells of your skin. The melanoma is dangerous because it has a much greater tendency to spread aggressively through the lymphatic system and the bloodstream. It also is one of those cancers that responds beautifully to immunotherapy if targeted correctly. That's why melanoma is a completely different category in terms of seriousness compared with many common skin cancers. There are also rare forms like ocular melanoma, which occurs in the eye, and mucosal melanoma, which can arise in the mucous membranes. The big point here is simple: not all skin cancers are equal. Some are usually local and highly treatable, and this is one of those cancers that potentially can be preventable with early screening, good sun protection, and good antioxidants and carotenoids like lycopene. Liposomal, very good here as well with phosphatidylcholine and high-dose fish oil. Family number 6, the central nervous system cancers. These are the cancers that begin in the brain and in the spinal cord itself, such things as gliomas. Gliomas start in the glial cells, which are the supportive cells of the brain. Inside the glioma family, there are several important subtypes: astrocytoma, oligodendroglioma, and the most famous and feared, glioblastoma, or GBM. And glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive brain cancers we know. There are also meningiomas, which start in the membranes covering the brain. They're often slower growing. Or medulloblastomas, which are more common in children. And there are others that can start in the pituitary, which require their own discussion and treatment. One reason central nervous system cancers are so difficult is their location. You're dealing with the brain, you're dealing with critical tissue. You're also dealing with getting immunotherapy there and treatments there that are specific. And that's a harder and more detailed process. And here's a full stack on the prevention side. Again, good diet, lifestyle, whole foods, getting rid of refined carbohydrates and sugars. But that stack I gave you, the liposomal lusanthin, the phosphatidylcholine, the fish oil, the beta glucans— these work great in the prevention of brain cancer as part of your supportive stack for things like glioblastoma and astrocytomas because they do pass the blood-brain barrier. And they provide antioxidant support to those areas. When you add the molecular axanthin, which is liposomal and very powerful, 6,000 times more powerful than vitamin C, it's capable of also crossing the blood-brain barrier and quenching those single-lit oxygens or those reactive oxygen species or oxidative stress. This simple yet powerful lipid immune protocol ensures that your brain's structural framework is resilient. Its inflammatory pathways are silenced and your internal surveillance is totally sharpened and outsmarting the malignant disease. That's the goal with these preventative stacks, along with diet and lifestyle. So now let's zoom out. You have carcinomas, sarcomas, leukemias, lymphomas, central nervous system cancers, and melanomas. And that's the map that matters, because once you understand it, you stop asking the wrong questions. The wrong question is, what is the standard treatment for this name? The better question is, what family does this cancer belong to, and what does my cancer actually respond to? So the name is the start and not the finish. And that's one of the biggest lessons I've learned over the years with our team and working with thousands of patients, is a diagnosis just gives you a label. It does not automatically give you a strategy. The real next question is, what test has been done on your tumor specifically? What detailed multiomics are you looking at? A 1,000 markers, or the typical 24 that are used in all major cancer hospitals by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. So if you take one thing from this video, let it be this: cancer is not one disease, it's a map. And the more clearly you understand the map, the better questions you can ask, the faster you can avoid confusion and oftentimes the wrong treatment, and the better chance you have of building a treatment plan that's specific, like a blue print for you. This makes a big difference. And now that you understand the map, the next question people ask is one nobody really answers clearly. Why did this happen? Why did this person get cancer? And why did this person not get cancer? And I made a video on that too, because it may be one of the most important conversations in all of cancer care. So click this video here and I'll walk you through what are the actual drivers to cancer at the cellular cellular level, what it means to prevent cancer, and what it means to treat it. I hope you found this episode helpful, and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.