No — not me, I know I have it.
You’ve got cancer too.
The difference is (hopefully) your immune system and lymphatic system are working day and night to protect you.
That’s not meant to shock or provoke. It’s just a fact. It’s meant to reframe how we think about cancer, immunity, and why some people develop disease while most don’t.
Let’s get into the numbers. Your body is made up of between 30 and 40 trillion cells. On average they replicate every 7 years — which equates to 10–15 billion cell replications every day.
If I asked you to write lines 50 times you’d probably not make any errors. If I asked you to write the same words 10 billion times, errors would creep in. This is cellular replication failure — and can be the source of trouble, including cancer.
The uncomfortable truth is: we all produce abnormal cells every day. Cells with damaged DNA. Cells with dysfunctional mitochondria. Cells that don’t behave as they should.
Most of the time, these rogue cells are quietly identified and removed long before they ever become a problem. Cancer doesn’t appear overnight. It develops slowly, over years, sometimes decades.
The difference between health and disease is rarely the presence of abnormal cells — it’s whether the systems designed to deal with them are still working.
The Immune System: A Coordinated Defence Force
We often talk about “the immune system” as if it’s a single thing. It isn’t. It’s a coordinated defence network made up of specialised units — much like a military.
Dendritic cells and macrophages are the scouts. They patrol tissues constantly, sampling their environment and looking for anything that doesn’t belong. Their job isn’t to fight. It’s to notice and report.
Helper T cells act as intelligence officers. They decide whether a threat is real, whether it needs escalation, and which forces should respond.
Cytotoxic T cells and NK cells (Natural Killer cells — I love that name) are the soldiers. They destroy cells that have been flagged as dangerous or abnormal.
B cells are responsible for antibody production, immune memory, and long-term targeting. In lymphoma like mine, it’s these B cells that have gone wrong.
Reframing Cancer
I’ve started to reframe cancer. It’s actually an incredible natural behaviour — and uncomfortable as it is, the responsibility ultimately sits with the host environment.
When you really stop and think about it, it’s hard to hate cancer cells. At their core, they’re not malicious. They’re not invaders. They’re cells that are trying to survive.
Nature has one overriding principle: persistence. Polar bears changing behaviour as ice sheets melt. Plants growing through concrete. Bacteria evolving resistance to their environment. The same principle applies at the smallest scale.
Nearly a century ago, Otto Warburg observed that many cancer cells generate energy differently from healthy cells. Cancer cells behave like cells under stress. They adapt to conditions that no longer support normal function.
This perspective changed something for me. It stopped cancer feeling like a betrayal by my body and started to feel more like a signal that something, over time, had drifted out of balance.
The Lymphatic System: The Overlooked Network
Understanding the immune system without understanding the lymphatic system is like trying to understand traffic without knowing the roads exist.
The lymphatic system is your body’s drain for waste. The network exists throughout your body and waste products move through it suspended in a liquid called ‘lymph’. Lymph moves through the network to two major drainage points near the heart and enters the blood, where it is ultimately filtered out as urine by the kidneys.
And it has one critical difference from the cardiovascular system.
There is no pump
Your heart pumps blood. Your lymphatic system has no equivalent pump.
Lymph moves only when you move, you breathe deeply, muscles contract, and the diaphragm works. If you don’t move, lymph stagnates. When lymph stagnates — waste clearance slows, immune surveillance weakens, local inflammation increases.
Today we sit to travel, sit to work, take the lift not the stairs, come home sitting on a train, sit and eat, sit on the sofa, and finally lie in bed. Nothing moves.
Movement is not optional. Because there is no pump, movement becomes medicine. Not intense exercise. Not punishment. Just regular movement. Walking. Stretching. Breathing. Changing posture.
Practical ways to support a healthy immune system — the 1% Protocol
Once I stopped thinking of the immune system as something to “boost” and started thinking of it as a system to protect and de-stress, the actions became surprisingly simple.
Support immune logistics — Move every day. Walk, take the stairs, change posture. Use deep, slow breathing to engage the diaphragm.
Protect sleep relentlessly — Consistent sleep and wake times. Reduce light and stimulation late at night. Most immune repair and regulation happens while you sleep.
Reduce chronic stress signals — Build deliberate pauses into the day. Spend time outdoors where possible. Chronic stress hormones suppress immune surveillance and increase inflammation.
Keep blood sugar stable — Avoid large spikes and crashes. Eat whole foods. Immune cells are sensitive to metabolic chaos.
Feed the microbiome — Eat a wide variety of plants. Include fibre, legumes, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. Use fermented foods. A large part of immune regulation begins in the gut.
Avoid immune friction — Minimise alcohol. Avoid ultra-processed foods. Reduce exposure to things that disrupt sleep and recovery.
Lymphatic drainage and massage
A large part of the 1% protocol is daily lymphatic drainage and massage. I have a routine broadly based on elements of Tai Chi and Qigong from ancient Asian cultures — something Western medicine has largely forgotten but Eastern cultures never abandoned.
My routine consists of 7 exercises that all involve bouncing, twisting, or stretching repeatedly for a minute each. I follow this with lymphatic massage — rubbing the areas of lymph nodes quite vigorously toward the heart.
The 1% Principle, applied
None of these actions are revolutionary on their own. But taken together — and done consistently — they reduce friction across immune surveillance, signalling, transport, and clean-up.
Not chasing perfection. Not forcing outcomes. Just creating the conditions in which complex systems can work properly.