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Advanced Holistic Cancer Treatment
By Dr. Dirk Wiedbrauck M.D. & N.D. Germany
Therapies will be gentler and more in tune with the physiological body process. We shall be able to end life unharmed and not, as so often today, after unnecessary senseless treatment, ill-treated in body and spirit, poisoned and tortured.
More and more people diagnosed with cancer feel the need to turn away from mainstream medicine into the field of naturopathic medicine. Medical treatment and tumor therapy have undergone many changes during the last decades. The vast range of therapy available can confuse both patient and doctor. The author has succeeded in presenting a complex survey of cancer therapies, concentrating in particular on immunology and complementary medicine, describing and discussing these and giving facts and figures. All his experience in twenty years of holistic cancer treatment will help to provide you with some knowledge to make the right decision for your future. We all must be critical to all kinds of treatments but open to new solutions. All medical means should be considered for the patient’s sake.
The possibilities of traditional medicine are exhausted. We can disregard the beneficial effect of radiotherapy however gentle it may be. We all know how the whole world fears the long-term after-effects following the nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl and on the other hand radiation is supposed to improve health, increase life expectancy and improves quality of life.
Only five per cent of all kinds of cancer are cured by chemotherapy! Chemotherapy is the nuclear warhead in all kinds of synthetic treatment. When research on mustard gas demonstrated that it has the ability to kill living cells, particularly those that rapidly divide, such as those in the intestinal tract, bone marrow and lymphatic system, chemotherapy was proposed for the first time. The idea came up soon to use mustard gas to poison cancer, which constitutes the most rapidly dividing cells of all. One of the most used chemotherapy drugs is Cyclophosphamide, which comes from mustard gas. Another drug, Cisplatin (Platinol) made of the heavy metal platinum can damage nerves and kidneys and causes hearing loss, irreversible loss of motor function, bone marrow suppression, anemia and blindness. Mechloretamine, an analogue of mustard gas (the M of MOPP treatment, the standard protocol for Hodgkin Disease) is so toxic that those, administering the drug are advised to wear rubber gloves and avoid inhaling it.
By using chemotherapy to treat cancer in the childhood, many survivors could be trading one type of cancer for a more deadly one later. It is common sense now that cancer patients suffer from sever immune damage and on the other hand these drugs are supposed to improve health, increase life expectancy and improve quality of life. The average North American swallows approximately 50,000 pills during his lifetime. In using chemicals we believe to regulate our day but that is not what it takes. Already in the year 1673, Moliere wrote in his stage play: “The Imaginary Patient”, most of the human beings dies from the drugs they use and not from the disease.
Approximately 300,000 North Americans die from side effects of synthetic drugs, that makes 822 people per day, 34 per hour or two persons per minute. Some 959,000 Americans, aged sixty and older, were hospitalized in 1999 after reacting to a drug.
Modern Asthma treatment with inhalers has increased a forty percent to over 5,000 deaths per year in the ages of five to thirty-four. In a recent Canadian study, asthmatics that inhaled thirteen or more canisters of Fenoterol in a year increased their risk of dying ninety times. An un-dogmatic, open attitude is necessary for doctor and patient to help and support measures. This will open a new horizon to successful treatments and holistic approaches, which are desperately needed. This script would like to see the patient become responsible for himself and encourage him to think and decide for himself so that we can cope this illness by making best use of gentle medicine with its gentle tricks and molecular biology. Everyone should have the right to decide for himself, even in illness. Political or economic interests should not influence choice of treatment. The patient must be free to choose the therapy, which will suit him and help him best and last but not least, a therapy he as confidence in. For all those who are hopefully, still in a healthy condition, I would like to encourage for active prevention to avoid this epidemic disease which will be responsible for number one cause of death in less than 5 years.
Something to think about.
Those are the fools,
Who halt at their first discoveries.
Those are the wise,
Who travel through their errors to the truth.
Introduction
Oncologists tell their patients: “The only change for you is chemotherapy and or radiation”. What a lie! According to an analysis and estimate conducted by De Vita, director of the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda (USA), cancer patients can be cured as follows:
28% by local surgery
11.5% by radiation and
5.8% by applying systemic or loco-regional chemotherapy
If the tumor was not appropriate for surgical removal or, if metastases had spread, only approximately 1.8% of all cancer patients could be cured by chemotherapy. A considerable lengthening of the life span by more than two years caused by chemotherapeutical measures could be recorded only for 3.2% of the said cancer patients. One patient told me some years ago that his oncologist had advised him to save his money and take a holiday instead. It would be his last anyway. Today he is still alive –unbelievably- in a good health and full of vitality. If we look to mortality statistics all over the world, we cannot fail to include in the treatment any other therapy that chemotherapy or radiation, even if this is only effective in a single case.
It is well known that a healthy person’s immune system can normally cope with at least one million tumor cells. Why at the most important stage, after a successful operation, is he treated with toxic and immunosuppressive substances which paralyse his body’s own defence system instead of rebuilding it, so it is able to destroy any remaining tumor cells?
Chemotherapy alters, blocks or covers the coupling mechanisms on the receptors of tumor cells which, being thus disguised, do not respond any longer to any immune therapy. Radiation treatment weakens the immune system even further. Even if the fatal effect is not immediate why most of the patients are sent home after such worse deals with the words: “We are sorry, your body can’t stand any more. We’ve done all we can to help you.”
The patient feels abandoned and is deeply hurt, because he had been told that chemotherapy and/or radiation were the only chance. Especially now, in this situation, he needs sympathy and moral support. “Fully treated” – its tragedy is worse than the diagnosis itself. The patient is sent home without any idea what to do, with the words: “Come back for a check up in 3 months time.” That brings to mind the comment: “Doctor I felt better after the last examination.” What does this check up really mean when we take a closer look? Let us see if you have got a new tumor! Why are only the white and red blood cells examined, platelets, haemoglobin and the liver transaminases? Why not the immune system too? This examination in particular shows defects very early and at a stage when the immune system can still be repaired and respond to an appropriate treatment that enhances the immune system?
Some examples what Vitamins are able to do: Vitamin A reduces the risk of lung cancer by 50 percent. Vitamin E prevents breast cancer from developing by 54 percent. Vitamin D reduces the tumor volume. It has been proven that the trace elements zinc, lithium and others are needed by the immune system to increase its cell account, the motility and aggressivity of the various defence cells. Why do clinics stonewall this indisputable fact? I refuse to believe that a doctor could behave like this. I rather suppose that this behaviour is a result of his medical training, which requires him to act in a scientific manner and that his colleagues will only respect him if he does the “right, i.e. traditional, thing”. To improve on doing “the right thing” and do the “best thing” takes decades of experience. I know a lot of colleagues who treat their patients secretly with the “best thing”. These are the ones who care about the patients who have completed their stay in hospital, “fully treated”, and feel ethically and morally responsible for them.
OK, so you’ve finally said No more – whatever happens will happen. You’ve refused further standard cancer treatment because you’ve found out either through research or through personal experience, that for the vast majority of cancer cases it just doesn’t work. People’s last months are made miserable with no upside. So there you are, without a net. Guess what? There never was one. So forget the politics of hospitals and insurance. You may feel that they ran their game on you and the required funds were transferred from one account to another in some data base somewhere, and here you are sitting at home looking out the window.
A good warrior must always assess his present position, evaluate his losses and assets, and move forward. So what have you got? Well, you’re alive. Maybe they predicted that you wouldn’t make it this long or else you’ve got X amount of time to live. Who cares? You’re no longer on their agenda, so now your calendar’s wide open. You refuse to die on schedule.
What else have you got? Well, you still have some kind of immune system left, or else you’d be dead. What’s an immune system? It’s a complicated system of cells and biological reactions which the body employs to ward off invaders and to prevent its own cells from deteriorating or mutating. The immune system is responsible for recognizing foreign proteins and cells and for triggering an attack against them. The immune system is involved with a never-ending second-by-second check of all your cells to see if they still look like the rest of you. If they don’t, they’re immediately destroyed. Most researchers, including Nobel Prize winner Sir MacFarlane Burnet, feel that in the normal body hundreds of cancer cells appear every day. These mutating cells are simply destroyed by the normal immune system and never cause a problem. Cancer only proliferates when a failing immune system begins to allow abnormal cells to slip by without triggering an attack on them. That’s how you got cancer.
So looking at it this way, a tumor is a symptom, not a problem. A symptom of a failing immune system. Cancer is a general condition that localizes rather than a local condition which generalizes.
Most cancers are not found until autopsy. That’s because they never caused any symptoms. For example 30 – 40 times as many cases of thyroid, pancreatic, and prostate cancer are found in autopsy than ever presented to the doctor. According to a study cited in top British medical journal Lancet 13 Feb 93, early screening often leads to unnecessary treatment: 33% of autopsies show prostate cancer but only 1% die from it. After age 75, half of males may have prostate cancer, but only 2% die from it. This means simply that the immune system can hold many problems in check, as long as it is not compromised by powerful procedures. Guess which systems is the most important to you at this time, more than it’s ever been before in your whole life.
Right – the immune system. Guess which system suffers most from chemotherapy and radiation. Right again. So the one time in your life you most need it, your
immune system will be weakened by those therapies. If you’re one of the few cancer patients who’s refused standard treatment from the get-go-good, but your immune system still needs all the help you can give it.
A 1992 study in journal of the American Medical Association of 223 patients concluded that no treatment at all for prostate cancer actually was better than any standard chemotherapy, radiation or surgical procedure. (Johansson)
NEW DIET – NEW DISEASE
A hundred years ago, cancer was virtually unknown. At that time, people relied more on whole foods, unrefined and generally in their original form. Gradually, processed foods became a greater and greater proportion of the American diet during the 1940s and into the 1950s, first in the canning industry, which then developed into the food processing industry. The idea was to make food last on the shelves as long as possible, thereby increasing overall profits. The way this was done was by removing the natural enzymes contained in the food. Enzymes are what make food go bad, but they are also what make food digestible by the human body. So as more and more sophisticated methods of removing enzymes from food were discovered, shelf life increased, and food value decreased.
What does all this have to do with cancer? I’m getting to that.
CRITICAL VALUE OF ENZYMES
When food that is difficult to digest continues to be forced into the body, month after month, year after year, our own digestive system struggles valiantly to try to break down all these weird, manmade foods that have only this century appeared on the human scene. But eventually the system gets overtaxed, and wears out. We keep taking in the same amounts of pizza, burgers, spaghetti, milk, cheese, chips, and fries, but since we can’t digest them completely, they start accumulating in the digestive tract. Before long, we start absorbing the undigested food into the bloodstream, intact. Big problem. The autopsy on Elvis found 20 pounds of undigested food into the intestine. With John Wayne it was 44! That took years! Now remember that all food is in one of three forms: fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Normal digestion breaks them down into their usable forms – fats into fatty acids, proteins into amino acids, and carbohydrates into glucose. But if they are absorbed whole into the blood stream, which is abnormal digestion, many bad results occur, most of which have a direct bearing on the emergence of cancer. Clumping together of red blood cells is a sign of the absorption of undigested protein. In normal blood, the red cells should be round, freely movable, and unattached. That way they can make their way through the blood vessels and accomplish their number one job, which you will remember is to carry oxygen to all the cells of the body. But the accumulation of undigested protein in the blood makes these red blood cells stick together, like stacks of coins, or like globs of motor oil. Once it gets like this, the blood tends to stay aggregated. Imagine the difficulty, then, for the blood to circulate in such a glopped-up condition. The smallest blood vessels, through which the blood has to pass each time around, are the capillaries. But unfortunately, the diameter of a capillary is only the same as one of the red blood cells – they’re supposed to circulate in single file. So what happens in a body whose red cells are all stuck together for a few years? It’s not rocket science: the tissues of the body become oxygen deprived and are forced to stew in their own wastes.
Are we talking about cancer yet? We sure are. Nobel laureate Dr. Otto Warburg discovered in the 1920s what all researchers now know: most cancers cannot exists well in an oxygen-rich environment. Why is that people don’t die of cancer of the heart?
Just doesn’t happen. Why not? Because that’s where the most highly oxygenated blood is, and cancer doesn’t like oxygen. Even more favourable for cancer is a setting of fermentation. That’s a big word for half digested carbohydrates (sugar). Every bootlegger knows that as sugars ferment, they bubble. The bubbles are the oxygen leaving. Cancer doesn’t like oxygen too well, but it loves sugar. Starting to get the picture here? Fermentation means half-digested. Remember we talked about all that undigested food accumulating in the gut and in the bloodstream because of not enough enzymes? Well, a lot of that food was carbohydrate – you know, donuts, beer, candy, ice cream, Pepsi, bread, pastries, etc. Worse yet, the white cells, which are supposed to circulate as the immune system, become trapped in all this much. Remember what their job was? Right, to remove foreign stuff immediately. A cancer cell is foreign stuff.
ACID/ALKALINE
Another factor is pH. Acid-forming foods, such as the above, make the blood more acidic. To sustain life, human blood pH must be in the range of 7.3 – 7.45 (Guyton). Outside that range, we’re dead. Remember, the lower the number, the more acidity. The more acid the blood is, the less oxygen it contains, and the faster a person ages and degenerates. There’s a major difference in oxygen even within the narrow range of “normal” blood pH: blood that is pH 7.3 actually has 69.4% less oxygen than 7.45 blood, according to Whang’s book, Reverse Aging. On a practical level, this means we should do everything to keep the pH on the high side of the range, as close as possible to 7.45, by eating as many alkaline foods as possible. That would be, you guessed it – live, raw foods, especially green foods. That’s the faintest sketch about enzyme deficiency and acid-forming foods as primary causes of creating a favourable environment in which cancer can grow.
WHO’S WINNING?
We’re constantly being hit with media stories about “progress” in the war on cancer and new “breakthrough” drugs and procedures being “right around the corner.” The military rhetoric hasn’t changed since 1971. Is it true that we’re winning the war against cancer ... like they’re always telling us?
From the U.S. government’s own statistical abstracts we find the real story:
Mortality from Cancer in the U.S.
Year --- deaths/100,000
1967 --- 157.2
1970 --- 162.9
1982 --- 187.3
1987 --- 198.2
1988 --- 198.4
1989 --- 201.0
1990 --- 203.2
1991 --- 204.1
1992 --- 204.1
source: Vital Statistics of the United States vol.II 1967-1992
1992 is the last year for which data is currently available from Vital Statistics. There is nothing to indicate that there should be any downturn between 1992 and the present. In fact, independent analysis by the CA Journal for Cancer Clinicians, Jan 97, put the 1993 death rate at 220 per 100,000. Does that sound like progress?
Why does nobody know this? Bet you never saw this chart before.
Numbers can be twisted and made to do tricks. This chart is the raw data, not age adjusted or divided by race, or type of cancer. Anyone can dig this information up by going to any library reference section. Bu t try finding a medical reference or journal article or a URL that uses this chart. Try finding a newspaper or magazine article in the last 15 years that uses the raw data. And this data says one thing: more people are dying of cancer now per capita than ever before and nothing is slowing the increase. Not early detection, not better screenings, not new high tech machines, not radiation, not surgery, and definitely not chemotherapy. Backtracking a little, in 1900 cancer was practically unheard of in this country. By 1950, there were about 150 cases of cancer per 100,000 population. In 1971, Nixon introduced the War on Cancer, opening the floodgates of massive research funding backed by the government. This situation escalated until by the 1980s, over $50 billion per year was being spent to “find the cure.” And yet we have the plain data in the chart above. What is going on?
THE BUSINESS OF CANCER
Industry. Politics. Big money. Health care. Buying and selling. You know – life. More people living off cancer than ever died from it, and that’s saying quite a lot since by the 1990s the amount spent for cancer research and treatment had jumped to $80 billion annually. But by this time more than 500,000 deaths per year in the U.S. were attributable to cancer, now second only to heart disease on the list of killer diseases. All this money has not improved the overall chances of survival from cancer even slightly. Many cancer patients feel they’re just a mark, a number, an insurance account. The goal of every visit seems to be running up the bill, not improving their overall health. The American Cancer Society, for example, collects upwards of $400 million per year. Very little of this money ever finds its way to research. The majority of the money goes into investments and towards administration – lavish salaries and perqs for the Society’s officers and employees. A funny thing is that written into the charter of the American Cancer Society is the clause that states that if a cure for cancer is ever found, on that day, the Society will disband. (The Cancer Industry) So think about it – is this an organization that is going to be motivated to find a cure for cancer?
This is the underlying reality, but what do we hear on the surface, coming at us every day from the scripted “reporting” of TV and news publications, or from the lips of the oncologists making their reassuring pronouncements on the outlook for our loved ones chances of survival? We’re “making progress.” “Early detection” is giving us a much better chance of “getting it all” by means of immediate surgery or by chemotherapy and radiation. Then after surgery they tell us we need to do chemo to put “the icing on the cake.” Frightened to death, and having nowhere else to turn, people have bought this company line for years and years. As a result, they have been dying on schedule. But then, why would people be told the truth? The goal of big money is big money. Finding a cure? Why on earth would anyone want to do that? But there’s a limit to everything, even with the stranglehold on information that is permitted to reach the purview of the general public. More and more of us have watched our parents or our friends die wretched deaths, as all the “big guns” were pompously wheeled out, with the hospital happily billing the insurance until coverage runs out. And some of us are saying Wait a minute, this isn’t about money – this is about my life. And people are deciding to take their chances without standard slash-and-burn protocols, either by just staying home and doing nothing, or else by experimentation with alternative therapies, which have always been there all these years, just below the surface.
CHEMOTHERAPY
Considering chemotherapy? Consider this:
“Chemotherapy is basically ineffective in the vast of majority of cases in which it is given”
- Ralph Moss, PhD p81
“Cancer researchers, medical journals, and the popular media all have contributed to a situation in which many people with common malignancies are being treated with drugs not known to be effective.”
- Dr. Martin Shapiro UCLA
“Despite widespread use of chemotherapies, breast cancer mortality has not changed in the last 70 years”
- Thomas Dao, MD NEJM Mar 1975 292 p 707
“Many medical oncologists recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumor, with a hopefulness undiscouraged by almost invariable failure.”
- Albert Braverman MD 1991 Lancet 1991 337 p901 “Medical Oncology in the 90s”
“Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.”
- Allen Levin, MD UCSF The Healing of Cancer
Let’s say you get cancer – in America it’s 1 in 3. Your doctor says you need chemo and sends you to an office in the hospital. You have no symptoms yet, no pain, and you feel fine. But you’re very frightened. You walk into the office and everyone else there is in obvious pain and most of them are dying. It’s like a scene from a horror movie. Your first instinct is to run: I’m not like them! I’m alive! What am I doing here? Then ask yourself this: in your entire life, how often have your true instincts been wrong?
CHEMOTHERAPY: AN UNPROVEN PROCEDURE
How can that be true of the main cancer treatment in the World? Fact is, no solid scientific studies or clinical trials prove chemotherapy’s effectiveness, except in small percentage of very rare types of cancer. For solid tumors of adults, the vast majority fo cancer, or anything that has metastasized, chemotherapy just doesn’t work. A German epidemiologist from the Heidelberg/Mannheim Tumor Clinic, Dr. Ulrich Abel has done a comprehensive review and analysis of every major study and clinical trial of chemotherapy ever done. His conclusions should be read by anyone who is about to embark on the Chemo Express. To make sure he had reviewed everything ever published on chemotherapy, Abel sent letters to over 350 medical centers around the world asking them to send him anything they had published on the subject. Abel researched thousands of articles: it is unlikely that anyone in the world knows more about chemotherapy than he. The analysis took him several years, but the results are astounding: Abel found that the overall worldwide success rate of chemotherapy was “appalling” because there was simply no scientific evidence available anywhere that chemotherapy can “extend in any appreciable way the lives of patients suffering from the most common organic cancers.” Abel emphasizes that chemotherapy rarely can improve the quality of life. He describes chemotherapy as “a scientific wasteland” and states that at least 80 percent of chemotherapy administered throughout the world is worthless, and is akin to the “emperor’s new clothes” – neither doctor nor patient is willing to give up on chemotherapy even though there is no scientific evidence that it works! – Lancet 10 Aug 91. No mainstream media even mentioned this comprehensive study: it was totally buried.
Similar are the conclusions of most medical researchers who actually try to work their way past all the smoke and mirrors to get the real statistics. In evaluating a therapeutic regimen, the only thing that really matters is death rate – will a treatment significantly extent a patient’s life. I’m not talking about life as a vegetable, but the natural healthy independent lifespan of a human being. Media stories and most articles in medical journals go to great lengths to hide the underlying numbers of people dying from cancer, by talking about other issues. In Questioning Chemotherapy, Dr. Ralph Moss talks about several of the ways they do it: Response rate is a favourite. If a dying patient’s condition changes even for a week or a month, especially if the tumor shrinks temporarily, the patient is listed as having “responded to” chemotherapy. No joke! The fact that the tumor comes back stronger soon after chemo is topped is not figured into the equation. The fact that the patient has to endure horrific side effects in order to temporarily shrink the tumor is not considered. The fact that the patient soon dies is not figured into the equation. The idea is to sell, sell, and sell. Sell chemotherapy.
Also in the media we find the loud successes chemotherapy has had on certain rare types of cancer, like childhood leukemia, and Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But for the vast majority of cancer cases, chemo is a bust. Worse yet, a toxic one. Even with Hodgkin, one of chemo’s much-trumpeted triumphs, the cure is frequently a success, but the patient dies. He just doesn’t die of Hodgkin’s disease, that’s all. In the 1994 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, they published a 47-year study of more than 10,000 patients with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, who were treated with chemotherapy. Even though there was success with the Hodgkin’s itself, these patients encountered an incidence of leukemia that was six times the normal rate. This is a very common type of report success within the cancer industry – again, the life of the patient is not taken into account. In evaluating any treatment, there must be a benefits/risks analysis. Due to gigantic economic pressures, such evaluation has been systematically put aside in the U.S. chemotherapy industry.
THE BI-PHASIC EFFECT: WHY CHEMO DOESN’T WORK
Every time we put a drug in our body, two things happen:
1. What the drug initially does to the body
2. How the body adapts to the drug
Any example will do. Antibiotics? First, the drug kills all bacteria in the body. Then the body responds by growing them back, often with the bad bacteria out of balance, which come back in more powerful, mutated forms. Steroids? First, muscles are built because testosterone has been mimicked. Then the body responds by cutting production of natural testosterone, which eventually feminizes the athlete by shrinking the gonads. Heroin? First it blocks the pain receptors and sends happy hormones called endorphins through the body, giving an overall feeling of wonderfulness. The body responds, by getting so used to this euphoria that when the heroin is stopped, the reality of pain receptors going back to work again is unbearable. Obviously these are simplifications, but you get the idea.
Dr. Dean Black puts it this way: “Drugs tend to worsen whatever they’re supposed to cure, which sets up a vicious cycle.” Health at the Crossroads p.20
The Bi-Phasic Effect is well-explained by Dean Black and many other researchers who were trying to figure out why tumors seemed to come back with such a vengeance after chemotherapy. Some original work was done by American Cancer Society researcher Robert Schimke in 1985, who discovered that the way cancer cells resist chemotherapy is to replicate even harder and faster. Chemo drugs are lethal, so the cancer cells are stimulated to try and survive any way they can, which means faster growth. In the presence of any toxin, cells will resist it to stay alive. The more they resist, the stronger they get. Black sees cancer itself is just an adaptation: a normal response to an abnormal poison.
Chemotherapy simply provokes adaptation. (Black, p.45) This is why we all know people who have had chemotherapy and experienced temporary remission. But when the tumor came back, it did so with a vengeance, ant eh patient was quickly overwhelmed.
Schimke talks about the possible effects chemotherapy might have on a tumor that otherwise may have been self-limiting:
“Might such treatments convert relatively benign tumors into more lethal forms?”
- Robert Schimke p1915
Think about this the next time you hear an oncologist talk about “mopping up” with powerful chemo drugs just to be sure we “got it all.” Or prescribing powerful chemotherapy for a “pre-cancerous” or even a benign situation.
To understand the bi-phasic effect, one begins to realize that drugs are fighting the body. The whole military motif – medicine imposes its will upon the body, even though we have vastly incomplete information to be doing something that arrogant.
GENE AMPLIFICATION
Is an important concept to understand if you are being given combinations of more than one chemotherapy drug at once. “Cocktails” have become standard treatment in many oncological protocols: concoctions of two or more powerful cytotoxic agents which supposedly will “attack the tumor” in different ways. In the above study, Robert Schimke noted that with chemo combos the rebound effect – the second phase where the tumor responds to the drug – may bring about a tumor cell proliferation rate which may be 100 times faster than the response to one single chemo drug may have been. Proliferation means the rate at which the tumor cells reproduce themselves, i.e., grow.
CYTOTOXIC
Is the word that describes chemotherapeutic drugs. It means “cell-killing.”
Chemotherapy kills all the cells of the body, not just the cancer cells. The risk is that chemo will kill the patient before it kills the cancer. Which usually happens. Therefore the only question that should be asked when deciding whether or not to begin chemo is this: will this drug prolong the patient’s natural lifespan? Is it like to? The unadorned data says NO.
BREAST CANCER
Which today 1 in 8 American women may expect, is an obvious area of failure and misinformation. A professor at Northwestern U School of Medicine, Dr. Edward Scanlon states:
“Over a period of 100 years, breast cancer treatment has evolved from no treatment to radical treatment and back again with more conservative management, without having affected mortality.”
Journal of the American Medical Association, Sep. 4, 1991.
In their latest mood swing, recently the medical consensus, whatever that means, is moving back toward more radical mastectomy again. In an article from the New York Times, 14 Jan 99, a new Mayo Clinic study being published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is backtracking to a former position. Bilateral radical mastectomy of healthy breasts supposedly “reduces the risk of getting breast cancer” by 90%! I am not making this up. Obviously, if a woman doesn’t have breasts, how can she get breasts cancer? This type of insanity – a recommendation to remove healthy breasts with the idea to prevent a disease a woman doesn’t have – makes you wonder what’s next. Why not euthanasia? – That way the patient will have a zero percent chance of ever getting any disease again.
What effects are these fickle, intellectualized medical opinions having on a death rate? None. Actually it’s even worse than that. From the same hard data sources cited above, Vital Statistics, we can look up the actual death rate for breast cancer:
Year --- deaths/100,000
1958 --- 13.1
1970 --- 14.3
1979 --- 15.4
1989 --- 17.4
1991 --- 17.4
Early mammograms: no effect. Chemotherapy: no effect. Surgery: no effect. Figures like these are extremely well hidden and can only be unearthed with great efforts, like walking up the stairs to the fourth floor at the library. But that is a great effort. Who goes to the library? A net search can instantly turn up 100 articles on the latest chemotherapy drugs and their anticipated “breakthroughs” and “response rates” that have always been “just around the corner” since 1971. Every week shows dozens of magazine and newspaper articles spouting the “latest thing” in chemotherapy. This is world class dog-wagging. Olympic carrot-and-stick dangling.
Mammograms
This is one topic where the line between advertising and scientific proof has become very blurred. As far back as 1976, the American Cancer Society itself and its government colleague the National Cancer Institute terminated the routine use of mammography for women under the age of 50 because of its “detrimental” (carcinogenic) effects. More recently, a large study done in Canada on found that women who had routine mammograms before the age of 50 also had increased death rates from breast cancer by 36%. (Miller) Lorraine Day notes the same feelings in her video presentation “Cancer Doesn’t Scare Me Any More.”
The reader is directed to these sources and should perhaps consider the opinion of other sources than those selling the procedure, before making a decision. John McDougall MD has made a thorough review of pertinent literature on mammograms. He points out that the $5-13 billion per year generated by mammograms controls the information that women get. Fear and incomplete date are the tools commonly used to persuade women to get routine mammograms. What is clear is that mammography cannot prevent breast cancer or even the spread of breast cancer. By the time a tumor is large enough to be detected by mammography, it has been there as long as 12 years! It is therefore ridiculous to advertise mammography as “early detection.” (McDougall p.114)
The other unsupportable illusion is that mammograms prevent breast cancer, which they don’t. On the contrary, the painful compression of breast tissue during the procedure itself can increase the possibility of metastasis by as much as 80%! Dr. McDougall notes that a between 10 and 17% of the time, breast cancer is a self-limiting non-life threatening type called ductal carcinoma in situ. This harmless cancer can be made active by the compressive force of routine mammography. (McDougall, p105)
Most extensive studies show no increased survival rate from routine screening mammograms. After reviewing all available literature in the world on the subject, noted researchers Drs. Wright and Mueller of the University of British Columbia recommended the withdrawal of public funding for mammography screening, because the “benefit achieved is marginal, and the harm caused is substantial.” (Lancet, 1 Jul 1995) The harm they’re referring to include the constant worrying and emotional distress, as well as the tendency for unnecessary procedures and testing to be done based on results which have a false positive rate as high as 50%. (New York Times, 14 Dec 1997)
PROSTATE CANCER
Is one of the worst areas of chemotherapy abuse, according to Norman Zinner, MD. He states:
“Most men with prostate cancer will die from other illnesses never knowing they had the problem.”
Hormones have been used as therapy since the 1940s, with no overall improvement in survival. Early detection of prostate cancer has resulted in thousands of men being treated for a condition that would have been self-limiting. No figures are available for those who have died from the side effects of treatment when the condition would never have caused any problems or symptoms during the patient’s entire lifetime. Composer Frank Zappa, now decomposing, found out this fact before he died at 52, but it was too late. Some studies show rates as high as 40% in autopsies of men over 70 in which prostate cancer was discovered which the patient never knew about, and which not the cause of death was. (American Cancer Society, 1995).
There are no randomized clinical trials proving that chemotherapy for prostate cancer increases long term survival. Au contraire, a 1992 study published in JAMA demonstrated that there was no difference in 10 year survival rate between the men who did nothing at all and those who had treatment. (Johansson)
Latest in the dog-and-pony show for prostate cancer: palladium implants. A couple hundred radioactive implants each about the size of a grain of rice is sewn into the scrotum (watch out for airport metal detectors!) This unproven and experimental procedure harks back to the days of radium implants in the blood, a very popular procedure for several decades earlier in the 20th century, when the Big Three were surgery, radiation, and radium implants. To see what radium implants looked like, rent Jack Nicholson’s The Two Jakes. No cancer was ever cured from radium, and it was finally replaced by chemotherapy, which has roughly the same success. Here’s why palladium implants are unlikely to work: it’s not the prostate that has cancer; it’s the person. Cancer is systemic – it’s all through you.
SIDE EFFECTS OF CHEMOTHERAPY
It’s already a word game. Drugs don’t really have side effects. They just have effects. Especially in the case of chemotherapy where there’s almost never any upside. Since chemo drugs are some of the most toxic substances ever designed to go into a human body, their effects are very serious, and are often the direct cause of death. Like the case of Jackie Onassis, who underwent chemo for one of the rare diseases in which it generally has some beneficial results: non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She went into the hospital on Friday and was dead by Tuesday. What happened? Most of those type patients survive, but even the ones that don’t usually won’t die for a year or so. Some sources imagined that since this was such a high profile patient, they’d given her an “extra strong” dose to “kill the cancer” faster. Unfortunately they miscalculated: there was a patient attached.
Aside from the standard hair loss, nausea, vomiting, headache, and dizziness, many chemotherapy drugs have other specific severe side effects. Most have an immediate suppressive effect on bone marrow. This is where new blood cells are normally being produced all the time. This is the #1 way chemo knocks out the immune system, at the one time in your life you need it the most!
All are extremely hard on the liver, because that’s the organ whose job is to try and break down toxins that have made it past the digestive tract. Liver fibrosis is a very common sequella of methotrexate. Methotrexate also causes bleeding ulcers, bone marrow suppression, lung damage, and kidney damage. (HSI Newsletter Apr 1999 p5) It also causes “severe anemia, and has triggered or intensified cancerous tumors.” (Ruesch, p.18)
The nitrogen mustard derivatives are, incredibly, still in use, though usually in combination with other drugs. Common effects are permanent sclerosing (hardening) of the veins, blood clotting, and destruction of skin and mucous membranes.
Cytoxan is one the most common chemo drugs. Besides the “normal” side effects, it causes urinary bleeding, lung disease, and heart damage.
Any of the alkylating agents commonly result in the cancer becoming resistant to them. Thus the cancer is actually stimulated, and for this reason, alkylating drugs must be thought of themselves as carcinogenic, with new cancers from the drug as high as 10% of the time! Hello? Anybody out there?
Any chemo drug can cause permanent neurological damage practically anywhere in the body.
Corticosteroid drugs have an entire array of side effects, the worst being immediate destruction of the gastric mucosa, which explains loss of appetite, and also accelerated osteoporosis and cartilage destruction in the joints.
This is just a partial list of some of the more common side effects, but it really makes you wonder are these effects really worth the possible benefit of temporary tumor shrinkage with no proven increase in survival?
WHAT KIND OF MONEY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HERE?
There is really no way to track how many patients are receiving chemotherapy per year. Or rather, it simply isn’t done in the U.S. the way it is in Europe. That fact is quite indicative in itself. If the focus were health care, and monitoring the effectiveness of a cure, why wouldn’t there be extensive inter-hospital data bases to follow up on successful treatment? What can be tracked is the amount of cytotoxic drugs sold by the pharmaceutical companies. This amount has grown from $3 billion in 1989 to over $13 billion in 1998. (Moss p.75) These figures are chemotherapy drugs sales only, not taking into account professional or hospital fees associated with treatment.
Cancer’s share of the total US health budget is calculated at 9.8% according to the AHCPR (Agency for Health Care Policy and Research) 1994 figures, the most recent. Let’s see. 9.8% of 1 trillion dollars: that means the cancer industry is turning over about $98 billion per year. Any questions?
It is startling to discover what chemotherapy drugs are made from. The first ones were made from mustard gas exactly like the weapons that killed so many soldiers in WW 1, eventually outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. In the 1930, Memorial Sloan-Kettering quietly began to treat breast cancer with these mustard gas derivatives. No one was cured. Most of the medical profession at that time regarded such “treatment” of malignant disease as charlatanism.
Nitrogen mustard chemotherapy trials were conducted at Yale around 1943. 160 patients were treated. No one was cured.
WHY NOT DRANO?
The beginning of the hype that promised to cure all cancer by means of chemo drugs came as an offshoot of the post war excitement with the success of antibiotics and the sulfa drugs. Caught up in the heady atmosphere of visions of money and power in vanquishing cancer, Memorial Sloan-Ketteering began to make extravagant claims that to this day, have never been realized. Some 400,000 “cytotoxins” were tested by Sload-Kettering and the National Cancer Institute. The criteria in order to be tested were: will the toxin kill some of the tumor cells before it kills the patient. That’s it! Many were brand new synthetic compounds. But thousands of others were existing poisons which were simply refined. Finally about 50 drugs made de cut, and are the basis of today’s chemotherapy medicine cabinet.
One of these 50 is a sheep-deworming agent known as Levamisole. With no major clinical trial ever showing significant increased long term survival with Levamisole, it is still a standard chemotherapy agent even today! The weirdness is, Levamisole was included for its “immune system modulation” properties. However, its major toxicities include:
- Decreased white cell count (!)
- Flu symptoms
- Nausea
- Abdominal cramps
- Dizziness
Some immune booster!
A 1994 major study of Levamisole written up in the British Journal of Cancer showed almost double the survival rate using a placebo instead of Levamisole! The utter mystification over why this poison continues to be used as a standard component of chemo cocktails can be cleared up by considering one simple fact: when Levamisole was still a sheep de-wormer, it cost $1 per year. When the same amount was suddenly upgraded to a cancer drug given to humans, now it costs $1,200 per year. Thank you, Johnson & Johnson. (Los Angeles Times 11 Sep 93.)
DOSE-LIMITING
A funny phrase that doctors use when talking about chemotherapy is that it is a “dose limiting” treatment. All that means is that if the does is not limited, the patient dies. It is inexplicable when patients tell me their family’s chemotherapy stories, usually involving a family member, in which they talk about toward the end, where the doctors gave the patient “5 times” or “20 times” the lethal dose! I hear this all the time, and when you really get what they’re saying, the level of barbarity is appalling. The doctors are saying at the end. Well it’s hopeless – we may as well give him 5 or 20 times the normal dose of an already poisonous drug, what difference will it make? We tried our best. Totally forgetting that the patient even while dying is a human being, and the goal wasn’t to kill the tumor; it was to save the patient. Or are they saying, quick this guy is dying, the insurance is still running? This is a major risk of giving the hospital carte blanche. Reminds me of giving a kid a credit card, hoping he’ll be judicious. When any chemotherapeutic drug is spilled in a hospital or anywhere en route, it is classified as a major biohazard, requiring the specialists to come and clean it up with their space-suits and all their strictly regulated protocols. Yet this same agent is going to be put into the human body and is expected to cure it of disease? What’s wrong with this picture?
INTERLEUKIN-2
Is another colossal failure. When the oncologist starts talking about interleukin-2, it’s usually time to start thinking about coffin selection, because by then the big stuff has been pretty much tried and met with its usual failure. The brilliant thinking behind interleukin-2 and other “vaccine” – type agents is that now we’re going to transform the patient’s lymphocytes into an army of Killer T-cells, which will then descend on those troublesome cancer cells and “root them out of there.” Just one problem with this theory: no foreign antigens have ever been identified in tumor cells. And that’s the only way that lymphocytes work – destroying foreign antigens – the not-self cells. So even if the T-cell count can be boosted, there is simply no way these lymphocytes can be directed at cancer cells, because the cancer cells don’t appear that different from normal cells.
The other vexatious feature of interleukin-2 therapy is that because of its last-ditch status in the oncological pharmacopoeia, the patient’s immune system is generally so depressed by the surgery/chemo/radiation it has just endured, there’s simply not much of it left to work with. Once your immune system’s gone, so are you.
Professor George Annas, a medical ethicist, who analyzed the controlled clinical trials done at the National Cancer Institute on interleukin-2, was slightly less than enthusiastic about interleukin-2 patients:
“More than 80% of the patients did not do any better and they actually did worse. They died harder. That’s not irrelevant. We always tend to concentrate on the survivors, but we’ve got to make the point that 80 per cent had terrific side effects and didn’t get any measurable increase in longevity.”
New York Times 3 Mar 94
Dr. Martin Shapiro agrees:
“revelations about the apparent ineffectiveness of the experimental cancer drug interleukin-2 are but the tip of an iceberg of misrepresentation and misunderstanding about cancer drug treatments in general.”
Los Angeles Times 9 Jan 87
METAPHORS OF WAR
Mainstream cancer theory is all in military terms:
- The war on cancer
- Killing the tumor cells
- Killer T cells
- Stopping the advance
- Powerful drugs as weapons
This type of thinking is so pervasive that it’s become second nature for most of us. The very failure of the entire cancer industry to slow the death rate over the past fifty years may indicate that perhaps it’s time to look for another paradigm. They have failed, but they can’t admit it because the whole thing is market-driven. Its imponderable that doctors continue to prescribe a volatile poison which they know will kill the patient, simply because it’s their only tool! This can’t be an acceptable excuse! You don’t want to believe that things are really this perverse, but in most cases due diligence will bring such a realization.
WHO ARE THE QUACKS?
The American Cancer Society and the FDA have a list of “Unproven Methods” for cancer. As you might expect, the criteria for getting on this list are predictable:
- In a natural form
- Non-toxic
- Not produced by the Drug Industry
- Easily available without a prescription
- Non-patentable
Even though chemotherapy and radiation and palladium implants are completely unproven themselves, and frequently are the cause of death themselves, they are not on the Unproven List. Why not? Because they’re expensive, can be completely controlled, and are patentable. This last deserves some explanation.
In order for a drug to be approved by the FDA, the manufacturer must do years of studies, which may cost anywhere between 17 to 100 million dollars. (Day) Now if a company is going to spend that kind of money, they don’t want some other company stealing their formula after they’ve gone to all that trouble developing it. Their guarantee is called a patent – legally it’s their drug and no one can copy it for 17 years.
Do you think after all that trouble, a drug company wants somebody to come along with a totally cheap, available, and natural product which has the same effect as their drug, yet with none of the side effects? Of course not! And do you think they’ll do everything they can both legally and politically to prevent natural products from reaching the market? You better believe it. Two books which best document some of the effective natural cures for cancer which have come along in the past 75 years and have faced a tidal wave of opposition from the FDA/AMA/Drug Trust are: Ralph Moss’s The Cancer Industry and Richard Walters’s Options. Some of these natural cures are still around in the US, though they are under attack. Others can only be obtained in Mexico or Europe. And still others have been crushed out of existence for good by the Darth Vader faction. You can do the historical research yourself on some of the following products and innovators:
William Kelley, Hoxsey, Gaston Naessens, Max Gerson, Kurt Donsbach, William Koch, Dr Burzynski, Dr Blass, Dr Loffler, Stan Bynum, Patrick Flanagan, Microhydrin, 714x, Haelan, antineoplastins, raw foods, live cell therapy, ozone, EDTA chelation, Laetrile, Coley vaccines, Hydrazine sulphate, Hans Nieper, JH Tilden, whole food vitamins, antioxidants, colon detoxification, the Rife machine, the black box, green foods – this is a partial list. Many names have been lost forever. Separately or in combination, these methods and these healers have resolved cancer in thousands of cases during the past 75 years. Some of the technology has been repressed out of existence – other methods are quite easy. What they have in common is that they are non-patentable generally natural methods which have no significant side effects, and work with one common goal: strengthen the immune system. If cancer is to be overthrown, only the body itself can do that.
The above names were not people whose first goal was to make personal fortunes and lock their discoveries away from those who wanted to copy them. The Drug Trust, which includes the pharmaceutical industry, The AMA, the FDA, and even the FTC, have what can only be described as a de facto monopoly on cancer treatment in this company. Their goal is not curing cancer or helping people die with dignity, or trying to discover a cure, or relieving pain, or giving people a better life. Their only focus is profit, and they have proven for the past century that there are no limits they will observe to secure their control of what has become an $90 billion per year industry. If this sounds harsh or paranoid, start perusing the appended reference list and tell me what you come up with. Or try and find one single treatment on the FDA’s “Unproven Methods” list that is patentable as a drug.
The Immune System
Essentially, the immune system is the body’s means of surveillance, intended to protect it from disease by searching out and destroying any health-damaging agents.
The immune system identifies, remembers, attacks and destroys disease-causing invaders and transformed or infected cells. Some individuals, born with defective immune systems can only survive in a complete sterile environment free of micro-organisms that cause infections. Immunology, the study of the immune system, arose out of the observation that people who have contracted and recovered from infections and rarely, if ever, get the same disease again. By the way, we need infections, especially in our early childhood, to build up our immune system or as a kind of training ground.
Vaccination against all kinds of childhood diseases may cause a reverse action and prevent not only the disease but prevent our immune system to build up. Studies have confirmed that children show the tendency to develop more infections, if vaccinated. We better pay more attention to this subject and watch carefully the results. Vaccination causes besides weak immune systems severe side effects, such as leukemia or diseases of the central nervous system. There is not very much to read about it. I guess we all know why. Nowadays, we hear our patients tell us: “I can’t understand how I could catch cancer, I never had fever the last years.” Indeed, but not developing fever while sick from an infection, is not a sign of perfect health, it indicates that we lost the ability to defend ourselves with self-healing mechanisms like fever. In temperatures about 39 degrees Celsius, micro-organisms cannot reduplicate themselves anymore and the body starts to recover. Fever is the first immune response. Even mainstream medicine is rediscovering the healing power of fever. Cancer cells die off in temperatures about 40.5 degrees Celsius. This kind of treatment is called Hyperthermia and becomes more and more popular in the treatment of cancer.
What causes Cancer?
Increasing rates of cancer are a barometer of society’s overall ability to fight off disease. As our immune function declines, cancer increases. Two major factors determine whether our immune system can keep us healthy or whether it will cause cancer. Both of them result from our modern, urban way of life. These factors are:
Pollution, environmental toxins and nutritional status.
We still are far away from knowing all causes of cancer; however our wisdom increases almost every day. This script is not the platform to discuss all complicated biochemical pathways more to educate about some of very common reasons why someone starts to develop cancer and to make you more sensitive about early signs. So let us start with some common viruses that are believed to play a major role in cancer history. Experts believe that the Eppstein Barr Virus, which is known to cause “students kissing disease”, Pfeiffer’s glandular fever or infectious mononucleosis but also lymphoma, is a precursor of cancer. Herpes genitalis or papilloma viral infections are dangerous as a longstanding pre-cancerosis, also a precursor of cancer. Hepatitits B viral infections may produce primary liver cell carcinoma after some years of infection. There are lots more viruses conceivably triggering malignant diseases. Another example is herpes zoster, which does not attack healthy persons, but is often the first sign of a pernicious disease and is frequently found in cancer patients as a result of their weakened immune system.
Besides viruses exist some bacteria that are related to cancer. The bacterium Helicobacter Pylori, which is often found in gastric carcinoma, was listed by the World Health Organization in June 1994.
We also have a list of about 600 toxic substances that can promote cancer. One example is the Heavy Metals. Alternative medicine researchers and physicians believe that heavy metal poisoning is a major factor in autoimmune disorders, especially in multiple sclerosis and of course in cancer. In my twenty years of experience with cancer patients, all of them showed toxic levels of unchelated heavy metals. Different heavy metals have different routes of entry into the human system, yet all are devastating to the immune system.
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