Standard Treatments for Cancer & Why They May Not Work

We’re continuing from last week. We talked about cancer, what it is, a little bit about cancer cells and the causes of cancer. If you didn’t see that post I urge you to go back and look at it.  It will be very informative.

Let’s talk about how standard medicine treats cancer and then we will move on to other possibilities next time. There are currently three ways to treat cancer: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Let me say this very loud and clear. If you are going to get a standard medical cure for your cancer it should probably be surgery. That is: if the cancer is singular, if it is still one single tumor, if it hasn’t spread yet, and if they can go in and do a good “no touch” technique and remove the whole thing. You notice there are a lot of “if’s” in there.  If they can do all that and get it out, then you do have a chance of a standard medical cure, and that would be surgery.

The caveat to that is if they don’t get it all or if they biopsy it and run a needle through it cutting across lymphatics and veins and go through that tumor and back out again. Or they might not do good surgical technique when removing it. In either case, they have just spread it. That would be a problem. The point stands, however, that surgery would be the best standard medical cure, given the right conditions.

The next standard way of treating cancer is radiation. Radiation, which are X-Rays as I mentioned last week, causes cancer. It’s interesting – I guess you could say we’re treating fire with fire there. Radiation is frequently used to kill cancer cells. We also know that it does increase the risk of cancer of whatever you are radiating later. If you don’t kill all the cancer it increases the chance of having multiple lines of cancer cells instead of just one. There are some definite downsides for radiation. It also damages the immune system locally and to some degree more broadly. But it certainly damages the immune system less dramatically than chemo does.  

What I used radiation for in my alternative cancer clinic was mainly to de-bulk tumors. I didn’t use it a whole lot of times, but there is a new form called IMRT which helps you get less radiation. Radiation therapy is getting a little better. If you have an IMRT machine locally available it can be of benefit.

Chemotherapy works by damaging cells that are in the state of division. Whatever cells in your body are dividing it’s going to damage those cells. The theory behind chemo is that your cancer cells are going to be the most rapidly dividing cells in your body so it’s going to do more damage to them than it does to any other organ system or any other cells. Unfortunately that is not true for a lot of tumors. A lot of them are fairly slow growing.  The slower growing the less true that would be.  

The other problem there is the most naturally occurring rapid division in your body is from your immune cells. Therein lies a huge problem. If you ask a chemo doctor, “Doctor, could this chemo possibly ever kill all of the cancer cells?”  the answer will always, absolutely, 100% of the time be no. Chemo can never kill 100% of the cancer cells. You kind of scratch you head and go, “Well, okay, if chemo isn’t going to kill 100% of the cancer cells then what’s going to kill the rest of them?” The answer is your immune system. Then you go, “Okay, I thought chemo damaged my immune system. Isn’t that why you check the white blood count every time I come in before you give me another dose?” Therein lies the catch 22 with chemo. It damages the only thing that can possibly save your life. Unless your immune system steps up and kills the last 10 or 20 or 30% of the cancer cells you will not survive.

There are a few cancers, usually leukemias, lymphomas and blood type system cancers, and testicular cancer that there are some very effective chemos for. You can count those on your fingers. The others are poorly responsive to chemo in general. Outside of the handful of cancers that are very responsive it may not be a good way to go.

Next week, we’ll talk about some natural means of preventing and treating cancer. Stay tuned.

Cancer & Its Causes

Some of my first posts on this blog were talking about breast cancer. Now I’ll return to the subject but talk in a more general sense about cancer. Cancer is a huge subject.  There is a lot of material to cover so I’ll probably post for the next few weeks on cancer. It’s certainly of interest to all of us, and we all know someone that has had it. It’s not a pretty thing. There’s a real struggle to find a cure for cancer in the medical establishment but for most cancer there’s no good treatment.

Let me get right into the scope of the problem. Economically, billions are spend in research every decade and multi-billions of dollars are spent treating the disease every year. It’s a major industry. It's not fun to think of it in this way, but the financial outlay and costs to the U.S., and to the world is almost beyond comprehension. 

Since 1955 the incidence of cancer world wide has increased world-wide by over 40%.  That’s a big number. In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer. At that time it was the 8^th leading cause of death in the nation. Today it is number two. There was a period in 2005-2006 where it was actually reported in the news media that it was the leading cause of death. So you’ve got to ask yourself, “Are we winning this war?”  Needless to say the answer to that is a really big, “NO”.  

There’s also a paradox here because the only treatments that a person can receive legally are those which are approved by the government. These are: surgery, radiation, and chemo-therapy. If a physician administers anything that is not approved by the government, they can end up loosing his license or even going to jail. It kind of puts a damper on anybody that might want to receive treatments other than what the government has approved.

So the question is, what is cancer? What on earth is this? Why is it what it is?  Cancer is your very own cells that are trying to escape their toxic environment. That toxic environment happens to be your body. I know that’s kind of a different way of looking at cancer cells, but it’s true. Cancer is normal cells trying to escape a toxic environment.  

Let’s get a little more specific. Cancer is when a cell loses the knowledge of when to stop growing. You know that if you cut yourself the skin starts growing together from each side. When those cells meet in the middle they stop growing. They “know” when they’ve met each other and they “know” that they’re supposed to stop and how the normal healing process is supposed to be. There is an innate “knowledge” there and they “know” to stop growing. Well, cancer cells has lost that knowledge of when to stop growing.  

There’s also another characteristic of cancer cells: they’ve lost the knowledge of what they are supposed to be. A liver cell forgets that it is a liver cell and starts growing out of control. The less knowledge they have of what they’re supposed to be the worse the cancer is. In medical terms that’s called “undifferentiated”, or less specific cells. The less specific they are the worse that tends to be.  

Another thing we know about cancer cells is they’re extremely inefficient users of energy.   Whereas a normal cell gets 38 units of energy out of a certain type sugar, cancer cells only get 2. And as I’ve mentioned in a previous post about sugar, cancer can only burn sugar for their nutrient supply. These are a few things that distinguish what makes a cancer cell different.

What causes it?  Later I’ll talk more about different causes of cancer. But for now, recall what I said about cancer as cells trying to escape a toxic environment. What causes that toxic environment? Well, I’d say the first issue that we have to look at is (as people close to me will know that I’ve said it for years) emotional and physiological stress. If you’re familiar with my work on the Healing Codes with Alex Loyd, you’ll know that stress equates to unhealthy cellular memory down deep inside, or wrong beliefs. That’s what ultimately causes physiological stress in the body. Emotional issues and wrong beliefs can be the primary causes of cancer from my perspective.  

You absolutely have to deal with those issues if you want to get well and stay well. I frequently use the analogy, “Where do cactuses grow?” Well, we don’t see them here in East Tennessee. We see oak trees and grass and briars and bushes. We don’t see cactuses because they grow out in the desert. That’s the environment that they grow in. On the other hand, in Arizona they don’t have many live oak trees because the soil, the sunshine, and the water isn’t environmentally friendly to them. So the inside environment is what you want to change if you want to get well. In other words, where we really want to be is working on prevention. Physiological stress is what we want to stay out of. You can go to The Healing Codes site and hear Dr. Loyd and I talk about physiological stress, cellular memory and what causes that, along with the emotional issues that lead to physiological stress that, to me, are the primary cause of cancer.

Next time I’ll talk more about causes of cancer that relate to our physical environment as opposed to our emotional environment. Stay tuned. 

Drugs & chemo: not always the right choice.

This summer, the New York Times wrote an article about the drug Avastin, a drug sold by the company Genentech and used by many doctors to treat breast cancer. In the article, however, the New York Times notes that the drug “promotes life only by a few months, if that,” and that “some new studies suggest the drug might be less effective against cancer than the Food and Drug Administration had understood when the agency approved its uses.” 

Unfortunately, the sad truth is that drug companies usually know those things long in advance before it is disclosed. It’s about the money. I hate to be that honest and simplistic, but that’s the bottom line.  

I went to a breast cancer seminar probably 5-6 years ago.  Of course there were a lot of drug companies there. They had set up the booths and they were sponsoring it.  But the statistics at that time were that, if women who had recurrent breast cancer took chemo and radiation (in other words, traditional treatment provided by pharmaceutical companies) they lived 22 months on the average.  If they didn’t take these drugs they lived 20 months.  That is not statistically significant.  If you ask a statistician, there is no difference in those two, 20 or 22 months.  So you’re talking about women being damaged and nauseated, sick with hair falling out and all kinds of horrible side effects, all the while getting no increase in life that is of statistical significance.

I asked the drug company reps at this seminar, “So why are we giving this?”  They told me, “Oh, well, two months!”  But that’s two months of misery for these poor women. Medicine is supposed to be very scientific and about the patient, but unfortunately the sad truth is that many times it’s not in the best interest of patients.  

That doesn't mean that there isn't hope for a longer life for those who suffer from breast cancer. With a healthy lifestyle, careful decisions about your diet, and some alternative treatments and preventative measures, I've seen many women live far longer than the doctors had given them, with some even experiencing remission.  If you want to learn more, I'll shamelessly plug my book here, but you can also stay tuned to this blog to learn more about different ways to stay healthy without padding the pockets of drug companies.