Preventing Cancer

Okay, last week we talked about some of the traditional cures you’ll find for cancer in the medical field, and a little about the effectiveness of those treatments. Now we’ll ask the question, what can I do to prevent cancer or maybe treat it more naturally? Again, let’s go back to the causes. We’ll start with the number one cause, emotional issues. I tell every patient that I have, every one that I ever advise, two primary things: you have to be living in forgiveness and living in love. Forgiveness is the greatest emotional issue of life. You might have heard myself and my friend Dr. Loyd both talk about that in the past through The Healing Codes. I encourage you to go and investigate more of that because forgiveness is the greatest issue of life. 

Unforgiveness simply ties you to that person you don’t forgive. It doesn’t hurt them at all. You’ve got to let it go and cut the rope. You’ve got to be living in forgiveness. The positive side of that is living in love. That restores the joy to your life, and happiness.  Happiness is not about stuff, it’s about where you’re living your life. Those are emotional issues. That all relates to cellular memory and the other things that Dr. Loyd and I love to talk about.

Hypoxia. If you’ll remember, we talked about low oxygen tension in the blood a few weeks ago. That’s a huge one. How do you get the oxygen tension up in your blood? By changing your pH. The way to do that is to eat alkaline-ash foods and drink alkaline water. Those are really important issues if you’re trying to prevent cancer or get better if you have it. You want your body PH to be alkaline. That allows oxygen to turn loose out there on the other end and oxygenate the tissues. If cells can just have oxygen they can work miracles as far as staying healthy and utilizing the energy and the resources that they’ve got.  

What are alkaline-ash foods? Basically that’s lots of vegetables, less meat, healthy fruits.  That’s it in one sentence or less. You’ve got to move the pH and shift that.  

Environmental toxins – I’ve mentioned heavy metals earlier. Unfortunately there are not many natural ways to get heavy metals out of our bodies. EDTA and DMPS, DMSA are FDA approved drugs. They remove metals very effectively from the body and they have virtually no side effects. This is one place where I’m just going to recommend drugs. If you have heavy metal toxicity, if you have a “silver” filling in your mouth then you have heavy metal toxicity. If you live in America and drink water that comes through our pipes and breathe the air that has metal in it and live in a city where everything is metallic, then you probably have enough heavy metals where you need to get some out of your system. It dumbs down the immune system and the immune system can’t deal with heavy metals very easily.  

There are all kinds of other environmental toxins that you want to decrease your exposure to those: pesticides, all kinds of chemicals. Wash your food or if you can afford it buy organic. If you can’t buy organic, at least wash your fruits and vegetables off with hydrogen peroxide or other detoxifiers and neutralizers that are designed for that.  

On the positive side you can be taking anti-oxidants. That’s spelled f-r-u-i-t usually: blueberries, blackberries, grapes, grapeseed extract, wine, all different kinds of fruit. You can help yourself out and buy a good anti-oxidant formula from your nutrition store that would have grapeseed extract in it, alpha-lipoic acid, vitamins C, vitamin E and other anti-oxidants. Those are very, very significant.  

If I had a choice and I could only take my vitamin pill every day or my anti-oxidant, I would probably choose my anti-oxidant. They are just huge. We have so many oxidizing things in our environment that anti-oxidants are very significant.  

The food, the way it’s grown and processed and delivered to us these days, have significantly less anti-oxidants in it than if you grow your own in the garden.  You may need a boost there from those.

Radiation. Well, the best way to probably avoid radiation is not to go to the doctor’s office and get X-rays. Let’s talk about testing here for a little bit. There are common uses of X-rays. There are radiation studies like PET scans and different uptake studies, and there are CT’s. These are all using radiation. There is also a test called MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) with which you can see almost everything you can see on a CT (even better sometimes), that doesn’t have radiation.  There is also ultrasound. The point is, there are other ways to study things without radiation.

Stay out of sun beds, tanning beds and things like that. Stay out of the sun during solar flares. On the other hand, we probably should get 15-20 minutes of direct sun every day. It’s pretty healthy for you because you need your vitamin D3 which helps prevent cancer.  It’s very, very healthy for you. It’s the over exposure where we go out for an hour or two when we’ve been inside under the fluorescent lights all the rest of the week that is so damaging.

We’ve mentioned viruses as a cause of cancer. There’s just not a whole lot to do about viruses except to keep your immune system totally up to speed. Staying out of stress is probably the number one thing. Orally there are some things that are probably good for helping your immune system fight viruses.  These include the arabano dilactan, beta 1-3 glucans, things like that available at a nutrition store.  

Alternative medically there is hydrogen peroxide, ozone, ultraviolet blood irradiation that can help and silver may be an agent that may help with viruses.  

That’s a wrap on our talk on cancer.  I know I’ve dwelt on the topic for a while, but I wanted to share that with you. Hopefully it will be valuable information for you that will be of some practical benefit. It’s a huge subject and we could talk about it for hours.  There are books written about it inches thick. In comparison this is less than a thumbnail sketch, but there it is.  

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 & It's Causes: Part 2

Last week I started a multi-week talk about cancer. I began with defining exactly what cancer is: a cell that loses the knowledge of when to stop growing. I also talked a little about how emotional issues and wrong beliefs can be the primary causes of cancer because of the latent stress they cause to the body. This week I’ll talk more about phsysiological causes of cancer. 

First we’ll talk about hypoxia. Hypoxia is a scientific word for not enough oxygen in the tissues. Oxygen deficiency is a cause of cancer. We’ve known that for over 80 years. Dr. Otto Warburg described that in 1925 and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1931 for discovering the cause of cancer was low oxygen at the tissue level. Some of you are also aware that an acid pH causes cancer. These are actually one and the same thing. The acid pH prevents the delivery, the unhooking of oxygen out on the tissue level. So the cells don’t get oxygen when you have an acid environment in your body. That’s why having enough oxygen in your tissues is so critical. There are medical tests that look for this. You put a probe on your finger and it tells you how saturated your blood is with oxygen. Unfortunately, you can have 100% oxygen saturation in the blood and have extremely poor delivery of oxygen out in the tissues because of that acid pH in the environment.  

Another cause of cancer are environmental toxins. I was reading an article in the paper here a couple years ago. It was talking about the annual meeting of all the water treatment plant people that treat water for people to drink. They said they knew that chlorine caused cancer. They just didn’t know what to do about it because they couldn’t treat enough water for everybody without the chlorine. There are known environmental toxins; lead, mercury, chlorine, the different chemicals, pesticides; all kinds of chemicals that we have, unfortunately, in our environment. We’re still putting a lot of these toxins that help facilitate cancer into our system.

We all know that radiation causes cancer. Madame Curie, the discoverer of X-rays, died of, you guessed it, cancer. She didn’t know to protect herself with lead shields and lead aprons because she’d just discovered X-rays and didn’t have a clue that they caused cancer. We get natural radiation from the sun and from space. It’s raining down on us all the time. The medical community is, oddly, pretty free with radiation. There was a period when we were much more careful with radiation. For example, my daughter was getting an X-ray taken a couple years ago and I asked for a shield to put over her ovaries. They looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Why would you do that?” Well, X-rays damage tissue and they cause cancer. Right? “Oh, this isn’t much radiation.” We kind of treat it cavalierly and with bravado. “Oh well, it’s just a little bit of radiation.” Sadly, our medical environment is a significant source of radiation. Woman are encouraged to get mammograms. That’s a lot of radiation, especially if you talk about having it every year.  It may be that you may not be able to not have cancer at some point in time if you get enough radiation.

Another potential cause out there is nutrition, or should I say the lack of nutrition. You’ve got to have the right nutritional things to provide for proper cell structure, proper materials to grow, to maintain health, and the proper detoxifiers or antioxidants.  Nutrition or lack thereof can be put in that list of potential causes for cancer.  

I’d probably list the last cause of cancer as viruses. Every cancer cell will have a virus in it. Viruses play two roles in cancer. One is as a direct causative agent in the cells, helping them lose control. On a broader scope, we all have viruses hanging around. You might’ve seen or heard of somebody having shingles when they’re 70 or 80 years old. Where has that virus been? Where did that come from? That came from when they were 8 or 10 years old and got chickenpox and now 7 decades later it’s popped out and bitten them. Where was it all that time? It was right there in the body. Viruses are tough critters. They live in our bodies and our immune system has to stay constantly vigilant to protect us from them. 

There are some of the causes of cancer. This is a really big subject. What I’m going to do is come back next week and share some more about current therapies and other ways to look at treating cancer. Come back next week and we’ll give you the rest of the story.

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.