Bottom Line Health
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| This was called Coley toxin, which artificially induced inflammation in cancer patients and resulted in an improvement in 40% of patients and a cure in 10%. This treatment, nonspecific immunotherapy, activates the immune system in a general way.
In the last 20 years, immunotherapy for cancer, using vaccines to activate the immune system in a specific way, has become an important field of cancer research.
•How do cancer vaccines work? Cancer vaccines aren't like vaccines for viral diseases, such as influenza. Although they don't currently prevent cancer, we do hope that one day they will. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 Lauderdale, Florida, has reported five cases of cancer patients who were treated with intravenous zoledronic acid or pamidronate and developed osteonecrosis of the jaw after a tooth extraction (related to the impaired bone healing caused by the decreased bone turnover with bisphosphonate treatment). All patients developed infections of the bone that would not respond to antibiotics or surgery. They had chronic pain and problems with eating, speaking, and dental hygiene. |
Dr. Steven R. Gundry
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 Pale, with wasted muscles, and generally sickly looking, all these elite marathoners looked just like the cancer patients I was treating at my local hospital. As I've since learned, running marathons is a catabolic sport, meaning you lose muscle mass dramatically. When my colleagues at Loma Linda studied the marathoners, they found that their immune systems were shot. In contrast, look at sprinters in the 100- or 200-yard dash. They're muscle bound—exactly the opposite of long-distance runners. If you run sprints fast, you'll gain muscle mass. |
Peter h. Fraser and Harry Massey
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 Journalist Lynne McTaggart, in recounting the results of those early tests, wrote:
In every instance, the cancer patients had lost these natural periodic rhythms and also their coherence. The lines of internal communication were scrambled. They had lost their connection with the world. In effect, their light was going out.
Just the opposite occurred with multiple sclerosis. MS was a state of too much order. Individuals with this disease were taking in too much light, and this was inhibiting the ability of cells to do their job. . . . MS patients were drowning in light. |
Hyla Cass, M.D.
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 Medicinal mushrooms. cancer patients may also wish to investigate medicinal mushrooms (such types as reishi, shiitake, cordyceps, maitake, agaracus, and coriolus) as immune-boosting companions to chemotherapy. These medicinal mushrooms are sources of antitumor and immunity-modulating polysaccharides (a type of carbohydrate) that have been extensively researched. Formulas containing concentrated extracts of medicinal mushrooms are available; talk with your oncologist about which he or she might recommend.
Acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). |
| Corticosteroids may also be needed for severe asthma, to keep the airway open; for allergic rashes such as poison ivy, poison oak, or for a rash that comes from exposure to an irritating chemical; after organ transplant recipients to prevent rejection of the new organ; for adrenal insufficiency, where the adrenal glands are not producing enough hormones; or in cancer patients to reduce pain caused caused by swelling of tumors.
Action: Just like the corticosteroids made in the adrenal glands, they act as anti-inflammatories. |
| Consider a macrobiotic diet. Some cancer patients find that a macrobiotic diet—which consists of cooked whole grains, vegetables, beans, seaweed, and small amounts of fish—is easier to stomach than a standard diet when undergoing cancer treatment. This may sound foreign to you, but when faced with the serious malnutrition that often accompanies cancer, you may find this a real boon, as others have. For more information, see Michio Kushi's books: The Cancer Prevention Diet (St. Martins Griffin, 1994) and The Macrobiotic Way (Avery, 2004).
• Multivitamin. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 Sloan-Kettering also references clinical studies showing that reishi increases antioxidant capacity and enhances the immune responses in advanced-stage cancer patients.
And then there's stress.
Reishi mushrooms appear to be a natural stress-buster. According to Roundtree, reishi is the mushroom of choice for people under extreme physical or emotional stress. He recommends it for endurance athletes as well. Reishi mushrooms also have a very high level of antioxidants, largely due to their ganodermic acid. |
Ron Garner
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 Lee successfully treated many prostate cancer patients who recovered and did not have to resort to the standard medical treatments of surgery and chemotherapy, by using diet, antioxidants, progesterone, and testosterone.20 He also explains why the psa (Prostate Specific Antigen) count is not a reliable indicator of cancer because it is based on an erroneous understanding of the role of psa in the body. He suggests that men should endeavor to maintain healthy levels of progesterone and testosterone for both preventing and treating prostate cancer. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| A Midwest pharmacist was found guilty of diluting a patented chemotherapy drug for cancer patients.
• Over half of all drugs sold in the U.S. are purchased by pharmacy wholesalers. Large chain pharmacies buy drugs through these wholesalers. Sometimes the pharmacies receive counterfeit, mislabeled, stolen, or illegally imported drugs from the wholesalers.
• A large chain pharmacy was engaged to notify a particular niche of its clientele about the impending availability of a drug meriting their consideration. |
Devra Davis
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 There are remarkable efforts under way involving natural products and breakthrough approaches in clinical trials, pushed by cancer patients who often have nothing to lose and doctors who may be wrestling with the disease themselves.
There is no one who deals with the disease now who doubts that we need to open a new front. To reduce the burden of cancer today, we must prevent it from arising in the first place, and we have to find new ways to keep the millions of cancer survivors from relapsing. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Yet diabetics, heart disease patients and cancer patients and reversing their diseases like never before by turning to a plant-based diet, engaging in regular exercise and avoiding all toxic chemicals (including those in foods, drugs and personal care products).
To those people who still think for themselves, pharmaceuticals are largely irrelevant. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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| It should be understood that methotrexate is a major toxin that is used primarily for cancer patients as a last resort.
Penicillamine (Cuprimine), a derivative of penicillin that is also used to treat RA, acts by inhibiting the immune system. It can cause skin lesions and, like the other RA drugs, bone-marrow suppression. Any drug that inhibits the immune system can be very dangerous, since we need our immune system to fight off infections. |
Devra Davis
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| Generally speaking, however, employers are no more responsible for the lack of information about industrial cancer than are the many thousands of physicians who have cancer patients in industrial areas or who actually are associated with factories. It is an unquestionable fact that an appreciable number of occupational cancers slip through the hands of doctors unidentified. This is due in a great degree to a general ignorance of the occupational aspects of cancer. |
| Noting that all of his recent lung cancer patients had started smoking in World War I, he suggested that cigarette smoking lay behind this sudden surge in the disease.49 Two years later, in 1938, Raymond Pearl, a statistician with Johns Hopkins University, prepared an impressive analysis of the increased death rates of smokers by distilling information from insurance company records.50 In 1940 the Argentine researcher Angel H. Roffo, publishing in German journals, identified tobacco tars, rather than nicotine, as the principal cancer-causing part of cigarette smoke. |
| Hope is still the ultimate drug for cancer patients.
When I called Bizub to thank him for the magazine, he told me that the woman in the photo was his aunt, Isabelle Messinger. "Look at it," he said. "She was young. By the time they picked up this tumor that started in her cervix, it had spread everywhere. I'm a funeral director. I get to see it all. I see people at the end. Here in New Jersey, cases of cancer keep coming in younger and younger."
Dealing with the deceased, Bizub saw firsthand how those with cancer ended up. |
| In the case of these blood-boosting drugs intended to deal with the anemia so common in cancer patients, controlled supplements with inexpensive iron have been found to be as effective in many cases as more costly patented drugs in staving off anemia. But there is little effort to promote this alternative. In the U.S. today, we use three times more of these drugs than in other nations, and spend about five times more on chemotherapy, although our cancer survival statistics are not appreciably different.19
More times than we might like to admit, we use chemotherapy as a form of psychotherapy. |
| The heavy machine under which these cancer patients were positioned was considered an improvement over the old fluoroscopes because the beams were more focused. Michael Lotze remembers from his early days in training that sometimes a woman would survive repeated radiation treatments with a hole burned right through her body from the front to the back.
A nurse who worked for years transcribing cancer case reports told me that she could always tell what treatment phase a person was in by how they entered the room. |
Stacy Malkan
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 Feel Better for Teens" program for cancer patients ages 13 to 17 — a growing demographic since childhood cancer rates have been increasing. The program addresses the needs of both boys and girls, and its interactive, information-packed website covers skin care, head coverings, makeup, fitness and nutrition, and offers "tips for dealing with friends, fatigue, activities, school, and looking your best through it all."27
Not So Hot Trends
The normalization of cancer is everywhere. |
Lester A. Mitscher and Victoria Toews
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 Yet another study, based on 213 pancreatic cancer patients and a cancer-free comparison group, revealed "significantly decreased risk" for those drinking green tea.17
BLADDER CANCER
Approximately 50,000 new cases of bladder cancer are diagnosed annually, with four times as many men as women falling victim to the disease. Environmental factors play a role in cancer of the bladder, with cases much more common in cigarette smokers and industrial workers (including the dye, chemical, leather, and rubber industries). Polyphenols may mitigate some of the harmful effects of tobacco use. |
| A cancer registry in China identified 902 esophageal cancer patients, and another 1,552 cancer-free men and women were included in the study as controls. All of these men and women were interviewed to gather information about diet, medical history, smoking status, alcohol use, tea drinking habits, family history of cancer, occupation, physical activity, and reproductive history. Statistical analysis of the data showed that alcohol users and cigarette smokers have "risk reductions [for developing esophageal cancer] of about 20% among male and 50% among female drinkers of green tea. |
Ron Garner
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| Terminal cancer patients are approximately 500 to 1000 times more acidic than normal healthy people. Cancer will not occur in a pH-balanced body.
Recovering from Cancer
It is not enough to just kill the cancer. If the environment within the body is not corrected, cancer can return. This explains the medical terminology "in remission," meaning that cancer cells have been reduced to a very low or non-identifiable level at that time. |
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.
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 Engelbert Dunphy quoted as saying that cancer patients are not afraid of suffering or dying, but are afraid of being abandoned. That became my mantra with my study group: I would never allow them to feel abandoned.
From the very start, I made it a point to be integrally involved in each participant's treatment. It began with an initial interview of forty-five to sixty minutes with each patient and his or her spouse. We reviewed medical history, cultural variations in heart disease, research findings in human and animal studies, and the various therapeutic options that were available. |
John J. Ratey, MD
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 It came from an unlikely source. cancer patients are sometimes injected with a dye that shows up in proliferating cells so that the spread of the disease can be tracked. Researchers looked at the brains of terminally ill patients who had donated their bodies to science and found that their hippocampi were packed with the dye marker, proof that neurons were dividing and propagating—a process called neurogenesis—just like cells in the rest of the body. With that, they formalized one of the biggest discoveries in neuroscience. |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
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 One specific word of caution to breast cancer patients undergoing treatment with tamoxifen: until it has been determined if soy is beneficial in addition to tamoxifen or if it interferes with tamoxifen, I would recommend against daily soy ingestion while on tamoxifen.
For the most part and in most individuals, soy foods will not interfere with thyroid function, protein digestion, or the uptake of minerals, and they are more associated with reducing the risk of hormone-dependent cancers than with increasing it. |
| Only recently has there been renewed research interest, largely born of the need to provide menopausal breast cancer patients with safe and effective medicines for symptom relief.63 Patients received four weeks of vitamin E (800 IU per day), then four weeks of an identical placebo, or vice versa. Hot flash frequency decreased by 25 percent in the vitamin E group and 22 percenr in rhe placebo group. |
| We don't know with certainty that black cohosh is safe to use in breast cancer patients, but we have compelling safety data that offers much reassurance. There are two recent excellent reviews of the literature on the safety of black cohosh.116' 117 The more comprehensive Low Dog paper addresses safety in special populations, such as breast cancer survivors. Recent studies find that there is no estrogenic action of black cohosh, that it does not effect serum levels of estradiol, LH, FSH, and prolactin. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 Cancer
Books
Natural Strategies for cancer patients by Russell Blaylock, M.D.
Blaylock is a neurosurgeon, professor of medicine, and an outstanding nutritionist. This book is well researched and very thorough. Covers foods, supplements, and much more.
Beating Cancer with Nutrition by Patrick Quillin, Ph.D., R.D., C.N.S., and Noreen Quillin.
This is a classic by a Ph.D. nutritionist who specializes in nutritional protocols for cancer.
Clinics
Cancer Treatment Centers of America
800.615.3055 www. cancercenter. |
Anne Harrington
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 It's clear by now that this kind of psychotherapy helps cancer patients," he says. "How it helps them is a matter of legitimate disagreement. That it helps them is not."73
In fact, many of the women who participated in Spiegel's replication study would likely agree with him. Some years ago, during the time when interest in Spiegel's original findings of enhanced survival was at its peak, he gave me permission to go to California to talk with some of these women. I was interested above all in asking them a simple question that it seemed no one had ever asked: namely, what did they think? |
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