Summers Thomas Edison wrote, "The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease." This statement was very prophetic, because prevention is the direction that medical care has embraced more and more in the twentieth century. However, diseases like tuberculosis, AIDS, and cancer are still a puzzle.
According to the American Cancer Society, 24 percent of all deaths in the U.S. relate to cancer. Forty-two percent of all men and 39 percent of all women will someday develop cancer. In the last forty years, the incidence of cancer has risen 44 percent and the mortality rate is up three percent. In a recent speech to their national convention, the president of the American Cancer Society stated that there have been no significant advancements in chemotherapy since the early 1970s.
Anyone studying cancer treatments will soon come to the realization that there are hundreds of different treatments available and that many of them have been proven by competent medical doctors and researchers to be very effective.
I read my first cancer research paper in 1974 as part of an assignment I'd been given in an experimental psychology class. The researchers from this cancer study thought that perhaps much of the reason for the high mortality rate of cancer was the fear and stress generated by being told you had cancer and were probably going to die.
To test this hypothesis, these researchers published a book with the aid of a computer they programmed to generate words in random order. When they asked research subjects to read this book, it was discovered that their brain activity increased for about one and a half to two hours, then dropped to a state of relaxation. Finding this fact interesting, the researchers decided to test whether a brain relaxed in this manner would then turn all of a cancer patient's bodily resources to health instead of worrying about pending death.
The researchers then published 132 of the random-word-order books and gave them to terminal cancer patients to read. The cancer patients were asked to read the book three hours a day, five days a week. No other treatment was given during the study, and a mortality rate of over eighty percent was expected at the end of the first year of the three-year test period. When it was over, 106 of the original 132 cancer patients were still alive.
After reading this study, I realized the significance of the role of the mind and emotions in the healing process.
Research has shown that surgical removal of many forms of cancer does not prolong survival. Surgery places tremendous stress on the body that causes significant immune system depression. Also, many cancer cells often remain inside the patient post-surgery, which then necessitates chemo or radiation therapy.
It is also interesting to note that lung patients who receive radiation therapy have a mortality rate that is 21 percent higher than those who don't receive this treatment.
The positive side to this, though, is that there are specific nutrients that have been shown to stave off the destructive effects of radiation therapy. Ginseng has been shown to increase your chances of surviving radiation therapy. Antioxidants reduce the damage that can be caused as a result of the increase in free radicals that this treatment causes. Also, taking the amino acid taurine, which is depleted during radiation therapy, will help to maintain this amino acid at a suitable level.
There are many discoveries that help to reduce the effects of chemotherapy also. A good starting point lies within Questioning Chemotherapy by Dr. Ralph Moss; it’s a very well-written book with lots of helpful information. Taking Vitamins A and C combined with N-acetylcysteine will help to reduce damage that may be caused to your heart.
Apparently, chemotherapy reduces the ability of the left ventricle to pump blood. Coenzyme Q10, Vitamin E, and melatonin (which restores normal blood cell production) protect against chemotherapy-induced immune system depression. While whey protein renders the cancer cells more vulnerable to the action of chemotherapy, it protects healthy cells from chemotherapy toxins. It's also been found that the combination of Vitamins B-1, B-2, B-6, B-12, folic acid, and shark liver oil is more effective on some chemotherapy side effects than is marijuana.
Cancer research done in Germany between 1937 and 1945 not only proved that smoking caused lung cancer; they also discovered that a diet high in fruits, vegetables, and grains, and low in animal proteins and animal fats, reduced the risk of cancer by 75 percent. When Hitler heard the results of this study, he banned all smoking in public places in addition to banning all pregnant women from smoking.
From this same German research came a diet, the Gerson Diet, which used a combination of diet and body detoxification techniques as a treatment for cancer. Albert Schweitzer was among the tens of thousands of people cured of cancer with this diet.
In other research, it has been found that most people die when cancer cells from the original tumor metastasize (travel) to other parts of the body. Only when people have brain, lung, or kidney cancer do they die from the original tumor. Surgery is one of the causes of metastasis.
Another cause of metastasis is the intake of excess amounts of simple sugars, i.e. cake, candy, cookies, donuts, pop, and other foods high in simple sugars. This is because cancerous tumors consume five times more simple sugar than normal cells do. Thus, when you eat foods high in simple sugars, you're feeding the cancer cells and enabling the tumor to grow and spread throughout the body more quickly. It is easy to see that cutting down on simple sugar intake should be a major part of any cancer treatment.
Research going back as far as 1921 has shown that alkali metals like cesium and potassium have been very helpful in cancer treatment. It seems that cancer thrives and grows in a rather limited pH range inside your body. Tests have shown that raising the blood pH by 0.08 decreases the growth rate of a tumor by over ninety percent. Cesium and/or potassium intake help to raise the blood pH.
Also, for those who just can't give up the smoking habit, it's been shown that taking beta-carotene can reduce your risk of developing cancer to the same odds as those who don't smoke.
In 1956 at U.C. Berkeley Medical Center, a study was done treating three thousand women for breast cancer. These women all received surgery, and had either chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Fifteen hundred of these women were also given between fifteen hundred and three thousand milligrams of vitamin C a day. The results of the study proved how helpful vitamin C is in treating cancer.
However, these results were filed away and forgotten until 1990, when a researcher ran across them. The researcher decided to follow up on the study by contacting the participants (34 years post-study) to determine how the two groups, those who took vitamin C vs. those who didn't take vitamin C, were doing. It was found that 16 times as many women in the vitamin C group survived vs. those who didn't take vitamin C.
Still another study found that a combination of diet, meditation, and visualization was very successful in treating cancer. For instance, if test subjects had lung cancer, they would be put on a specific diet and given a picture of a healthy lung. They would then be taught how to use this picture to visualize a mental picture of a healthy lung. That mental picture would then be transferred to where the cancer was located. Affirmations would then be held in the mind that the lungs were now healthy and working perfectly. Those subjects who learned to clearly visualize healthy lungs in black and white had an 83 percent cancer remission rate; those who could visualize their lungs in color had a 92 percent remission rate.
When tumors start out, they don't have an internal blood supply, but rather take their nutrients from the surrounding tissue. As the tumor grows, this nutrient supply becomes inadequate for the tumor's needs. At this point "budding" occurs, a process in which capillaries from normal tissue bud into the tumor and grow finger-like projections. When the ends of two different "fingers" touch, blood flows through the capillary, and the blood supply of the tumor is enhanced. The tumor continues to grow.
Many studies have shown that taking beta-carotene and vitamin D-3 slows down or stops the budding process. Tests have been performed using this treatment instead of chemotherapy on women who have breast cancer. It was found that those taking the supplements lived four years longer than those treated with chemotherapy.
Furthermore, other studies have shown that combining the above treatment with vitamins C, E, soy extracts, coenzyme Q10, selenium and melatonin encourages cancer to go into remission.
It is interesting to note that Tagamet® (the antacid) both increases the number of white blood cells and makes them more effective at destroying cancer cells. It was also found to help prevent cancer.
An experimental treatment was done in a hospital in Japan in 1986 in which doctors took blood samples from one hundred terminal cancer patients using a random selection of cancer types. White blood cells were separated out from each blood sample and given nutrients to increase their numbers. The white blood cells were then injected back into the original donors and all one hundred patients went into full remission. This procedure has since been used successfully in Europe. All applications to try this treatment in the U.S. have been turned down by the Food and Drug Administration.
As a result of all the cancer research results I've come across, I've learned that it's very important for cancer patients to do a lot of research and ask lots of questions. A good book to start with is Love, Medicine and Miracles by Dr. Bernie Siegel. Dr. Siegel, a surgeon who kept documentation of interesting findings among his cancer patients, found that cancer often erupts in the part of the body that's symbolic of a person's repressed resentments. In many cases, once the resentment was brought out into the open and dealt with, the cancer went into remission. Thus, a major part of the treatment Dr. Siegel gives his cancer patients is recommending them to group therapy especially designed for those suffering from cancer.
Most importantly, cancer treatment becomes more successful when one not only follows one’s physician's advice, but also supplements it with information that can be found simply by going to the library and doing some in-depth research.
Michael Summers is a licensed counselor and massage practitioner. He teaches classes on curing cancer, AIDS, and spiritual healing in both Seattle and Tacoma. You may contact him at The Perfect Balance, (253) 759-6803.
