Who is Dr. James Forsythe?

Dr James Forsythe earned his MD from the University of California at San Francisco. He is a board-certified oncologist and also a board-certified homeopath which makes for an interesting mix of Western and alternative medicines. The combination of the two allows Dr. Forsythe to be extremely creative in his approach to cancer. He is an integrative oncologist providing the best of what both worlds have to offer. Today, Dr. Forsythe enjoys a successful career as a medical oncologist who utilizes alternative treatments

In the Introduction chapter of his book Dr. Forsythe explained why I abandoned conventional oncology. Here is what Dr. Forsythe wrote:

• Oncologists usually dismiss any anecdotes about miraculous remissions and cancer cures, even though most of them have encountered cases of remission they can’t explain.
• Not only do conventionally trained cancer specialists not want to hear about (such) case … they are hostile toward any physician (like me) who takes an interest in these anecdotes.
• We knew that chemo was killing good cells, but we just hope it was killing enough bad cells too.
• All of the patients became horribly sick from the treatment and most of them relapsed within a few years.
• It was during my training at UC San Francisco that I discovered how arbitrary the cancer treatment protocols we were learning had become. Someone higher up in the field would get an idea that we should prescribe a particular drug twice a week for this or that cancer and it should be the standard dose.
• Many times there was no scientific evidence behind what they were saying. Because we were trainees, we had to follow their exact protocol, whether it was evidence based or not.
• And despite the lack of evidence, these physicians and administrators were declaring the protocol to be an exact science, a sort of gold standard for medical practice. The obvious shortcomings bothered me a lot.
• When I attended oncology conventions there would be an exercise in which a cancer case would be presented and everyone would vote how they would treat that particular case. There was never a consensus about treatment.
• Of the specialists present, 60 percent might say one type of drug should be used, while 40 percent voted otherwise.
• I would think to myself: How can this be? These physicians were all oncologists. They should have been on the same page. But they never were; unfortunately for cancer patients, they still aren’t.
• More than 100 cancer drugs are out there today (some in use without FDA approval), and there is no consensus on which drugs to use, what dose to  use, how long to give them, or which types of cancer respond best to those drugs.
• All these decisions are made arbitrarily, turning the patients into virtual guinea pigs.
• An article written in the Journal of Oncology in 2004 noted … the overall survival rate for patients with Stage 4 cancer receiving chemotherapy was only 2.1% in the United States.
• This finding showed me that the over-treatment approach and the treatment protocols using so many toxins constituted a failing strategy.
• Even if you were lucky enough to be one of the two out of a hundred who survived, you would probably have chemo brain symptoms, you might have heart and liver problems, and you would probably experience constant pain and the loss of feelings in your feet and toes. These were just accepted side effects.
• Oncologists didn’t want to think about this dismal 2 percent survival rate after five years. Understandably, they didn’t want to acknowledge that they were doing any harm to their patients.
• What further disturbed me was the astounding escalation in patient treatment costs, especially when they were being directed to use toxic or ineffective cancer drugs following surgery.
• These high-dose drugs are expensive and often problematic. One lung cancer drug was on the market for almost five years and cost patients $25,000 (approximately RM 75,000) a year, based on them taking one pill a day, yet studies found the drug to be no more effective than if the patients had taken a placebo sugar pill every day.
• This amounted to a royal fleecing of the people who had been rendered vulnerable and fearful by the prospect of a painful death.
• Those individuals who were lucky enough to survive Stage 4 cancers often suffered from many of the symptoms of toxic chemotherapy …. The quality of their lives, even though they may have survived cancer, was oftentimes dismal.
• I found myself wondering if survival was worth the price. There was a morbid saying at some of our oncology meetings: We cure the cancer, but the patient died.
• They labeled my method a pseudo-science, something that isn’t evidence based. Because they didn’t learn about it in medical school, they considered it mere quackery.
• The bottom line is that they simply didn’t – and many still don’t – have the courage to deviate from Big Pharma’s indoctrination and drug-obsessed dogma.