Category: Medical treatments

CANCER’S COLLATERAL DAMAGE: PART 4–WHY THE RICH AND FAMOUS DIE FASTER WHEN THEY HAVE CANCER

by Yeong Sek Yee & Khadijah Shaari

Yes, the rich and famous (and insured) do die faster when they have cancer…more from the collateral damage due to the conventional (and scientifically proven?) cancer treatments than from the original cancer itself. A classic example is the sad story of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in January 1994 and died in May 1994, just barely 5 months after diagnosis.

In the best-seller, HOW WE DO HARM, Dr Otis Brawley, an oncologist and Vice-President of the American Cancer Society, bluntly stated that….”If you are rich and insured, you face another menace. Ironically wealth can increase your risk of getting lousy care. When wealthy patients demand irrational care, it’s not hard to find a doctor willing to provide it. If you have more money, doctors tell you more of what they sell, and they just might kill you. “

Below is a list of 15 (there are many, many more) rich and famous personalities who have succumbed to cancer and the average period from the date of diagnosis to death is less than 2 years. How is it that the scientifically proven/tested conventional cancer treatments did not help them? Did their cancer treatments come along with excessive collateral damage to their body system or were their cancers just too aggressive?

Likewise, you may remember that Malaysia’s most famous and leading oncologist, the late Dr Albert Lim, succumbed to prostate cancer on March 8th 2013 after less than a year of scientifically tested cancer treatments. He had metastasis to his pelvic area, liver and lungs as well. Was there excessive collateral damage or was the prostate cancer too aggressive??

HERE ARE THE 15 RICH AND FAMOUS WHO TRIED BUT DID NOT SURVIVE:

1) JO ANN DAVIS, 57

Jo Ann was a US Republican Congresswoman for Virginia and was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005. She underwent chemotherapy treatments and a mastectomy. In early 2007, she suffered a recurrence. When the cancer returned, she underwent chemotherapy again. Jo Ann died on Oct 6, 2007.

Summary Point—From diagnosis to death: 2 years

2) LINDA McCARTNEY, 56

Linda McCartney, wife of Paul McCartney died in April 1998, less than three years after it was announced that she was treated for breast cancer. Although her chemotherapy treatments had seemed to have her cancer in check, she took a turn for the worse in March 1998 when the disease spread to her liver.

Summary Point—From diagnosis to death: Less than 3 years

3) HEATHER CLARKE, 39

Heather was the wife of Darren Clarke, a PGA Golfer. She died in August 2006 after a two year battle with breast cancer that had spread to her bones and liver. She was treated at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.

Summary Point—From diagnosis to death: 2 years

4) MIRIAM ENGELBERG, 48

Miriam, a well-known US cartoonist was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001 at the age of 43. Three years later, the cancer had spread to her brain and she died at age 48.

Summary Points—a) From diagnosis to recurrence: 3 years  b) From diagnosis to death: 5 years 

5) ELIZABETH EDWARDS, 57

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John Edwards (a US presidential candidate) was initially diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004 and was treated with a combination of chemotherapy, surgery and radiation. In March 2007, a recurrence was discovered after she cracked a rib and a subsequent X-ray showed spots on another rib, on the other side of the chest.

Summary Point—From diagnosis to bone metastasis: Less than 3 years.                            

6) KING HUSSEIN OF JORDAN, 63

In July 1998, King Hussein was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL) and immediately underwent chemotherapy at MAYO Clinic in US. He was treated there for six months and returned to Jordan in January 1999.

In late January 1999, King Hussein returned to MAYO after his doctors found evidence that the lymphatic cancer had recurred. King Hussein underwent two bone marrow transplants with cells from his younger brother and sister (in December 1998 and January 1999).

In February 1999, King Hussein returned to Jordan for palliative care and subsequently passed away on February 7, 1999.

Summary Points—a) From diagnosis to recurrence: 6 months  b) From diagnosis to death: 7 months. 

7) FREDDY FENDER, 69

Freddy Fender, singer of hits like “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” and “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” was diagnosed with lung cancer (two lemon-sized tumors) in January 2006. He underwent chemotherapy but later decided to stop treatment because of severe effects on his body. Following Fender’s initial round of chemo, he had a PET scan which showed that the tumors had shrunk, but also revealed that he had nine other tumors. Freddy Fender died on October 14 2006.

Summary Point—From diagnosis to death: 9 months. 

8) SUZANNE PLESHETTE

On August 11, 2006, Suzanne Pleshette was treated for lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre and the hospital claimed that the cancer was the size of “a grain of sand” when it was found during a routine x-ray, that the cancer was “caught very much in time,” that she was receiving chemotherapy as an outpatient. She was later hospitalized for a pulmonary infection and developed pneumonia, causing her to be hospitalized for an extended period ……as part of her treatment, a part of her lungs was removed… Pleshette died in January 19, 2009of respiratory failure.

Summary Point—From diagnosis to death: 1 year 5 months

9) DAN FOGELBERG, 56

Dan Fogelberg, a singer and songwriter, discovered he had advanced prostate cancer in 2004. He underwent hormonal therapy and achieved a partial remission but failed to completely eliminate the disease. Dan subsequently died on December 15, 2007.

Summary Point—From diagnosis to death: 3 years

10) LUCIANO PAVAROTTI, 71

Pavarotti, opera singer was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in July 2006 and required emergency surgery to remove the tumor. On September 5, 2007, Italy’s AGI news agency reported that Luciano Pavarotti’s health had deteriorated and the singer was in a “very serious condition”. He was reported to be in and out of consciousness multiple times, suffering kidney failure. He finally passed away on September 6, 2007.

Summary Points—From diagnosis to death: 11 months 

11) DANA REEVE, 44

Dana Reeve, wife of Christopher Reeve (Superman), was diagnosed with lung cancer in August 2005 and passed away on March 6, 2006.

Summary Point—From diagnosis to death: 7 months only 

12) TONY SNOW, 51

Tony Snow, a White House spokesman, was treated for colon cancer in 2005 at which time his colon was removed and subsequently underwent six months of chemotherapy. In March 2007, doctors determined that the cancer had spread to his liver. He died in July 2008.

Summary Points: a)   From surgery/chemotherapy to liver metastasis: 1 ½ years  b)   From surgery /chemotherapy to death: 2 ½ years

13) MICHAEL LANDON, 54

Michael Landon was the star in the hit series “Little House on the Prairie” and “Bonanza”. On April 5, 1991 he was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver and lymph nodes. He underwent three sessions of chemotherapy but subsequently died on July 1, 1991.

Summary Point—From diagnosis to death: 2 months 

14) ARCHBISHOP CHRISTO DOULOS, 69

The Archbishop fell ill in June 9, 2006 and medical tests showed that he suffered from advanced cancer in the LARGE INTESTINE (COLON) and an unrelated malignant growth in the liver. A first operation to remove the intestinal cancer was deemed successful but later a liver transplant in the US was abandoned after discovery that the liver cancer has spread. The Archbishop passed away in January 2008.

Summary Point—From diagnosis to death: 1 ½ years 

15) MARTIN D. ABELOFF, 65

Dr Martin Abeloff, an international authority on the treatment of breast cancer and chief oncologist and director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Centre at John Hopkins University for the past 15 years, died of leukemia on September 14 2007. His leukemia, a form that is sometimes slow to grow, was diagnosed a year before that (i.e. approx September 2006).

Summary Point—From diagnosis to death: 1 year 

In his book, Dr Otis Brawley revealed a secret: Wealth in America (and elsewhere as well) is no protection from getting lousy care…in fact, wealth can increase your risk of getting lousy care.

Do you fancy getting some collateral damage?

 

FALSE HOPE IN A BOTTLE

Yeong Sek Yee & Khdijah Shaari

On June 05 2003, The New York Times published a short article written by Tom Nesi, a former director of public affairs at the drug company Bristol-Myers Squibb.  The article was strangely entitled “False Hope in a Bottle.” Curious, we decided to read further. Interestingly, we came across the book “HOPE or HYPE” by Dr Richard Deyo, MD and a Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who described the story as “Exaggerating Benefits.” The story below is summarised based on the New York Times article and Dr Deyo’s story (read pages 45/46 of the book)

Tom Nesi described his wife, Susan, who was 52 when she was found to have a highly malignant brain cancer. They were told that the average survival with this condition was about eleven months, but they hoped for more. For about a year, Susan had been offered numerous medications, including, in the latter stages of her illness, Iressa, which was just approved by the Food and Drug Administration despite limited data about its effectiveness.

They sought care from a prestigious medical centre that offered several innovative treatments. One, called a Glidel wafer, is a dime-sized wafer that is implanted in the brain when the tumor is surgically removed. The goal was to deliver chemotherapy directly to the tumour site. The Nesis were told that this would extend Susan’s life, on average, about two months.

In the ensuing months, Susan underwent 3 brain operations and 6 hospitalizations. After the third operation, she was almost totally paralysed and unable to speak or eat. In her final months, she required two weeks in a critical care center, a full time home health aide, a feeding tube and electronic monitor, home hospital equipment, occupational therapists, social workers and medication. The costs for her care were around US $ 200,000.

As Susan lived 3 months longer than average; many doctors described the innovative treatment as a success. After the disastrous third operation, her surgeon told Tom: “We have saved your wife’s life….we have given you the ability to spend more quality time with your loved one.” Two weeks later, sustained by the feeding tube, Susan wrote on a notepad, “Depressed…no more…please.”

But according to the medical profession, the experimental treatment had worked. Susan lived almost three months longer than the average patient with glioblastoma. Somewhere in some computer database, Susan’s experimental regimen will be counted a success. She was a ”responder.” And therein lies the terrible truth behind the approval of ”miracle drugs” on the basis of ”tumor shrinkage” or ”extended days.” Susan’s life was extended. But at what cost?

Tom Nesi then faced a decision as to whether to stop the feeding tube and withhold liquids. He concluded his story by noting, “I think we need to ask ourselves whether offering terminal patients limited hope of a few more months is really beneficial. The question is not whether days are extended, but in what condition the patient lives and at what emotional and financial costs”

This is a story of well-meaning doctors (?) and a desperate patient. The presumption of both parties must have been that new technology could only help. As usual, the bias was to do something, to be aggressive. In the end, the treatment may be worse than the disease itself.

In many such cases, doctors tend to see only the good side of their interventions. They often dismiss, discount, or are wholly unaware of the downsides, which often diminish quality of life. And although new treatments often claim great benefits, we need to critically ask what the benefits are, and what we are giving up in order to have them.

FOOTNOTE: To Tom Nesi, chemotherapy is likened to FALSE HOPE IN A BOTTLE but to the late Senator Hubert Humphrey, who had bladder cancer, the chemotherapy that he endured for 1 year before he died was described (by him) as “bottled death.”  When diagnosed, he was treated with radiation after which his physician Dr Wilfred Whitmore, M.D. declared, “As far as we are concerned, the Senator is cured” Despite the cure declaration, they began treating the senator with chemotherapy. Shortly after the treatment started, Senator Humphrey regretted and called chemo “bottled death.” 

(Humphrey was the 38th Vice President of the USA from 1965 to 1969 and passed away in January 1978 at age 66).

We would like to end this article with a very brutal statement by Dr Charles Huggins, MD who was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Physiology/ Medicine. As a physician, physiologist and cancer researcher at the University of Chicago, he is no quack doctor when he described chemotherapy:

  • ”There are worse things than death. One of them is chemotherapy” 

For those who have undergone chemotherapy treatment, please do share with the rest of the world what your thoughts are on this subject.

We welcome your comments.

SOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE:

1)      HOPE OR HYPE –THE OBSESSION WITH MEDICAL ADVANCES AND THE HIGH COST OF FALSE PROMISES by Dr Richard A. Deyo, MD, MPH and Dr Donald L. Patrick, PhD, MSPH.

2)   HEALING CANCER FROM INSIDE OUT by Mike Anderson

(Read story about Senator Hubert Humphrey and bladder cancer treatment)

3)   THE CANCER ODYSSEY by Margaret Brennan Bermel, MBA,

(Read about Dr Charles Huggins, MD)

4)   TOM NESI’S ARTICLE: FALSE HOPE IN A BOTTLE

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/05/opinion/false-hope-in-a-bottle.html

5)   ARTICLE: QUALITY OF LIFE, DIGNITY AT DEATH

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/09/opinion/L09DEAT.html

6)   ARTICLE: ARE WE TREATING CANCER, BUT KILLING THE PATIENT?  By Dr. George J Georgiou, PhD, ND, DSc. (AM)

Link: http://curezone.org/forums/am.asp?i=1392406

7)   ARTICLE: WHEN CANCER TREATMENT MIGHT KILL YOU by Theresa Brown, RN. …

Link: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/when-cancer-treatment-might-kill-you/

 8)   ARTICLE: HOW CANCER DRUGS MAKE CANCER WORSE AND KILL PATIENTS

Link: http://gizmodo.com/5876919/how-cancer-drugs-make-cancer-worse-and-kill-patients

Given honest answers … about surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy … the chances are high that the patients will “run away” from them!

YB is a 52-year old lady. About three and a half years ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy in Kuala Lumpur. It was a triple negative tumour. YB went to Singapore for follow up treatments. She received 6 cycles of chemo using FEC. Then she had 12 more cycles of chemo using Taxol and Carboplatin. No radiation was indicated.

When YB started chemo, she also took our herbs and took care of her diet. The side effects she suffered was much less compared to others. She was alright after the chemo treatment.

Unfortunately things did not turn out right. YB took a trip home to Kuala Lumpur (she was staying in Singapore) to visit relatives. She felt dizzy and started to vomit. Her condition deteriorated. Whenever she moved her head, she would feel dizzy or had severe headaches and would start to vomit.  She had to lie down. As long as she did not move her head, she was okay.

YB did a CT scan and MRI. There were tumours in her brain.

YB’s daughter wrote: 11 January 2014.

Dear Dr Chris,

My mother has a relapse of her cancer to the brain. MRI shows 3 lesions in her brain. One of them is approximately 3 cm which caused swelling and subsequently dizziness, vomiting and headache. Meanwhile, she’s been given steroid to reduce the swelling. We are planning to see you right after the full report is out.

12 January 2014::

Dear Dr Chris,

CT scan result is out and it seems that the primary tumor is from the left lung. However, my mom has not suffered any symptoms or difficulties with breathing.

What would you do if she was your mother and given the following details?

1. The neurosurgeon suggested surgery to remove the big tumour in her brain. According to him,  the two small tumours cannot be removed  surgically and YB has to undergo radiotherapy. Surgery would cost SGD6,500 and radiation cost SGD 2,000 to 3,000 (foreigner’s rate. Singapore citizen pay much less).

2. Can surgery cure her brain cancer? The surgeon said, NO, the tumour will recur. Because of that YB has to go for radiation. Whatever  it is the family was told that YB will eventually die.

3. Did the doctor indicate how long your mom could survive? The surgeon said this,

a. If patient does nothing and is only on steroid, she has 2 months to live.

b. If patient undergoes chemotherapy and radiotherapy, she has 6 to 7 months to live.

c. If patient undergoes surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, she has 6 to 7 months plus 3 months.

According to the surgeon these are based on statistics and also on the assumption the surgery goes not well without any complications.

What does the family want to do now? Everybody in the family decided to give up further medical treatment. They would rather go on herbs.

Did the doctor give you such information out front? No. We have to ask questions after questions and we get answers bit by bit. Nothing is laid out neatly like the above.

Comments:

Bravo to patient empowerment!  For you to make a decision you need honest answers. You do not get honest answers if you dare not ask! So patients, learn how to ask questions. Don’t just be satisfied with just an answer! Ask and ask, dig and dig until you are satisfied.  This is because it is your life and you have to bear the consequences of that intervention not your doctors.

After you get the answers, use your common sense to make your decision. Follow what your heart says.

It seems very clear. If doctors give honest answers … about surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy … the chances are high the patients will “run away”!

What would you do if you are told that chemotherapy spreads and makes cancer more aggressive?

What would you do if you are told the following about radiotherapy?

  • Radiation makes cancer more aggressive. 
  • Radiation reprogrammed less malignant breast cancer cells into Induced Breast Cancer Stem Cells (iBCSCs). This explains radiotherapy actually enriches the tumor population with higher levels of treatment-resistant cells.  Researchers UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center said radiation treatment killed half of the tumor cells  treated. The surviving cells are resistant to treatment and become iBCSCs. They were up to 30 times more likely to form tumors than the non-irradiated breast cancer cells. 
  • Radiation gives a the false appearance that the treatment is working, but actually increases the ratio of highly malignant to benign cells within that tumor, eventually leading to treatment-induced death of the patient.

HAVE YOU HEARD OF ONCOLOGISTS DEFRAUDING CANCER PATIENTS?

by Yeong Sek Yee & Khadijah Shaari

One night, while browsing the Internet, we came across an article (dated August 2013) that really threw us off the chair. The article that stunned us, but which has not been reported in the mainstream media, can be viewed at the following link:

Cancer doctor gives needless chemo in US 35 m fraud....says prosecutors.

LINK:http://www.today.com/news/cancer-doctor-gave-needless-chemo-35m-fraud-prosecutors-say-6C10913890

As we search further, we came across a more detailed article of the same subject published in MEDPAGE, a medical news portal which can be read at the following link:

Physician Gave Chemo to Patients without Cancer, Feds say

LINK:  http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/809243

Briefly, in August 2013 Oncologist Dr Farid Fata was arrested for allegedly having scammed US$35 million from Medicare over a two-year period. The following are the main points in the allegations against Dr Farid:

  • Deliberately misdiagnosed patients as having cancer to justify unnecessary cancer treatment,
  • Deliberately misdiagnosed patients without cancer to justify expensive testing
  • Administered chemotherapy unnecessarily to patients who were in remission,
  • Administered chemotherapy to end-of-life patients who will not benefit from the treatment,
  • Fabricated other diagnoses such as anemia and fatigue to justify unnecessary hematology treatments,
  • Unnecessarily distributed controlled substances to patients,
  • Administered chemotherapy to patients who had other serious medical conditions that required immediate treatment before being permitted to go to the hospital.

You can read more of Dr Farid Fata’s case (or verify the authenticity of this article) when you google CHEMOTHERAPY FRAUD or just DR FARID FATA or watch the following videos on YouTube:

1)   Michigan Oncologist Accused of Giving “Unnecessary Chemotherapy to cancer patients”

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4QVqbTTmxU

2)   Cancer doctor deliberately misdiagnoses patients

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjL_OrSkEm4

As at 2 October 2013, Dr Farid Fata is still in prison after his US $ 9 million bond has been revoked pending trial. He faces a 20 year jail sentence.

In December 2012, there was another fraudulent chemotherapy case similar to the above Dr Farid Fata case…read link below:

1)   Oncologist Dr. Meera Sachdeva gets 20 years for Medicare fraud

Link:http://pathologyblawg.com/medical-news/oncologist-meera-sachdeva-20-years-medicare-fraud/

In this case, this is how oncologist Dr Meera Sachdeva defrauded cancer patients at her cancer center –The Rose Cancer Center in Summit, Jordan, USA:

·         Syringes were re-used and different patients’ chemotherapy drugs were drawn from the same bag.

·         Chemotherapy drugs were diluted,

·         Use chemotherapy drugtreatments after their expiration date,

  • Submitted claims for chemotherapy services that were supposedly given while she was out of the country,

Dr Meera has been sentenced to a 20–year jail term. You can read more of Dr Meera Sachdeva by just googling her name or watch the following YouTube videos:

1)   Summit doctor sentenced for cancer drug fraud.

    Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzdzit4NsxI2)

2)   Two plead guilty in chemotherapy fraud case

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqcqNOOAJvo

 And there is yet another chemo fraud case that can blow your brains to pieces….watch the video below:

Chemo drugs diluted

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE6eE0WDxcQ

Concluding comments:

Are these the only “isolated” cases or are these just the “tip” of the iceberg? To be diagnosed with cancer is traumatizing enough…but to be cheated by your oncologist/doctor is like rubbing a ton of salt into a big wound. Don’t you think so?

If you have undergone chemotherapy treatment, you may have some comments/experience to share with the rest of the world. Your comments may help to save some fellow cancer patients.

SOME FURTHER RELATED REFERENCES:

If you would like to blow your brains further, read the following:

1)   How We Do Harm…this book is written by  oncologist Dr Otis Webb Brawley (also chief Medical and scientific officer and Executive Vice President of the American Cancer Society)…the book gives a detail description how cancer patients are mislead and defrauded into unnecessary treatments.

2)   Fraud: Chemotherapy

http://www.mnwelldir.org/docs/fraud/chemo.htm

3)   Chemotherapy Fraud: Is This Fraud Too Big Even For 60 Minutes? http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/10/chemotheraphy-is-medical-fraud.aspx

4)   Article: The Cancer Business

http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/cancer_business.htm

5)   The Cancer Report

http://healthwyze.org/index.php/component/content/article/521-video-the-cancer-report-documentary.html

  • or YouTube at :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=WnaBG177VIw

6)   Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/burzynski-the-movie-cancer-is-serious-business/

7)   National Cancer Institute report admits millions have been falsely

treated for ‘cancer’

http://www.naturalnews.com/042789_National_Cancer_Institute_false_treatments_misdiagnosis_epidemic.html#ixzz2k8yGp8GC

8)     Millions Wrongly Treated for ‘Cancer,’ National Cancer Institute Panel Confirms

http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/millions-wrongly-treated-cancer-national-cancer-institute-panel-confirms

ARE YOU SCARED? WE ARE.

BREAST CANCER — A NINETEEN-MONTH TIMELINE

by Yeong Sek Yee & Khadijah Shaari

Allow us to share with you the sad news of the recent demise of a close relative who was diagnosed with breast in December 2011.  To us, this is a classic case of a lady who did not die because of the breast cancer – she died due to the breast cancer treatments that she diligently underwent since diagnosis.

This 65-year old lady was a very staunch and caring Christian and very much loved and admired by her siblings, relatives and friends.  Perhaps her weak point in her journey with cancer is her unquestioning loyalty to her doctors/oncologist (her son is also a medical doctor).  From Day One, she listened very faithfully to her oncologist who advised her not to consume antioxidants, herbs or other complementary treatments as these will “clash” with her chemotherapy and subsequent radiotherapy, and hence the efficacy of her conventional treatments will be compromised.

Briefly, in December 2011, when she was diagnosed with a 3.8 cm lump in her left breast, she was told by an oncologist (in Singapore) that the lump is too big for surgical removal.  She was then advised to have at least 8 sessions of chemotherapy “to shrink the tumour” before surgery could be performed.  She followed the doctor’s advice and underwent chemotherapy during the whole of 2012 – 6 sessions of EC (Epirubicin + Cyclophosphamide) followed by 5 sessions of docetaxel, which ended in January 2013.

Come January 2013, instead of the tumour shrinking, the condition of her breast became more inflamed, with a few more new lumps appearing at the sides the breast. She was then advised by her hometown oncologist to consider radiotherapy.  So she came to KL for that purpose as the radiotherapy machine in her hometown was not working.  Whilst in KL she consulted with two prominent breast surgeons, who advised that (as at January 2013), surgery was definitely not an option based on the condition of the breast after 11 sessions of chemotherapy. She subsequently did 33 sessions of radiotherapy from January to March 2013, with the intention of shrinking the five lumps.  Again, while she was undergoing radiotherapy she was warned by her oncologist and radiologist not to take any herbs or antioxidants until everything is over.  At the end of the 33 sessions she was referred back to her hometown oncologist, with a report that the cancer has metastasized to her bone.

Back in her hometown, her oncologist recommended a new drug, Eribulin, which was only currently available in Singapore (as at April 2013).  She flew to Singapore and bought 4 doses of the drug from an oncologist there at the cost of S$8,000 per dose.  However, after three jabs, her hometown’s oncologist determined that Eribulin was not suitable for her.  He subsequently recommended Cisplatin + Gemzar and she underwent four cycles of this, the last one being around mid-August, after which she was told that further chemotherapy would not work for her.  She was totally devastated.  However, as some form of hope for her to cling on, she was given oral Xeloda.

All the while during her chemotherapy treatments in 2012, radiotherapy and further chemo in 2013, this tough lady was in pain most of the time and the pain became more and more intense in the months of April through August 2013.   From April 2013 her lungs started accumulating fluids…this is usually a confirmation of metastasis to the lungs. In the month of August till her demise on Sunday, 25th August, she had to be on oxygen most of the time (in addition to morphine).

She did try some herbal treatment off and on in between her chemotherapy/radiotherapy sessions in 2013.  Obviously this could not help her much as by that time her body was a total wreck.  Further, she only changed her diet in 2013. During 2012 she “ate anything she liked” as advised by the oncologist in Singapore and from her hometown.

When I attended her wake on 27th August 2013, the first thing that her eldest son said to me was “Uncle, see – only 19 months!”  Of course her oncologist and other doctors attributed this to her triple negative breast cancer which is supposed to be an aggressive form of breast cancer. Anyway, it is always about the cancer being aggressive, and never about the toxicities and ineffectiveness of the conventional cancer treatments which is always marketed and touted as evidence-based, scientifically tested, etc.

Lately, we noticed a new current trend in breast cancer treatment very similar to this case –more and more patients are advised to have pre-surgery chemotherapy – to shrink the lump before surgery.  We are very perplexed by this – why do you need to shrink the lump first before surgery when the breast, an “external” organ, can be wholly removed by mastectomy?  We know of a lady who recently had a 5 cm lump removed by lumpectomy and is recovering well and she has refused any form of chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

This trend of pre-surgery chemotherapy first is a huge business (if you catch my drift) for the medical/cancer establishment.  This unfortunate lady paid RM80,000 for the EC and Docetaxel in 2012.  Imagine how much the drug companies/and oncologists would make if they can persuade a million ladies to do so annually, world-wide.

It is mind-boggling, and the damage to the body, and the suffering, is also mind-boggling.

Just to conclude, this is the lady’s 19-months timeline summary:

a)    December 2011 – diagnosis

b)    December 2012 – commenced EC x 6 sessions followed by Docetaxel x 5 sessions

c)     January to March 2013 – 33 sessions of radiotherapy + oral cyclosphomide.

d)    April/May 2013 – 3 sessions of Eribulin

e)     July to August 2013 – 4 sessions of Cisplatin/Gemzar.  When Cisplatin/Gemzar was stopped after the 3rd session, she was given Xeloda

f)     25th August 2013 – passed away.

Undoubtedly, she has found peace with the Lord now but you do not have to follow her timeline. Follow Olivia Newton John’s cancer journey….she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, did one year of chemotherapy and complemented her treatments with good nutrition, herbs, homeopathy, acupuncture and practiced meditation and prayer….and Olivia is still very much alive today (22 years later)…..watch out for her more detailed story soon.

BLOOD BOOSTING INJECTIONs (ESAs) WHILE ON CHEMO ENCOURAGE TUMOUR TO GROW!

Not many MDs, least of all an oncologist, would dare to break ranks from the rules of the medical establishment and especially from the clutches of Big Pharma in the present day cancer industry. One exception is Dr Otis Webb Brawley, MD, and oncologist and the Chief Medical and Scientific Officer and Executive Vice President of the American Cancer Society.

As we were reading the 2011 best seller in America “HOW WE DO HARM” by Dr Brawley, we were shocked to read in Chapters 6 and 7 that Erythropoiesis-Stimulating Agents (ESAs) causes tumour promotion i.e. the anemia-building drugs seemed to be encouraging tumors to grow.

How we do harm

 What Are ESAs?

Erythropoiesis-stimulating agents are one of the most common drugs used to treat anemia i.e. these are medication that increase the production of red blood cells. For a brief introduction, go to: http://www.anemia.org/patients/feature-articles/content.php?contentid=000379

The doctor would give you ESA or a blood boosting injection if you do not enough blood after a chemo treatment. They use “the red juice” to fight anemia by stimulating red blood cell production and “the white juice” to fight neutropenia, a deficiency of white blood cells.

If these ESAs or “hemoglobin-building” drugs are supposed to perform a useful function in overall cancer treatment, why then is Dr Brawley so vociferous against these drugs? He even mentioned that “these drugs stimulate cancer growth”

Let us examine some of the reasons:

  • The FDA approved the drugs for the treatment of anemia in cancer patients in 1993 based on data pooled from only 6 small studies that altogether enrolled a total of only 131 patients (page 76).
  • The 6 minuscule trials… asked only whether Procrit (one of the ESA drugs) had the ability to prevent blood transfusion. Not a shred of data said anything about “fatigue” or its opposite “strength” (page 77).
  • There were a lot of unanswered questions such as: was their anemia corrected? Did their underlying cancer recur? Did they die sooner? Did they face a higher risk of blood clots? (page 77).

Soon after hemoglobin-drugs were approved, a German radiation therapist named Michael Henke decided to test one of the fundamental tenets of his subspecialty: that patient with higher hemoglobin levels have better responses to radiation therapy. Henke believed in the connection between hemoglobin and response to radiation. However the study’s results didn’t come out the way Henke expected. The result of Henke’s study, which was initiated in 1997, was published in 2003. The study showed that patients who received the hemoglobin-building drug didn’t live as long as those on placebo. Also, the disease progressed more rapidly in patients receiving the drug. Henke concluded that he had encountered a biological phenomenon: the drug seemed to be encouraging tumors to grow (page 81).

In August 2003, researchers had to stop another study, the Breast Cancer Erythropoietin Survival Trial (BEST), when more women died on Procrit than on the control arm. In both the Henke trial and BEST trial, the survival curve showed an increased risk of death from cancer, which suggested something you don’t want to see in patients you are treating for cancer –  tumour growth (page 82).

In other words, pharmaceutical companies were promoting an untested therapy that was supposed to make patients feel better and stronger when, in fact, it caused stroke and heart attacks and in some cases made tumors grow (page 73).

According to Dr Brawley, FDA approved these drugs to reduce the risk of blood transfusion in patients with solid tumours treated with chemotherapy. That’s it. Not a word was said about “tiredness”, not a word about “cancer fatigue”

In Chapter 6, Red Juice and Chapter 7, Tumour Progression, Dr Brawley described how cancer patients are routinely “offered” hemoglobin-building drugs to even borderline anemia, a common side effect of cancer drugs. The drug companies manufactured a medical condition called “cancer fatigue” and nurses were trained to “suggest” “erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESA)” to all patients undergoing chemotherapy – “the red juice” to fight anemia by stimulating red blood cell production and “the white juice” to fight neutropenia, a deficiency of white blood cells.

  • With powerful incentives set in motion, many hospitals and oncology practices in the US instructed nurses to ask leading questions about “fatigue” with the intent of expanding sales to a growing number of patients and upping the dosage to each patient. This is referred to as “an ESA treatment opportunity”
  • These drugs are still being prescribed routinely. According to Dr Brawley,” these ESA drugs were not used to cure disease or make patients feel better. They are used to make money for doctors and pharmaceutical companies at the expense of patients, insurance companies and taxpayers “(page 97)
  • Also the disease progressed more rapidly in patients receiving the drug (page 81) i.e. the drug seemed to be encouraging tumors to grow…this compound is a stimulant, a “tumor fertilizer”. A patient with active disease is more likely to suffer tumour progression: the more tumor you have, the more tumor there is to stimulate!! (page 97). 
  • Commenting further on ESA drugs, some doctors didn’t bother to check what the patient’s hemoglobin was and erred on the side of giving the ESA every time they give chemotherapy. Doctors routinely prescribed the drugs for uses in which it had not been studied-such as anemia caused by cancer itself, as opposed to anemia caused by chemotherapy (page 78).

Besides Dr Brawley’s comments in the book, we searched further for sound scientific validation of ESAs causing tumor promotion. These are extracted from prominent sources like the FDA, Journal of Clinical Cancer Research, Annals of Oncology, British Journal of Cancer, PubMed Medline, Journal of Oncology Practice, etc. There are lots more. The following are some of the links you may be interested to read:

1)      THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION (FDA) of the US issued a Drug Safety Communication dated 26/2/2010 under the following title: “Erythropoiesis-Stimulating Agents (ESAs): Procrit, Epogen and Aranesp.”

In the article, the FDA warned that cancer patients using ESAs should understand the risks associated with the use of ESAs. These risks include:

  • ESAs may cause tumors to grow faster.
  • ESAs may cause some patients to die sooner.
  • ESAs may cause some patients to develop blood clots, and serious heart problems such as a heart attack, heart failure or stroke.

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/PostmarketDrugSafetyInformationforPatientsandProviders/ucm200297.htm

2)      In July 2011, THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR CANCER RESEARCH, in its journal, Clinical Cancer Research published an article entitled: “The Role of Erythropoietin and Erythropoiesis-Stimulating Agents in Tumor Progression” It reported that:

  • Erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESA) are used clinically for treating cancer-related anemia [chemotherapy-induced anemia (CIA)].
  • Recent clinical trials have reported increased adverse events and/or reduced survival in ESA-treated cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, potentially related to EPO-induced cancer progression.

 http://clincancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/17/20/6373.abstract

3)      THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR MEDICAL ONCOLOGY in its journal, Annals of Oncology (2010) published the following guidelines: “Erythropoiesis-stimulating agents in the treatment of anemia in cancer patients: ESMO Clinical Practice Guidelines for use.” The lead author, Professor Schrijvers, although on the Advisory Board of Johnson and Johnson admitted the following:

  • The influence of ESAs on tumour response and overall survival in anemic cancer patients remains unclear. Several randomized trials have demonstrated decreased survival times and poorer loco-regional control or progression-free survival 
  • Other recent meta-analyses showed that ESAs increase and worsened overall survival when given to cancer patients. 

 http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/suppl_5/v244.full

4)      In September 2007, THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CLINICAL ONCOLOGY published the following article in its Journal of Oncology Practice: “Erythropoiesis-Stimulating Agents: Continued Challenges” in which:

·         The FDA revised both the epoetin alfa and darbepoetin alfa product labels, with new “black box” warnings and expanded information on safety, tumor progression, and survival.

·         Additionally, the new warning states that ESAs are not indicated for patients with active malignant disease receiving neither chemotherapy nor radiotherapy.

 http://jop.ascopubs.org/content/3/5/248.full

5)      In March 2012, THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF CANCER (of the CANCER RESEARCH of UK) published several research studies done on the usage of ESAs and concluded that….”several trials have reported an association between ESA use and increased disease progression and/or mortality” The article is entitled: “Effects of erythropoietin receptors and erythropoiesis-stimulating agents on disease progression in cancer”

 http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v106/n7/full/bjc201242a.html

In another book, A WORLD WITHOUT CANCER, Dr Margaret Cuomo, a radiologist also stated that… “even drugs used to treat the side effects of chemotherapy have been linked to secondary cancers”. For example, patients who need medication to raise their white blood cell counts may be injected with granulocyte colony stimulating factor (G-CSF), a substance normally found in the blood. Researchers observed that this doubled the risk of developing myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) or acute myelogenous leukemia (AML)… (page 69)

READ THE FOLLOWING LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION ON MDS/AML: 

1)   THE STORY OF ROBIN ROBERTS:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/robin-roberts-myelodysplastic-syndrome-diagnosis-beat/story?id=16540293#.UZnTWaKLC-U

2)   In 2007, THE NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE (US) published the following article in its Journal (JNCI J Natl Cancer Inst Volume 99, Issue 3 pp. 196-205).…. “Acute Myeloid Leukemia or Myelodysplastic Syndrome Following Use of Granulocyte Colony-Stimulating Factors during Breast Cancer Adjuvant Chemotherapy” The article concluded that….”the use of G-CSF was associated with a doubling in the risk of subsequent AML or MDS among the population that we studied”……

http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/99/3/196.short

FOOTNOTE: In Malaysia, these ESAs (and G-CSF) are commonly referred to as “booster” or “booster jabs” and are generally given after the 3rd or 4th cycle of chemotherapy when the patient’s RBC, WBC, Platelets, Hemoglobin, etc are low. These booster jabs are costly…..and that is why patients are warned not to use cheaper and (safer) methods (because it will clash with the chemo drugs!!)

A POINT TO PONDER UPON:

When a patient decides on chemotherapy treatment, he or she expects to be healed and not to have the cancer spread or suffer second malignancies shortly after completion of the scientifically tested and proven treatments. And to be given ESAs or G-CSFs which later promotes tumour growth isn’t it too much for the patients to bear? Is this a double bonus or a double whammy for the patients? (Please note we have not factored in the damaging side effects of radiotherapy into the above scenario).

We welcome your views.

Is The Present Day Cancer Treatment Based on Faulty and Inadequate Science?

Fall-into-hole

Albert Einstein is said to have defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. This great scientist went on to say that “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.”

You may interpret the above quotations anyway you like and for whatever reason or circumstances you like. Let me put them in the perspective of my own work – herbal therapy for cancer. If I have patients coming to me  every day and I prescribe  A, B or C to them and they don’t get well. I must be a real idiot to keep on giving out the same A, B or C to them again and again hoping that one day someone get cured!

To avoid being an idiot, I tell patients to stop taking our herbs if they feel that they are NOT getting any better after two or three weeks. We do not want to mislead you nor waste your precious time. I take this stance because I really believe in what Einstein said.

There is another lesson I learnt from Einstein. To him complex problems may not need complex answers. There can  just be a simple answer to it! But the problem is, many people in this world want to believe that a complex problem must have a “scientific, complicated and complex” answer. That is why we end up with having “experts.”

These so-called experts are highly educated people who talk a language that you and I may not understand. They make things to appear complicated and complex (so that their expertise are always required!)  Let me repeat, any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It needs a real touch of humility, courage and a lot of common sense to see things differently. In short, complex problem can just be solved simply! Unfortunately again, to many people simple answers are not impressive – too good to be true!

For the past week,  I spent some time surfing the net in addition to reading a book.  I have shared with you what I read about the insights of Professor Paul Davies in the previous posting, Looking At Cancer Through the Eyes of a Physical Scientist, Stop thinking cancer as a disease! I don’t think we need to cure cancer.

I must admit I don’t know if I am happy or I am angry after reading all these. Perhaps a mixture of both.

I am happy, because I thought the experts have decided to wake up and they don’t want to be insane (as defined above) anymore. For the past many decades the cancer problem was handled by “experts” who make things more complex and violent. And the result was dismal. Then not too long ago, someone important decided that perhaps non-cancer experts could provide a better solution to the present day cancer problem. They have decided that it is time to see things from outside the box. For that, I am real glad.

Why was I angry at the same time? If you hear stories day in and day out that people don’t get better because of someone else’s “insanity” you cannot help but become angry – why does the world allow or even encourage such a thing to happen? I don’t have to answer that question! Some patients know why.

And to make things even worse, alternative healers  who propose something “effective” but outside the norm or prevailing paradigm are labeled as quacks or snake oil peddlers.

In this second posting, I ask this question: is the present day cancer treatment based on faulty and inadequate science? I don’t have to answer that question either. Here are some research papers that I came across. Bear with me if you find it difficult to understand the jargons used and the ideas beside the reports.

In a paper, Cancer treatment as a game published in Physical Biology, 2012, Paul Orlando et al wrote:

  • Chemotherapy for metastatic cancer commonly fails due to evolution of drug resistance in tumor cells.
  • We view cancer treatment as a game in which the oncologists choose a therapy and tumors ‘choose’ an adaptive strategy.

Read more: http://iopscience.iop.org/1478-3975/9/6/065007/article

In a paper by Ariosto Silva et al (Cancer Res; 72(24); 6362–70. 2012.)

  • Many cancers adapt to chemotherapeutic agents by upregulating membrane efflux pumps that export drugs from the cytoplasm, but this response comes at an energetic cost. Chemoresistant cells must consume excess resources to maintain resistance mechanisms.
  • In breast cancer patients, expression of these pumps is low in tumors before therapy but increases after treatment.
    • The authors proposed a new method of treatment which they called “adaptive therapy.” They wrote: “Our findings challenge the existing flawed paradigm of maximum dose treatment, a strategy that inevitably produces drug resistance.”

Source: http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/72/24/6362.abstract)

What is adaptive therapy?

  • At the moment, the future of cancer research seems to be centered in the field of targeted chemotherapy. However, it is evident that currently neither conventional nor targeted chemotherapies will suffice against resilient tumors. 
  • Conventional therapies generally aim for maximum cell death in the shortest amount of time using fixed regimens of drugs designed to eliminate as much of the tumor mass as possible under tolerable levels of toxicity to the patient. 
  • However, our perception of cancer has begun to change. It is becoming increasingly evident that an individual’s cancer can be viewed as a Darwinian ecosystem containing a heterogeneous mixture of genetically distinct cancer cell types that compete amongst each other for space and resources. 
  • This competition, combined with conditions within the tumor micro-environment and cancer phenotypes conducive to increased DNA damage, stimulate the rapid evolution of tumor lineages. Unfortunately, this often renders current therapies ineffective against highly adaptable cancers that quickly develop resistant cell types. 
  •  Adaptive Therapy, a relatively new field of cancer treatment, has the potential to counteract cancer’s ability to adapt. 
  • When intensive drug regimens are applied, the competition pressure of the chemosensitive cells is removed. This allows the resistant cells to proliferate freely, essentially dooming the patient. 
  • An adaptive approach would take advantage of this discrepancy in fitness to hold the overall population of cancer cells at a low constant, avoiding the possibility of tumors consisting entirely of resistant cells. Essentially, the ultimate goal of adaptive therapy would be to manage a tumor mass efficiently by administering drugs in a dynamic regimen tailored to each individual cancer, thereby allowing the patient to effectively outlive the cancer by managing its growth over time.

Source: http://islaslab.blogspot.com/2011/05/cancer-management-through-adaptive.html

In another paper, Adaptive therapy (Cancer Research, 69:4894-903,2009) Gatenby et al. wrote:

  • A number of successful systemic therapies are available for treatment of disseminated cancers. However, tumor response is often transient, and therapy frequently fails due to emergence of resistant populations. The latter reflects the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of the tumor microenvironment as well as the evolutionary capacity of cancer phenotypes to adapt to therapeutic perturbations.
  • Although cancers are highly dynamic systems, cancer therapy is typically administered according to a fixed, linear protocol.
  • If resistant populations are present before administration of therapy, treatments designed to kill maximum numbers of cancer cells remove this inhibitory effect and actually promote more rapid growth of the resistant populations.
  • We present an alternative approach in which treatment is continuously modulated to achieve a fixed tumor population. The goal of adaptive therapy is to enforce a stable tumor burden by permitting a significant population of chemosensitive cells to survive so that they, in turn, suppress proliferation of the less fit but chemoresistant subpopulations. 

In a paper, Physics of cancer – the impact of heterogeneity, Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics, Vol. 3: 363-382, 2012, Qiucen Zhang and Robert Austin wrote:

  • It is a common mistake to view cancer as a single disease with a single possible cure which we have just not found yet.
  • In reality cancer takes on many forms that share a common symptom: uncontrolled cell growth and successful invasion of cancer colonies to remote regions of the body.
  • The key reason why we may never be able to defeat cancer may lie in the extreme heterogeneity of the population of the cells in a tumor: there is no one magic bullet.
  • All malignant cancers… are fundamentally governed by Darwinian dynamics.
  • The process of carcinogenesis requires genetic instability and highly selective local microenvironments, the combination of which promotes somatic evolution.
  • These microenvironmental forces, specifically hypoxia (low oxygen conditions), acidosis and reactive oxygen species, are not only highly selective, but are also able to induce genetic instability.
  • As a result, malignant cancers are dynamically evolving clades of cells living in distinct microhabitats that almost certainly ensure the emergence of therapy-resistant populations.
  • Cytotoxic cancer therapies also impose intense evolutionary selection pressures on the surviving cells and thus increase the evolutionary rate. 

Gillies et al ( Nat Rev Cancer. 12: 487-93, 2012) in their paper Evolutionary dynamics of carcinogenesis and why targeted therapy does not work.

Eric Schuur in his blog post Time to Rethink Cancer Therapy? on 28 November 2012 wrote:

  • The feeling of frustration in chasing cancer up the path only to have it resurrect out of seemingly nowhere still further upstream is a signal to me. I have sensed in this frustration a signal to think about cancer pathogenesis and treatment in new ways, like I’m sure others have.
  • Recently I have been gratified to hear a number of researchers propose new views of what cancer is and new strategies for treating it.
  • I have been a member of a tumor microenvironment interest group for a while, mostly to keep an ear to the ground in that area. Having spent many years trying to grow cancer cells in various ways, it is clear to me that they depend heavily on their microenvironment to survive.
  • I noticed a few publications suggesting that resistance to chemical therapy may be mediated by more than just the response of the tumor cells. These studies suggest that the tumor microenvironment may provide protection from anti-cancer agents by secreting of growth factors from stromal cells intermingled with the tumor cells.
  • In one study, WNT16B growth factor secretion was induced in stromal fibroblasts, which in turn protected the cancer cells from programmed cell death.
  • Rethinking cancer therapy has been proposed by Robert Gatenby and colleagues for some time.

Source:  http://mendelspod.com/blog/time-to-rethink-cancer-therapy#sthash.EvaA1gqw.dpbs

Comments

Let me briefly summarise what these researchers said.

1. Chemotherapy for metastatic cancer commonly fails due to evolution of tumour cells to become  drug resistant.

2. So going to the oncologist is like playing a game .. the oncologists choose a therapy and the tumors ‘choose’ an adaptive strategy. A famous Singapore oncologist put it in a different way – It is just like buying a lottery hoping to strike a jackpot!

3. When chemo drugs are pumped into you, the cancer cells work overtime to pump out the drugs from their cells. If no chemo drugs were applied, the pump activity was low. This activity increased after chemo treatment. Increased activity means the cells need more energy – will this not make your MORE sick?

4. The researchers said that the commonly practised maximum-dose-shoot-to-kill treatment is flawed.  Oncologists have been doing this for years. And the patients are made to believe that the stronger the dosage of poison used the higher the chances of  “cure.” And that practice has now been challenged!

5. Now there is a new buzz word —  the future of cancer research seems to be centered in the field of targeted chemotherapy.  Take note of the terminology used nowadays, Targeted Therapy! However, it is evident that currently neither conventional nor targeted chemotherapies will suffice against resilient tumors. Target therapy make a lot of money but for patients I don’t see much meaningful results. Very often, we see disappointment. Why?

6. The researchers provide the answer:  tumor response is often transient, and therapy frequently fails due to emergence of resistant populations. Why are they resistant to the chemo-drugs? The latter reflects the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of the tumor microenvironment as well as the evolutionary capacity of cancer phenotypes to adapt to therapeutic perturbations.

7. Is the kill-all-cancer-cells strategy that is done today the correct approach? Not so. You don’t have to kill all the cancer cells in your body. The goal of adaptive therapy is to enforce a stable tumor burden by permitting a significant population of chemosensitive cells to survive so that they, in turn, suppress proliferation of the less fit but chemoresistant subpopulations.

8. It is a common mistake to view cancer as a single disease with a single possible cure which we have just not found yet. The key reason why we may never be able to defeat cancer may lie in the extreme heterogeneity of the population of the cells in a tumor: there is no one magic bullet.

9. The process of cancer that occurs in your body requires genetic instability and highly selective local microenvironments, the combination of which promotes somatic evolution. Hypoxia (low oxygen conditions), acidosis and reactive oxygen species … are also able to induce genetic instability. Don’t blame it all on only the  genes. You don’t have to remove your two beautiful breasts trying to prevent cancer! O, poor actress? There are MORE to it than just the genes.

10. Malignant cancers are dynamically evolving … living in distinct microhabitats that almost certainly ensure the emergence of therapy-resistant populations. Cytotoxic cancer therapies also impose intense evolutionary selection pressures on the surviving cells and thus increase the evolutionary rate. Take note, cytotoxic cancer therapies also contribute to this problem! You don’t cure cancer – you make cancer – with chemotherapy!

11. At long last, someone –  Eric Schuur in his blog post said: Time to Rethink Cancer Therapy? Having spent many years trying to grow cancer cells in various ways, it is clear to me that they depend heavily on their microenvironment to survive. Cancer treatment is not just about KILLING cancer cells. There is more to this!

12. If there is one message you need to know, here it is: Chemotherapy Spreads Cancer and Makes It More Aggressive.  (Click link to read more.)

If you have appetite for more, read my next post: Quotations from: NEVER FEAR CANCER AGAIN.

Looking At Cancer Through the Eyes of a Physical Scientist

Stop thinking cancer as a disease! I don’t think we need to cure cancer

Cancer research has traditionally been carried out by biologists and medical researchers. They did not seem to get  anywhere, in spite of being able to generate tons and tons of data.

In 2008, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) created 12 “Physical Science-Oncology Centers institutions” and sponsored mathematicians and physical scientists to initiate new, non-traditional approaches to cancer research.

NCI Director John E. Niederhuber said: “By bringing a fresh set of eyes to the study of cancer, these new centers have great potential to advance, and sometimes challenge, accepted theories about cancer and its supportive microenvironment. Physical scientists think in terms of time, space, pressure, heat and evolution in ways that we hope will lead to new understandings of the multitude of forces that govern cancer.”

One of the scientists involved in the “rethinking”  of cancer is Professor Paul Davies, a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist and  astrobiologist. He is Regents’ Professor and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative, and Principal Investigator in the Center for the Convergence of Physical Science and Cancer Biology, all at Arizona State University.

I have the benefit of reading some of Dr. Davies’  papers found in the internet.

Physics not biology may be key to beating cancer. Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21728970.200-physics-not-biology-may-be-key-to-beating-cancer.html

Cancer: The beat of an ancient drum. Source: The Guardian,  25 April 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/25/cancer-evolution-ancient-toolkit-genes

New research program to approach cancer studies differently. Source: http://www.statepress.com/archive/node/8973 

Rethinking cancer. Physics World, 2010. Source: http://cancer-insights.asu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Physics-World-June-20101.pdf 

For your information, let me quote what this learned, non-medical professor said about cancer. Indeed we need non-medical researchers to call a spade a spade. Let’s hope that those in the medical profession take heed.

Present Day Cancer Research

  • Cancer touches almost everyone in some way. Forty years ago President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer”. Yet in spite of $100 billion of taxpayer-funded research in the US alone, the mortality and morbidity rates for most cancers have remained almost unchanged. 
  • Dozens of much-hyped “cures” developed by drug companies are either useless or have marginal effect. 
  • Billions of dollars have been spent on cancer research and a million research papers have been published, yet most cancer sufferers have not benefited greatly from that effort. 
  • With the exception of a handful of cancer types, such as childhood leukaemia, progress on treatments has been limited to baby steps …  leading to marginal extensions of life expectancy.
  • Cancer biology is a subject about which a vast amount is known but very little is understood. So could it be that researchers cannot see the wood for the trees? 
  • Right now, the huge cancer research programme is long on technical data, but short on understanding.
  • Cancer research is dominated by genetics and biochemistry. That’s why we have the therapies, genetic and chemotherapy, as the main approaches. I think that we can open up a whole new frontier just by thinking about the problem in a totally different way.

Changing Concept of Cell

  • In the 19th century, living organisms were widely regarded as machines infused by vital forces.
  • Biologists eventually came to realise that cells are … complex networks of chemical reaction pathways.
  • Then came the genetics revolution, which describes life in the informational language of instructions, codes and signalling.

Mainstream research today focuses almost exclusively on chemical pathways or genetic sequencing. For example, drugs are designed to block reaction pathways implicated in cancer. But while of great scientific interest, such projects have not led to the much-anticipated breakthrough. Why?

There are fundamental obstacles: living cells, including cancer cells, are a bottomless pit of complexity, and cancer cells are notoriously heterogeneous. A reductionist approach that seeks to unravel the details of every pathway of every cancer cell type might employ researchers for decades and consume billions of dollars, with little impact clinically.

  • Here is …  another way of looking at cells. In addition to being bags of chemicals and information processing systems, they are also physical objects, with properties such as size, mass, shape, elasticity, free energy, surface stickiness and electrical potential. Cancer cells contain pumps, levers, pulleys and other paraphernalia familiar to physicists and engineers. Furthermore, many of these properties are known to change systematically as cancer progresses in malignancy.
  • The challenge is now to unify all three pictures – chemical, genetic and mechanistic.

Need to Change the Perception About Disease and Cure

  • To make a start …  it is helpful to stop thinking of cancer as a disease to be cured.
  • Many accounts misleadingly describe cancer as rogue cells running amok.
  • Cancer cells are not themselves “germs”; rather, they are part of one’s own body, misbehaving in a manner that may produce undesirable consequences for the organism. 
  • I don’t think we need to cure cancer.  We do not need a “cure”; rather, we need to better control and manage how cancer cells behave and, ideally, prevent cells turning malignant in the first place. 
  • In fact, I don’t really think of cancer as a disease as much as an alternative form of living matter. We don’t need to cure it, we just need to manage it for long enough that people die of something else. 
  • It is a misconception to think that people either “have cancer” or not. Cancers usually go through a progression from mostly innocuous progenitor cells to full blown malignancy, and at any given time most people (at least those of middle age and beyond) harbour cancer cells and even small tumours in their bodies that produce no ill effects.
  • Cancer cells are not the invincible enemy of folklore, but recalcitrant variants of healthy cells that face their own struggle for survival against the body’s immune system. 
  • We need to get away from the notion of a cure, and think of controlling or managing cancer. And just as the effects of ageing can be mitigated without a full understanding of the process, the same could be true of cancer. 

Darwinism and Cancer: the Evolutionary Roots

  • With no prior knowledge of cancer, I started asking some very basic questions. What struck me from the outset is that something as pervasive and stubborn as cancer must be a deep part of the story of life itself. 
  • Sure enough, cancer is found in almost all multicellular organisms, suggesting its origins stretch back hundreds of millions of years. 
  • Oncologists tend to think of cancer as a motley collection of cells gone berserk, but to me the way that tumours grow and spread to other organs indicates an organised and systematic strategy, designed to evade all that the body and the medical profession can throw at it. Such well-honed behaviour suggests they are the product of a long period of biological evolution. 
  • Cancer is pervasive among all organisms (not just mammals) in which adult cells proliferate. There is a simple – some may say simplistic – Darwinian explanation of cancer’s insidiousness, which is based on the fact that all life on Earth was originally single-celled. Each cell had a basic imperative: replicate, replicate, replicate. However, the emergence of multicellular organisms about 550million years ago required individual cells to co-operate by subordinating their own selfish genetic agenda to that of the organism as a whole.
  • The genes needed to fashion the primitive cellular aggregates of the Proterozoic era did not all become defunct. Some were incorporated into the genomes of later, more sophisticated, organisms, and lurk inside human beings to this day. That’s because they still serve a crucial function.
  • It  has long been recognised that there are many similarities between cancer and embryo development, and evidence is mounting that some genes expressed during embryogenesis get re-awakened in cancer.  When an embryo develops, its genes lay down a body plan, starting with the most basic and most ancient features.
  • So when an embryo develops, identical stem cells progressively differentiate into specialized cells that differ from organ to organ – be it kidney, brain or lung. All these cells contain the same genes, but not all of the genes are constantly active. The body has a number of chemical mechanisms to switch genes on and off, which allow cells in different organs to have different properties that can vary with time. The colon, for example, needs to rapidly replenish cells sloughed off by the passage of food, whereas the cells in other organs, such as in the brain, have a slow turnover and reproduce only rarely. 
  • With advancing age, however, that command and control system develops flaws. If a cell does stop responding properly to the regulatory signals, it may go on reproducing in an uncontrolled way, forming a tumour specific to the organ in which it arises. 
  • The implications of our theory, if correct, are profound. Rather than cancers being rogue cells degenerating randomly into genetic chaos, they are better regarded as organised footsoldiers marching to the beat of an ancient drum, recapitulating a billion-year-old lifestyle. As cancer progresses in the body, so more and more of the ancestral core within the genetic toolkit is activated, replaying evolution’s story in reverse sequence. And each step confers a more malignant trait, making the oncologist’s job harder. 
  • It is well known that cells regulate the action of genes not just as a result of chemical signals, but because of the physical properties of their micro-environment. They can sense forces such as shear stresses and the elasticity of nearby tissue. They are also responsive to temperature, electric fields, pH, pressure and oxygen concentration. Most normal cells seem to come pre-loaded with a “cancer subroutine” that can be triggered by a variety of insults.

Metastasis – the Spread of Cancer

  • Only 10 percent of people die from primary tumors.  The mere presence of cancer cells in the body is not in itself necessarily a danger. 
  • It is their ability to target, invade and cling to other tissues that leads to problems. 
  • Most existing cancer treatments involve trying to remove a tumour surgically or destroying it with radiation … oncologists are often in the dark about why certain drugs actually work, or why normal dose–response relationships do not seem to apply. Cancer cells are notorious for mutating rapidly, often developing resistance to specific drugs or undergoing a resurgence years later with an acquired immunity somehow remembered. 
  • Chemotherapy can be effective at shrinking tumours and prolonging life somewhat, but …  can even be counter-productive by leaving a handful of resistant cells alive with no competition to arrest their explosive spread. As a result, drugs are rarely the perfect solution. 
  • When cancer cells spread around the body, this is a physics problem. These cells are microscopic bodies being swept along in this raging torrent. They wriggle around, they latch on to surfaces, they drill their way through. This is the sort of language that physicists and engineers can understand.  
  • Although metastasis seems fiendishly efficient, most disseminated cancer cells never go on to cause trouble. The vast majority die, and the survivors may lie dormant for years or even decades, either as individual, quiescent, cells in the bone marrow, or as micro-metastases in tissues, before erupting into proliferating secondary tumours. 
  • When tumours start shedding cells into the bloodstream and lymphatic system, allowing the cancer to spread around the body, a secondary tumour may then develop in organs far removed from the original. 
  • The spread of cancer presents many possibilities for clinical intervention once the dream of a cure has been abandoned. For example, if the period of dormancy can be extended by, say, a factor of five, many breast, colon and prostate cancers would cease to be a health issue. How could this be achieved? 
  • A key hallmark of cancer is that it can also grow in an organ where it does not belong; for example, a prostate-cancer cell may grow in a lymph node, or an ovarian-cancer cell in the liver. 
  • Metastatic cells may lie dormant, like spores, for many years in foreign organs, evading the body’s immune system while retaining their potency. Healthy cells, in contrast, soon die if they are transported beyond their rightful organ. 
  • Although tumour cells struggle to obtain oxygen from the normal blood supply, in response they can switch their metabolism to a low-oxygen cycle, thereby creating acidic conditions as a by-product that can harm other cells. In some respects, the self-centred nature of cancer cells is a reversion to an ancient, pre-multicellular lifestyle. 
  • Cancer cells are therefore neither rogue “selfish cells”, nor do they display the collective discipline of organisms with fully differentiated organs. They fall somewhere in between, perhaps resembling an early form of loosely organized cell colonies. 
  • Nowadays, most cancer researchers adopt a “followthe-genes” approach, based on the notion that an accumulation of defective (mutated) or misbehaving genes are the primary cause of cancer. Humans have between 20 000 and 30 000 genes in total, but many are switched off depending on the type of cell or its stage of growth.

Comments 

The world ought to be glad to learn that at last someone has decided that perhaps non-medical scientists ought to have a look at cancer from a different perspective. So the US National Cancer Institute decided to invite non-medical experts to research on cancer.

Is this not what Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of the 20th century said years back?

  • We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
  • When all think alike, no one thinks very much.

I am happy that Professor Paul Davies had come out with his new insights about cancer. He made these suggestions:

  • STOP thinking of cancer as a disease to be cured that must be totally destroyed or bombed out of existence.
  • STOP frightening  or put FEAR in us that cancer consist of rogue cells running amok. These are not an enemy. It is a part of the complexity of life that we inherited since life on earth begun. 
  • TEACH us how to manage the cancer like we manage our ageing process.

For years, practitioners of alternative healing  are saying the same things.  At CA Care I have been telling patients to learn how to live with their cancer. There is no need to fight. Fighting to me implies “war” – and we don’t want to start a war in our body. We need peace and harmony. When the times comes, let us die with our cancer.

Watch this video.

Many cancer patients come to us with a very naive notion. They are bought up by the idea that chemo is going to destroy all the cancer cells and they will be cured. The enemy in the body is done with. Soon afterwards many patients learn the folly of their ignorance.

Then,  they are told,  If the medical treatments cannot destroy all, at least the cancer is brought under control. Here again patients are just being misled — read the next posting to know that medical treatments could actually cause cancer to spread more and make it even more aggressive!`

5 Chemo does not curecancer

Brain Cancer: Radiotherapy – Recurrence; Chemo – Recurrence; and Avastin – Dead

1-Doctor-mistakes-buried-in

It is indeed with a heavy heart that we have to write this story. However, let us pray that similar story like this does not have to be played out all too often in this world of medicine.  May you all find wisdom and learn from this sad experience.

In the month of May, I had this exchange of e-mails.

1 May 2013  Dear Dr. K.H. Teo,

Our family and I migrated to Australia 22 years ago in 1990 from Malaysia as a skilled migrants and live in Australia ever since.

This is very sad to let you know that my young Architect daughter has brain cancer (grade IV Glioblastoma multiforme) which diagnosed six months ago and under chemo treatment by cancer Specialist in … Australia.

I searched the internet and found that your holistic approach towards healing and advocate the use of herbs for all cancer patient. I would like to buy your herbs. We have a strong faith in Nichiren Buddhism (Japanese) and praying hard for my daughter recovery. She has a positive attitude (and looking towards to be better healthy life.

Kindly let me know the cost and instructions so that I can remit money to you.

Sincerely thanks. Please reply. Kind regards.

Reply: I am sorry we cannot help patients from foreign countries, especially from Australia. We may have problems with your quarantine. Also we are not a direct selling outfit. Chris.

1 May 2013   Dear Dr. K.H. Teo,

Thanks for your email reply.

I try very hard to contact you through the phone on +604 – 6595881 and it goes to a fax tone.  Can you please email me your direct phone contact (not mobile) so that we can have a phone conversation and it does not cost me very much.

I can always take a flight back Penang to buy the herbal medicine from you after you have establish which type of herbs are good for my daughter and bring them myself.

I am very well verse of her brain cancer illness conditions and I can explain to you thoroughly every aspect of her cancer condition and her history. I have a medical file which recorded every chemo treatment and western medicine she has taken including chemo drugs – Termozolmide (Temodal) and now on Avastin (bevacizumab) infusion.

I am waiting for your email now and call you, please.

My family and I are in very desperate situation and we have a lot of pain in our mind and hearts. Hope you understand our feeling as parents and we are praying very hard and trying extremely hard to save our daughter’s life.

Sincerely thanks. Regards.

Reply: You can come and see me with all the medical reports and can take back the herbs. Last week I have a 6 year old girl with brain cancer (like your daughter). No surgery, no chemo because it does not work for such cancer. She took herbs and can now go back to school. Read this story, https://cancercaremalaysia.com/2013/05/23/helping-a-six-year-old-with-cancer-of-the-brain-stem/

Avastin — spreads cancer! That’s the drug they gave you!

There is NO need to talk to me over the phone because there is NOTHING I can do. I need to see the scans and medical reports. Unfortunately the herbs are very bitter and have lousy taste and smell. Not many people can drink them. But that 6-year-old could take them without problem.

I do not talk over the phone for obvious reason that everyone on this earth want to talk to me about their problems. I just cannot cope. Actually I would not want to have patients from overseas. ..NO use …but if you want to come, it is okay with me and then you can get your friends and relatives to send the herbs to you. I cannot handle all these chores.

HER MEDICAL HISTORY

1 May 2013  Dear Dr. Teo,

Let me give you a brief medical history of my daughter. She has brain cancer – Grade IV Glioblastoma multiforme on her Brain Stem diagnosed 6 months ago in October 2012.

Very much earlier in September 2009, she had diffused Glioma on her brain stem and was treated with 30 doses of Radiation-Chemotherapy over a period of 6 weeks and the Diffused Glioma shrunk and life was back to normal.

Things started to change end of October 2012, recurrence of diffused low grade brain stem glioma with high grade transformation in the cerebellum. Also, they are aggressive tumours now. Admitted to hospital and neurosurgeon has done a surgery to implant a Brain Shunt to relief the brain pressure built up and at the same time, biopsy taken.

On 9 November 2012, first Termozolomide (Temodal tablets 300mg each day) Chemotherapy for 5 days and rest for 23 days (1cycle) for 5 cycles and blood test was done before each Chemo treatment. After 2 cycles, on 2 January 2013, MRI Head Scan showed the tumours actually shrunk and the family jumped with joy.  Tumours responded to chemo treatment. So continued with Termozolomide Chemo until after the fifth Chemo,

MRI Head Scan on 25 March 2013 was done and sad to say that the tumours had grown back to size   even bigger than before. Her condition deteriorated quickly, Medical Oncologist changed to the use of Avastin (becacizumab) infusion. First Avastin infusion was on 4 April 2013. After 3 weeks, second  Avastin Infusion on 24 April 2013. And at present, her condition seems not improving.

She is bed bound, unable to sit on wheelchair, blur vision, slurred speech, right hand shaking, upper and lower limbs very weak, overall health very weak and unable to eat by herself – feeding needed by mother. Her condition has deteriorated fast just a matter of 4 weeks.

Dr. Teo, I will definitely come over to consult you and show you all the MRI head scans.  I am really working extremely hard to save my daughter. Sincerely thanks, Please reply. Regards.

Reply: There is NO hurry to come and see me. She did not get cancer yesterday — she got cancer many years ago yet. No need to rush. Before you come please know that:

a) There is NO cure for cancer. The type of cancer she has cannot be cure by anybody.

b) The most intelligent thing to do is STOP doing the chemo because it does not work and may even spread the cancer more. See what Avastin does to people in the attached file.

c) After that go to www.BookOnCancer.org and read my book on Cancer What Now — there I have explained everything you need to know. This is written specially for people who come and see me and their expectations.

d) Don’t be misled that there is a cure for cancer. THERE IS NONE. Even if you come to me in a hurry there is NOTHING much I can do except to give you the herbs and hope for the best.

e) I see problems like yours everyday — when doctors gave up, they come to me and expect me to cure them. NO way.

Provided you know what you are coming in here for it is okay with me. Don’t be cheated by people who want to make quick bucks from you.Chris

1 May 2013   Hi Dr. Teo,

Very kind of you for your quick reply.

I have my own reason of coming to see you ASAP and I will explain to you when I see you either on this Friday 3 May 2013 or this Sunday 5 May 2013.

We know there is no cure for this brain cancer and we don’t expect very much as well but just to prolong her life and with your herbs so that she can live a few more year with her strong religious faith, positive attitude and thinking which can create her own strong immune system, control diet and then there is a chance for her to live longer.

At present, she is bed bound and can’t eat by herself, terrible to see my own daughter like this and it is very painful for parents.

Tomorrow morning I will ask my son to book a flight to KL and connecting flight to Penang by Air Asia and hopefully to see Friday or Sunday afternoon as stated in the website or please advise. I think the flight will be on this Friday early morning at 5 am. Perth time is the same as Penang time. My son is studying hard for his university exams now.

There will be no more Avastin infusion till 15 May 2013 and we still have time to stop it. Before that Avastin infusion, she needs to have an MRI Head Scan first and see any improvement on the size of tumours. And if no improvement, then treatment with Avastin infusion will also stop.

Looking forward to see you soon, Dr. Chris Teo.I have been reading your website on newsletters and other material and you are a remarkable Doctor. Please reply. Regards.

 

Radiotherapy: Recurrence After three years

 

Temodal shrunk tumour but it grew bigger after that

 

She had Avastin And She died

 

At CA Care I am not god

7 May 2013  Dear Dr. Chris Teo,

Very sad to inform you that when I arrived in Australia early Sunday morning (5/5/13), my daughter has passed away. Terrible news for the family. Sincerely thanks. Regards.

Death by chemo is acceptable

 

Avastin Spreads Cancer and Makes It More Aggressive

Chemotherapy Spreads Cancer and Makes It More Aggressive: Articles From the Internet

Compiled by Yeong Sek Yee & Khadijah Shaari

1.   Perilous Approach: Avastin and Sutent Promote Growth of Breast Cancer Stem Cells

(Note: Many patients in Malaysia have been treated with this very expensive drug)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently revoked approval of Avastin for treating breast cancer. The reversal was in response to clinical trials showing that the drug’s benefit was short-lived, with breast cancer patients quickly relapsing and the cancer becoming more invasive and metastatic.

Cancer treatments designed to block the growth of blood vessels were found to increase the number of cancer stem cells in breast tumors in mice, suggesting a possible explanation for why these drugs don’t lead to longer survival, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

While anti-angiogenic drugs do shrink tumors and slow the time until the cancer progresses, the effect does not last, and the cancer eventually regrows and spreads.

The researchers treated mice with breast cancer using the anti-angiogenesis drugs Avastin (bevacizumab) and Sutent (sunitinib). The researchers found that tumors treated with these drugs developed more cancer stem cells, which fuel a cancer’s growth and spread and are often resistant to standard treatment.

Read more: http://www.med.umich.edu/cic/2012-spring/perilous-approach.html

2)      Chemotherapy Can Make Cancers More Resistant To Treatment And Even Encourage Them To Grow

  • Chemotherapy treatment for some cancers may actually encourage tumours to grow, researchers have claimed.
  • The treatment triggers the healthy body cells around the tumour to produce a protein that helps the disease to resist treatment.
  • The surprise discovery suggests that some forms of the cancer treatment are doing more harm than good. 

Read more:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2184277/Chemotherapy-encourage-cancer-growth.html 

3)      Chemo Does Not Cure: Often It Inflicts Damage and Spreads Cancer

  • German investigators from Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, have shown that Taxol (the “gold standard of chemo”) causes a massive release of cancer cells into circulation.
  • Such a release of cancer cells would result in extensive metastasis months or even years later, long after the chemo would be suspected as the cause of the spread of the cancer. This little known horror of conventional cancer treatment needs to be spread far and wide, but it is not even listed in the side effects of Taxol.

 Read more:  http://www.tbyil.com/Chemo_Does_Not_Cure.htm

4)      Chemo/Radiation “Therapy” May Fuel Cancer Spread

  • Treatment may fuel cancer’s spread
  • Treating cancer with surgery, chemotherapy or radiation may sometimes cause tumors to spread, researchers say.
  • Tests in mice show that using the chemotherapy drug Doxorubicin or radiation both raised levels of TGF-beta, which in turn helped breast cancer tumors spread to the lung.

Read more: http://rense.com/general76/fuel.htm

5)      Chemotherapy Causes Resistance and Spread of Cancer

Peter Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle co-authored a study and published it in Nature Medicine this month detailing how chemotherapy not only produces resistance to chemotherapy by cancerous tumors but also stimulates its growth and metastasis (spread).  Approximately 90% of people with metastatic cancer become resistant to chemotherapy.  This occurs readily in cancers of the breast, prostate, lung, pancreas and colon.

Read more: http://www.anoasisofhealing.com/the-chemotherapy-cover-up/#axzz2S15t3mvT

6)      Chemo Could Spread Cancer.

A new research published in Nature Medicine shows that chemotherapy can actually be extremely counterproductive in treating cancer as it could spur healthy cells to release a compound that actually stimulates cancer growth.

Read more: http://personalliberty.com/2012/08/07/chemo-could-spread-cancer/

7)      Chemotherapy can Backfire and Encourage Cancer Growth

Chemotherapy can backfire by triggering healthy cells to secrete a protein that sustains tumor growth, which could explain why some patients become resistant, a new study suggests.

Read more: http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/11314/20120806/cancer-chemotherapy-resistance-immunity-nature.htm#BVXeMw9SBDTZpR0W.99

8)      Study Links Cancer’s Ability to Spread with Chemotherapy Resistance

Doctors who treat patients with breast cancer have known that tumors that develop resistance to chemotherapy are also more likely to grow larger and to spread, or metastasize, to other parts of the body.

Read more: http://www.mskcc.org/blog/study-links-s-ability-spread-chemotherapy-resistance

9)       Anti-Cancer Drugs Make Tumors More Deadly

…..new research shows that aggressive treatment (used to shrink or remove even relatively small, slow-growing or encapsulated, harmless tumors) may create a situation where the entire body is riddled with highly aggressive cancers.

This study, published in the January 17, 2012 issue of Cancer Cell,finds that a group of little-explored cells that are part of every primary cancerous tumor likely serve as important gatekeepers against cancer progression and metastasis.

Read more: http://www.ener-chi.com/anti-cancer-drugs-make-tumors-more-deadly/

10)   Anti-Cancer Drugs Make Tumors More Deadly

  • Just imagine you were diagnosed with a cancerous tumor, and your doctor told you that his/her proposed treatment could reduce the size of your tumor by 30 percent, but at the same time increase your chances of developing secondary tumors by a whopping 300 percent!
  • That is exactly what is demonstrated in recent research (at Harvard and MD Anderson Cancer Centers), and published in conventional Oncology Journals! The history of conventional anti-cancer therapies is replete with cases where the treatment turned out to be far more devastating than the disease itself.

Read more: http://hbmag.com/anti-cancer-drugs-make-tumors-more-deadly/

11)   Exposed: Deadly Cancer Drugs Make Cancer Worse and Kill PatientsMore Quickly

  • Cancer drugs, pushed by many drug companies as the only ‘scientific’ method of combating cancer alongside chemotherapy, have been found to actually make cancer worse and kill patients more quickly.
  • The findings come after research was conducted on the cancer drugs at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Sold at a premium price to cancer sufferers, it turns out these drugs are not only ineffective but highly dangerous.

Read more: http://naturalsociety.com/deadly-cancer-drugs-make-cancer-worse-and-kill-patients-more-quickly/

12)   Breaking News: Cancer Drugs Make Tumors More Aggressive And Deadly

…….scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Comprehensive Cancer Center and UAB Department of Chemistry are currently investigating the very real possibility that dead cancer cells left over after chemotherapy spark cancer to spread to other parts of the body (metastasis).

·         A study just published in the January 17 issue of the journal Cancer Cell concludes that anti-angiogenic therapies (which shrink cancer by cutting off tumors’ blood supply) may be killing the body’s natural defense against cancer by destroying pericyte cells that likely serve as important gatekeepers against cancer progression and metastasis.

Read more:  http://www.infowars.com/breaking-news-cancer-drugs-make-tumors-more-aggressive-and-deadly/

13)   Woops! Study Accidentally Finds Chemotherapy Makes Cancer Far Worse.

 

  • A team of researchers looking into why cancer cells are so resilient accidentally stumbled upon a far more important discovery.

While conducting their research, the team discovered that chemotherapy actually heavily damages healthy cells and subsequently triggers them to release a protein that sustains and fuels tumor growth. Beyond that, it even makes the tumor highly resistant to future treatment.

Read more:  http://naturalsociety.com/chemotherapy-makes-cancer-far-worse/

14)   Chemotherapy Backfires – Causes Healthy Cells To Feed Growth Of Cancer Tumors

 This protein,dubbed “WNT16B,” is taken up by nearby cancer cells, causing them to “grow, invade, and importantly, resist subsequent therapy,” said Peter Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He’s the co-author of the study that documented this phenomenon, published in Nature Medicine. This protein, it turns out, explains why cancer tumors grow more aggressively following chemotherapy treatments. In essence, chemotherapy turns healthy cells into WNT16B factories which churn out this “activator” chemical that accelerates cancer tumor growth.

Read more:  http://www.naturalnews.com/z036725_chemotherapy_cancer_tumors_backfires.html

15)          Chemo and Radiation Actually Make Cancer More Malignant

The very treatments may have transformed a relatively slow growing tumor into a rapidly proliferating and invasive one.

Read more: http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/chemo-and-radiation-actually-make-cancer-more-malignant

16)         Beating Cancer With Chemotherapy And Better Drugs: Junk Science?

  (1) The Department of Oncology at North Sydney Cancer Centre in 2004 published a report evaluating chemotherapy over the years and concluded that ‘it only made a minor contribution to survival’. The figures they came up with were 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in America.

(2) The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle that concluded ‘Chemotherapy can cause cancer to return’. They said CAUSE – apparently chemotherapy can cause healthy cells to produce a protein WNT16B and this is taken up by cancer cells – it helps them re-grow and even protects them from the next round of chemotherapy.

(3)  A ‘landmark study’ from their Cambridge Institute showed there were 10 different ‘clusters’ of breast cancer types. ‘No longer does one size fit all’ they cried.

 (4) Three research studies reported on the existence of Cancer Stem Cells at the heart of tumours. A couple of UK cancer centres (Bart’s Hospital and the Blizzard Institute, London) have even isolated these nasty little cells. Apparently, if you don’t kill them off, they can re-grow. In one of the three studies (from the University of Texas South Western Medical Centre), there were statements such as ‘Cancer Stem cells are in charge of tumours’, and the lead researcher, Dr Louis Parada and the other researchers added, ‘In the past we have tried to get rid of the entire stew of cancer cells. But shrinking a tumour by 50% is irrelevant. No current drugs tackle cancer stem cells.

 (5)  Perhaps the final words should therefore go to Duke’s University Medical Centre in Carolina who in their 2012 report concluded that ‘Patients with cancer are largely being mislead into believing that the drug they are being offered is somehow going to cure them’.

Read more: http://www.junkscience.co.uk/2013/04/junk-science-number-50-beating-cancer-with-chemotherapy-and-better-drugs/

WHY CONVENTIONAL CANCER TREATMENT IS FATALLY FLAWED – A DOCTOR’S VIEW

By Yeong Sek Yee and Khadijah Shaari

Is conventional cancer treatment really fatally flawed? This seems to be the opinion of Dr Margaret I. Cuomo, MD who wrote the article “Why Cancer treatment is Fatally Flawed” (Copy of article attached or view article at the following link): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margaret-i-cuomo-md/cancer-prevention_b_1609446.html

Curious to find out more, we subsequently bought the book, “A WORLD WITHOUT CANCER” by Dr Margaret Cuomo, a board – certified radiologist (more details at the end of this article).

World wiithout cancer2

We would like to summarize some of the main points of Chapter 4 of this book which is surprisingly entitled “CUT, BURN AND POISON: A LOOK AT TODAY’S TREATMENT OPTIONS.” The following points sum up Dr Cuomo’s disappointment in conventional treatment (in her own words): –

a)      For most of the 20th Century, we have used 3 basic approaches to treat cancer: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. With experimentation and practice… some modalities may have improved, yet…our results remain entirely inadequate. In crude fashion, we are still trying to cut, poison, and burn our way through cancer (pages 56/57)

b)      One cancer expert has called our approach to cancer “damage control”. We deploy the heavy artillery to kill as much of the cancer as we can, hoping that it doesn’t escape our weaponry. However, all too often it does (page 10).

c)      When it comes to treating cancer, we seem to be in a holding pattern (page13) Cancer has turned out to be far more clever than we imagined… it is able to develop resistance even to highly toxic drugs… it has an uncanny ability to outwit the therapeutics sent to inhibit its growth (pages 12/13).

What are Dr Cuomo’s views on cut, poison, and burn (or alternatively known as surgery, chemotherapy and radiation)?

a)      Cutting : The Surgical Option          

  • Sometimes, surgery isn’t an option. Tumors may be inoperable because they are weakened in an area that’s almost impossible to reach, or a patient may not be strong enough to withstand surgery (page 64).
  • Even if someone does undergo surgery, there is no way to be sure it has been successful. Although every cancer patient yearns to hear the words “we got it all,” cancer has the capacity to work in nearby tissues, even where a clear margin seems to have been obtained, or to spread undetected through the blood or lymph nodes (pages 64/65)
  • Today’s surgery may be safer than it was, but in many cases, it still doesn’t cure the disease. Cutting out organs and tissues does little to fight cancers peripatetic capacity to travel through the blood to colonize other parts of the body (page 13).

b)      Poison: The Limits of Anti Cancer Drugs

  • Pharmaceuticals, collectively called systemic therapy “include 3 major groups : chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and hormonal therapy (page 65).
  • Whether administered as neo-adjuvant therapy (before surgery or radiation) or adjuvant (after surgery or radiation), physicians sometimes avoid the technical language and simply call them “poison” – what we want the drug to do is kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, they can kill normal cells as well… “Chemotherapy is like taking a stick and beating a dog to get rid of fleas” (page 65).
  • Chemotherapy can be especially grueling, with many patients receiving one drug after another. “Usually the first treatment regimen works and then it stops working after a certain point” says Dr Nicholas Vogelzang of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (page 57).
  • The toxic effects of chemotherapy are not limited to cancer cells. Every drug has its own package of debilitating and sometimes bizarre side effects. Some of these occur during treatment and immediately afterwards, some occur five or more years later (page 67).
  • According to the American Society of Clinical Oncology, late effects can strike just about anywhere in the body – including the heart, lungs, brain and spinal cord, bones and joints, endocrine and digestive system. Even dental and vision problems can occur (page 68).
  • When it comes to chemotherapy, no patient emerges unscathed, and the benefits may not last. If cancer cells became resistant to chemotherapy, as often happens over time, they begin to multiply again. The question for patients is always whether the gain in longevity will ultimately outweigh the brutality of the treatment (pages 69/70).
  • Even drugs used to treat the side effects of chemotherapy have been linked to secondary cancers (page 69).
  • Most of the drugs we have to fight solid tumors influence a specific part of a cellular cycle and have only a transient effect. They don’t stop the progress of a tumor indefinitely. A slow growing tumor is still growing and is perhaps beginning to spread undetected elsewhere in the body (page102).
  • Lastly, many drug therapies are not even studied on the basis of their impact on overall survival, but rather on their impact on progression-free survival or the maintenance of stable disease. There is a big difference (page 101).

c)      Burn: Radiation Therapy

  • Although we have gotten much better at aiming radiation directly at a tumor, we can’t target it with the precision necessary to burn only cancer cells and leave healthy ones intact. That means that this therapy, too, is damaging (page 75).
  • Months or even years after radiation, chronic side effects can surface. With radiation, as with chemotherapy, the list of potential problems is lengthy (page77).
  • Most troubling is the possibility that other cancers will emerge, often near the original site, long after receiving radiation therapy…children who survived cancer were 15 times more likely to die of a subsequent cancer later in life (page 79).
  • Though the young are most vulnerable, secondary cancers can develop as a result of radiation at any age.

Flawed Clinical Trial Design:

Besides cancer treatments being fatally flawed, clinical trial designs are also flawed in the first place (page138). According to Dr Cuomo:

  • Good medicine is built on clinical trials in which promising scientific discoveries are tested in human beings (page 138).
  • Too often, clinical trials fail to discover who benefit from a therapy and who will be harmed (page140)….we need to be doing the studies that will tell us which patients require chemotherapy (page 141).
  • ….because we don’t know the profile of those who will gain, almost all patients routinely get chemotherapy……that translates into giving therapies that fail 95% of the time in order to find that 3 to 5% of responsive patients (page 141).

Some other pertinent remarks of Dr Cuomo that are particularly succinct: –

  •  The fact that we have made so little progress after a century of using the same basic techniques surely suggests that we aren’t taking the right approach. The problem? “Even one cancer cell can lead to death” says James Holland, MD a distinguished professor of neoplastic diseases at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Relapse is always a possibility until we can guarantee that there are no cancer cells in the body (page 79).
  • When death can come from a single cell that successfully eludes our most brutal attempts to cut, poison, and burn it the sword of Damocles hangs over every patient’s head (page 59).
  • We should differentiate between drugs that make a small difference and drugs that make no difference at all. A lot of cancer drugs are not worth very much in terms of prolongation of life (page 110).
  • Meanwhile, our continuing emphasis on producing, prescribing, and paying for one marginally useful cancer therapy after another suggests that we are in the wrong playing field (page 124).

In conclusion, when Dr Cuomo commented in The Final Word (page 244) that, when President Nixon launched “a great Crusade against cancer in 1971, he said that a long shadow of fear darkens every corner of the earth” So it is today. We need to rekindle the effort to eradicate cancer that began four decades ago (page 245).

Actually, it makes us (our personal views) wonder, whether cancer treatments are really flawed or is it made to be flawed? We can send a human to the moon but we cannot find a cure for cancer? Or is it that the cancer industry does not intend to find a cure for cancer? The answer to these questions can found on page 125 of this book (which your doctor will not recommend you to read)…it says: “the drug companies are too greedy, the FDA is too slow; doctors are rich and    raking it in.”

Also, without question (Dr Cuomo’s views), fighting cancer remains highly profitable. The drug companies have all the incentive to keep their research focused on developing powerful therapies, rather than on eliminating cancer altogether (page 66).

(Yes, a cure for cancer will never be found and will never be allowed to be found!! The cancer industry does not want you to be cured and they do not want you to die so soon either….that is their window of opportunity to rake in the money. That is our views. We welcome your views.)

ISBN NO: 978-1-60961-885-8 (published October 2012)

Dr. Margaret Cuomo, the author of “A World without Cancer,” is a board-certified radiologist and an attending physician in diagnostic radiology at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. for many years. Specializing in body imaging, involving CT, Ultrasound, MRI and interventional procedures, much of her practice was dedicated to the diagnosis of cancer and AIDS.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Are there other doctors/oncologists/cancer researchers who share the same views as Dr Cuomo that conventional cancer treatment is fatally flawed, ineffective, too much collateral damage, etc? Yes, there are, some are listed and summarized below for your enlightenment. These are books which your doctors/oncologists will not recommend you to read:

1) THE COMPASSIONATE ONCOLOGIST by Dr James W. Forsythe, MD, HMD. Read why Dr Forsythe left conventional oncology and find out why conventional cancer treatment is…often it is akin to entering a dark room with a handful of darts and hoping to hit the centre of the dart-board blindly (page 127).

2) NATURAL STRATEGIES FOR CANCER PATIENTS by Dr Russell Blaylock, MD, a               neuroscientist and neurosurgeon.He was the Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery at the Medical University of Mississippi. Read Chapter 3…Chemotherapy: Poisoning Cancer (and You) in  which:

  • Dr Blaylock bluntly revealed that……“The probability that chemotherapy make tumours more aggressive, inhibit the immune system and damage vital organs were reviewed in the medical literature as far back as 1987… In many instances, chemotherapy makes the cancer more aggressive and more likely to metastasize”. (pages 78-79)

3) THE END OF ILLNESS by Dr David Argus, MD, an oncologist and Professor of Medicine.  Find out why he also left conventional oncology:

  • When cancer is exposed to chemotherapy, drug-resistant mutants can escape. In other words, just as resistant strains of bacteria can result from antibiotic use, anticancer drugs can produce resistant cancer cells (page 37).
  • The number of mutations shoots up exponentially as a cancer patient is treated with drugs such as chemotherapy, which inherently causes more mutations (page 39).
  • When chemotherapy drugs bind to DNA, they can cause cancer just as radiation can cause cancer by mutating the genome. This helps explain why survivors of breast cancer, for instance, can suffer  from leukemia later in life due to the chemotherapy they received to cure their breast cancer (page 39).

4) MONEY DRIVEN MEDICINE: TESTS AND TREATMENTS THAT DON’T WORK by Dr         David K. Cundiff, an Assistant Professor in medical oncology at the Harbor-UCLA Medical          Center in Los Angeles.” Dr. Cundiff later left oncology and became a hospice doctor because:

  • “I would not recommend chemotherapy if I did not think that the benefits outweighed the risks.” I was so out of step with the other practicing medical oncologists that it became clear that I could not make a living with such a conservative treatment philosophy. Dr Cundiff just could not stomach what he saw and practiced.

5) FIGHTING CANCER WITH KNOWLEDGE & HOPE by Dr Richard C. Frank, MD, an            oncologist, gives an explicit explanation as to why chemotherapy may not work for you           (pages 188/190) and why targeted therapies have fallen short of its lofty goals (pages            175/184)

6) LIFE OVER CANCER by Dr Keith Block, an integrative oncologist, whose view that            conventional cancer treatment is fatally flawed is reflected in the following statement on            page 304:

  • “Cancer’s ability to continually adapt is one reason why chemotherapy and radiation are not more effective against cancer: the treatments also produce free radicals that support the disease process, allowing any cells that survive the barrage of radiation or chemotherapy to thrive.”

7)INTEGRATIVE ONCOLOGY by Dr Donald Abrams, MD and Dr Andrew Weill, both          Professors of Clinical Medicine and oncologists….wrote on the toxicities of conventional               treatment and…..”the well known potential to cause mutations and malignant               transformation” (page 8).

8) WHAT YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CANCER by Dr Robert                        Buckman, MD, a medical oncologist and Associate Professor, University of Toronto.                       In Chapter 9, he wondered…..”With so many breakthroughs, why is there no Progress?”                        Very thought provoking.

9) THE ENZYME FACTOR by Dr Hiromi Shinya, MD, a Clinical Professor of Surgery at                       the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Chief of the Endoscopy Unit of Beth Israel                       Hospital in New York.  Dr Shinya firmly believes anti-cancer drugs do not cure cancer…                      Read to find out why.

10) HOW WE DO HARM by Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, MD, the chief medical and executive                        Vice president of the American Cancer Society, and currently serves as Professor of                         Hematology, oncology, medicine, and epidemiology of Emory University and a fellow in                           Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute, USA. You must really read the book                        to find out how oncologists/doctors do harm…..contrary to the first precepts of medical                         ethics taught in medical school….”FIRST, DO NO HARM”

To conclude this article, allow us to quote Dr Guy Faquet, a retired hematologist / oncologist, in his book “THE WAR ON CANCER…AN ANATOMY OF FAILURE, A BLUEPRINT FOR THE FUTURE”:

  • “medical treatment of cancer for most of the past century was like trying to fix an automobile without any knowledge of the internal combustion engine or, for that matter, even the ability to look under the hood” (page 63).

 NB: IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO READ MORE ON THE ABOVE SUBJECT        MATTER, DO CALL US.

Dr. James Forsythe: Why I Abandoned Conventional Oncology

Take-control-of-your-cancer

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.

2 Chemo-is-odd-UK-doctor

1 Chemo-worthless

Chemotherapy SPREADS and MAKES cancer more AGGRESSIVE

Can this statement be true? Is it a hoax? I would NOT dare say or write such a thing about chemotherapy lest I would be accused of trying to scare you away from chemotherapy – the gold standard treatment of cancer today.  That is the way it is with human nature – if you say something not nice about something then you are the enemy of that something – there is no middle ground.

Unfortunately, my daily reading of medical literature makes it difficult for me to keep quiet or play deaf and dumb about what I have read.

When patients go and see their oncologists for their cancer, they generally have high hope but at the same time are just as anxious. Some patients dare ask their oncologists: Can chemo cure me?  Others do not have a clue what to say or ask . They take it for granted that doctors know best – why ask questions? For those who asked, what answers do they get? Probably these:  There is a 95 percent chance; or Let’s see after three cycles of chemo; or Cannot cure, but can control the cancer from spreading; or You must do chemo to make the cancer less aggressive, or With chemo you have better quality of life!

The answers provide much comfort and assurance to patients. Indeed that is what patients want to hear! And then they play along with their oncologists.  But do you ever realize that such an answer is just a PR exercise rather than a statement of fact based on scientific evidence? With each passing day as more and more scientific evidence are being reported, such answers seem to be very leaky.

Let me ask you.

  • If you know that chemo CANNOT cure your cancer, would you still undergo chemotherapy?
  • If chemotherapy can make your cancer worse and makes it spread more aggressively, would you go for chemotherapy? 

Some will say NO. But some will say YES, because what choice have I got? For example, read this e-mail below:

14 June 2012: Dear Chris,

The doctor (looked experienced and kind) suggested Gemzar and Cisplatin for six cycles. He did not recommend radio because it is not solving the root cause of the growth (previous radio sites also growing). Honestly, I’m at loss because I also frightened of chemo after so many awful stories. Finally, we decided to try out 1 or 2 cycles and monitor my husband’s condition, scheduled to start next week. I know this sounds stupid. However, there does not seem to be other avenue to slow down this growth. We still plan to continue with herbs long term- but can we have herbs during chemo? Thanks and regards.

30 January 2013: Dear Chris,

My husband had passed away last November 2012.  After two cycles of chemo, he experienced leg weakness. He stopped chemo after that. Then he was paralysed starting from the legs, and moving upwards to both hands, and finally his breathing muscle was affected. He died due to breathing difficulties. In any case, I would like to thank you for the help rendered. Thanks and regards,

After two cycles of chemo and the patient was dead?  This is what I always tell patients:  It is your life and you have to make your own decision without me having to influence you. My responsibility is to provide honest information. You can ask your oncologists about the pros of chemo. But it is unlikely that they tell you in detail the cons of chemotherapy. Here, we tell you about the dark story of chemo because they are equally important although less talked about. Nevertheless you need to know them if you want to make a wise and empowered decision. But be reminded that by doing this we appear to be anti-chemo. We are not – at times we do urge you to go for chemotherapy.

Dr. Morton Walker (in Cancer’s Cause, Cancer’s Cure) wrote: I was astounded at how distorted the physicians’ presentations were when they discussed the side effects of their treatments. The doctors appeared to become almost like used-car salesmen in a pitch for their surgery, radiation therapy and/or chemotherapy.  I know something about medical practices and oncology from my work as a medical researcher and as a former practicing podiatrist. In my opinion, the information the oncologists gave my fiancee was hardly an honest assessment of the relative benefits and risks associated with the recommended treatments. 

Let me ask you to reflect on the following tragic story and see if you can learn anything from it.

Kathy (not real name) is a 44-year old lady. A CT scan done on 8 November 2010 showed a mass in her right lung. The doctor suspected malignancy, Stage 3B. A biopsy confirmed lung cancer, positive for EGFR (epidermal growth factor receptor), a case where taking oral drug, Iressa is said to be effective. Kathy started to take Iressa for seven months.  With Iressa the mass in her lung started to shrink until the size could not be measured.

In August 2011, Kathy’s condition deteriorated. The lung mass which had apparently disappeared after taking Iressa, had grown back to twice its original size. Kathy was told that her lung cancer was at Stage 4B.

The lung mass was again tested for its sensitivity to Iressa. Unfortunately this time it was negative for EGFR. Iressa would be useless for Kathy this time around. Kathy was asked to undergo chemotherapy.

In November 2011, Kathy went to China for further medical treatment.  Kathy underwent the following treatments:

1. Chemotherapy, a procedure called Transarterial Chemical Infusion (TACI).

2.  Cryosurgery (also called cryoablation).

3. Radioactive iodine seed implantation.

Kathy was told that she had a 60:40 chance of success – 60 percent that she would be cured by the treatments and 40 percent chance that the treatments would fail.

Kathy made a last visit to China in March 2012. She was told she was unable to receive anymore chemotherapy because the tumour had grown in between her ribs.

Kathy was asked to take Iressa (again? But she had taken Iressa before from December 2010 to June 2011). Kathy declined Iressa.

Kathy was asked to return to China for a checkup in June 2012 but she did not return. She did a PET scan in Jakarta. Unfortunately the results showed progressive disease and the cancer had spread to her bones, lymph nodes, liver, etc.

This effectively means the treatments in China had failed.

Back home in Jakarta, Kathy continued to receive radiotherapy to her backbone. She also received chemotherapy. A CT scan in October 2012 showed that the tumour had grown in size. She stopped chemotherapy.

Unfortunately after the radiation to her backbone, her right breast became hard, painful and developed rashes.

Kathy had probably reached the end of the road and did not know what else to do. She said: Now I only take supplements and PRAY.  Through a friend she got to know CA Care and came to Penang on 12 November 2012.

Ask the following questions:

  1. Iressa made the tumour disappear for a while – seven months. Does any cancer patient ever been told or know a complete story? Is there no evidence to show that shrinkage after treatment is just temporary and meaningless? If you have been reading our stories here, you know that there are many similar cases!
  2. Why did the cancer come back after its disappearance? Probably you will get the answer in the later part of this article.
  3. The lung tissue that was once positive for EGFR had then turned negative for EGFR – why? Is this not about the complexity, uncertainty and messiness of life that experts generally fail to see. Probably you will also get a scientific answer to this problem in the later part of this article.
  4. Kathy went for more treatments in China with the prospect that she would have a 60 percent chance of cure, in spite of the earlier failure. But it did not turn they way she or her doctor expected. She had MORE treatments and she ended up with MORE cancer.
  5. Can it be true that chemo and radiation encourage more cancer? Make the cancer more aggressive and spread more? Read further to know. It is up to you to make your own conclusion after that.

Research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre, Seattle, Washington, USA.

A  research report, published in Nature Medicine 18: 1359-1368 (2012) has this title: Treatment-induced damage to the tumour microenvironment promotes prostate cancer therapy resistance through WNT 16B. It was written by Yu Sun et al. – a team of eight researchers led by Peter Nelson of the Division of Clinical Research, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research. http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v18/n9/full/nm.2890.html )  From this paper we learn that:

  1. Acquired resistance to anti-cancer treatment is a problem in cancer treatment.
  2. Cancer tissue microenvironments can influence the success or failure of treatments.
  3. WNT 16B in the prostate tumour microenvironment promoted tumour cell survival and disease progression.

Many articles are written in lay language following the release this study. This is to allow you and me understand the implications of the above scientific finding.

Read this article written by Jonathan Benson:  Study accidentally exposes chemotherapy as fraud –  tumors grow faster after chemo! (24 January 2012: http://www.naturalnews.com/038811_chemotherapy_tumor_growth_fraud.html#ixzz2JVhgUwC5)

 The Daily News of 6 August 2012 had this heading, Shock study: Chemotherapy can backfire, make cancer worse by triggering tumor growth (http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/shock-study-chemotherapy-backfire-cancer-worse-triggering-tumor-growth-article-1.1129897#ixzz2JiaJnOox)

Anthony Gucciardi wrote this article, Woops! Study Accidentally Finds Chemotherapy Makes Cancer Far Worse (7 August 2012, http://naturalsociety.com/chemotherapy-makes-cancer-far-worse/#ixzz2JibCe87N).

Let me summarise what these authors wrote.

  • A team of researchers from Washington state had a giant Oops! moment recently when it accidentally uncovered the deadly truth about chemotherapy while investigating why prostate cancer cells are so difficult to eradicate using conventional treatment methods. 
  • Chemotherapy does not actually treat or cure cancer at all, but rather fuels the growth and spread of cancer cells, making them much harder to stamp out once chemotherapy has already been initiated.

Jonathan Benson said:

  • You might call it the smoking gun that proves, once and for all, the complete fraud of the conventional cancer industry. Not only is chemotherapy, the standard method of cancer treatment today, a complete flop, based on the findings, but it is actually detrimental for patients with cancer. 
  • According to the study, chemotherapy induces healthy cells to release WNT 16B, a protein that helps promote cancer cell survival and growth. 
  • Chemotherapy also definitively damages the DNA of healthy cells. 
  • This combined action of healthy cell destruction and cancer cell promotion technically makes chemotherapy more of a cancer-causing protocol than a cancer-treatment protocol. 
  • Avoiding chemotherapy improves health outcomes. For all intents and purposes … the entire process of   chemotherapy is completely worthless, and is actually highly detrimental for cancer patients. Anyone searching for a real cure will want to avoid chemotherapy, in other words, and pursue an alternate route.

Co-author Peter Nelson from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center explained:

  • WNT 16B, when secreted, would interact with nearby tumor cells and cause them to grow, invade, and importantly, resist subsequent therapy.
  • Completely unexpected – our results indicate that damage responses in benign cells … may directly contribute to enhanced tumor growth kinetics.
  • In cancer treatment, tumors often respond well initially, followed by rapid re-growth and then resistance to further chemotherapy.

Deadly Cancer Drugs Make Cancer Worse and Kill Patients More Quickly

This finding should not come as a big shock really. Just before this discovery, medical researchers have also reported that certain cancer drugs not only fail to treat tumors, but actually make them far worse. The cancer drugs were found to make tumors spread and grow massively in size after consumption. As a result, the drugs killed the patients more quickly.

Vesseline Cooke et al. (and a team of 15 researchers headed by Raghu Kalluri of the Matrix Biology, Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, wrote an article: Pericyte Depletion Results in Hypoxia-Associated Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition and Metastasis Mediated by Met Signaling Pathway. This was published in Cancer Cell . (http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1535610811004478/1-s2.0-S1535610811004478-main.pdf?_tid=dc206a6a-6d05-11e2-b7ac-00000aacb361&acdnat=1359788451_ea0e924ab8a26cdaa5bab696f3a0baf6)

  • Researchers examined drugs such as imatanib (Gleevec, a leukemia drug) and sunitinib (Sutent, a drug for gastrointestinal tumors and kidney cancer) found that these drugs may initially reduce tumor size but afterwards cause tumors to spread aggressively – meaning  the tumors can come back much stronger and grow much larger than their original size.
  • In the study the researchers induced anti-angiogenesis in mice genetically engineered to have breast cancer. When they induced anti-angiogenesis, they saw a 30 percent decrease in the volume of each tumor over 25 days. But the number of tumors that had metastasized to the lungs tumors tripled compared to untreated control mice.
  • Kalluri and his team performed a previous study in humans that found breast cancer patients with fewer cells called pericytes, which support the walls of veins, were less likely to survive their cancer. It turns out those are the cells damaged by some anti-angiogenesis drugs. 
  • By studying the mice they found that those pericytes are important because without them tumors become weak and leaky. 
  • And that causes cancer cells to launch survival mechanisms: the researchers found a fivefold increase in factors inside the pericyte-lacking cells that promote cell migration and growth.

In an article on 19 January 2012: Exposed: Deadly Cancer Drugs Make Cancer Worse and Kill Patients More Quickly  http://naturalsociety.com/deadly-cancer-drugs-make-cancer-worse-and-kill-patients-more-quickly/#ixzz2JbbnsoG4 Anthony Gucciardi wrote:

  • Cancer drugs, pushed by many drug companies as the only scientific method of combating cancer alongside chemotherapy, have been found to actually make cancer worse and kill patients more quickly.
  • Sold at a premium price to cancer sufferers, it turns out these drugs are not only ineffective but highly dangerous.

Kristen Philipkoski, on 17 January 2012 (http://gizmodo.com/5876919/how-cancer-drugs-make-cancer-worse-and-kill-patients) wrote this article How Cancer Drugs Make Cancer Worse and Kill Patients.

  • You’d think that a tumor shrinking would be considered good news for anyone suffering from cancer. But maybe not. Scientists have found that a type of cancer treatment aimed at shrinking tumors can actually make them spread more efficiently and aggressively and kill patients quicker. 

I spoke to Dr. Raghu Kalluri, one of the study’s authors and chief of the matrix biology division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He said:

  • Focusing on tumor growth, the treatment results looked good. Tumors shrunk. But if you looked at the big picture, making tumors smaller didn’t mean the cancer was being controlled. It was actually spreading. 
  • Whatever manipulations we’re doing to tumors can inadvertently do something to increase the tumor numbers to become more metastatic, which is what kills patients at the end of the day.

I’ve had several family members who died at the hands of cancer shortly after the good news that doctors had shrunk the tumor! Was that tumor shrinkage actually what killed them?

Dr.  Kalluri said:

  • It’s possible. If cancer drugs are used randomly against all kinds of cancer without thinking about all the biology of the tumor, it could lead to a poor prognosis. It’s important for doctors to remember that tumors contain lots of types of cells, and they’re not all bad.
  • Seventy to 80 percent of cells in a breast tumor are non-cancer cells.  Are they all bad? Some of them are there to protect us.
    • Cancer drugs that shrink tumours by cutting off their blood supply may end up helping them to spread.
    • Drugs such as Glivec and Sutent reduce the size of tumours but could also make them more aggressive and mobile.
    • A little-studied group of cells called pericytes that provide structural support to blood vessels act as gatekeepers to pen in cancer.
    • Pericytes are wiped out by some advanced cancer drugs that prevent the growth of tumour-nourishing blood vessels. As a result tumours find it easier to spread around the body.
    • Tests on mice showed that both Glivec and Sutent depleted pericytes by 70 per cent while metastasis rates tripled. They saw a 30 per cent decrease in tumour volumes over 25 days, but also a three-fold increase in the number of secondary tumours growing in the animals’ lungs.

Leon  Watson, on 18 January 2012, wrote this article: Cancer drugs that aim to shrink tumours by cutting blood supply can actually help them SPREAD (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2088032/Cancer-drugs-aim-shrink-tumours-cutting-blood-supply-actually-help-SPREAD.html#axzz2Jiz17J7D) explained further:

To see how relevant the findings were to patients, the scientists went on to examine 130 human breast cancer samples.

  • Samples with low numbers of pericytes in tumour blood vessel networks correlated with the most deeply invasive cancers, distant cancer spread, and five and 10-year survival rates lower than 20 per cent.

Lead researcher Professor Raghu Kalluri, from Harvard Medical School in Boston said:

  • But when you looked at the whole picture, inhibiting tumour vessels was not controlling cancer progression. The cancer was, in fact, spreading.
  • Some assumptions about cancer must now be revisited. We must go back and audit the tumour and find out which cells play a protective role versus which cells promote growth and aggression. Not everything is black and white. There are some cells inside a tumour that are actually good in certain contexts. 

S. L. Baker, 19 January 2012, wrote Breaking news: cancer drugs make tumors more aggressive and deadly (http://www.infowars.com/breaking-news-cancer-drugs-make-tumors-more-aggressive-and-deadly/)

  • When natural health advocates warn against mainstream medicine’s arsenal of weapons used to fight cancer, including chemotherapy and radiation, their concerns often revolve around how these therapies can weaken and damage a person’s body in numerous ways. 
  • But scientists are finding other reasons to question some of these therapies. It turns out that while chemotherapies may kill or shrink tumors in the short term, they may actually be causing malignancies to grow more deadly in the long term. 
  • Scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Comprehensive Cancer Center and UAB Department of Chemistry are currently investigating the very real possibility that dead cancer cells left over after chemotherapy spark cancer to spread to other parts of the body (http://www.naturalnews.com/029042_cancer_cells_chemotherapy.html). 
  • And now comes the news that a little-explored specific cell type, the pericyte, found in what is called the microenvironment of a cancerous tumor actually may halt cancer progression and metastasis. And by destroying these cells, some anti-cancer therapies may inadvertently be making cancer more aggressive as well as likely to spread and kill.

 These results are quite provocative and will influence clinical programs designed to target tumor angiogenesis, Ronald A. DePinho, president of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said in a press statement. These impressive studies will inform and refine potential therapeutic approaches for many cancers.

An article in http://www.bewellbuzz.com/body-buzz/chemotherapy/ has an article entitled Truth About Chemotherapy. It makes a good conclusion to our discussion.

  • Chemotherapy drugs cannot differentiate between healthy cells and cancer cells, and attack both with the same vigor.
  • Scientists have found that non-cancerous cells that were damaged by chemo drugs release a certain protein, WNT 16B, in high quantities. WNT 16B secreted by healthy cells damaged by chemo drugs interact with nearby cancer cells, increasing their survival rate and, more disturbingly, making them more resilient to other treatments.
  • Studies show that chemotherapy drugs can cause DNA mutations. Scientists suspect that these DNA mutations may be passed to a patient’s future generations as well. In other words, chemotherapy drugs may negatively affect a patient’s entire hereditary line.   
  • Researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, Boston, studied the effect of cancer drugs and found that they caused cancer cells to metastasize aggressively.
  • In their findings, scientists noted that cancer drugs, Sutent and Gleevec , caused cancer cells to metastasize. The size of the tumor may initially reduce when these drugs are administered. However, these drugs make cancer cells metastasize aggressively over time.

Is it time we look beyond chemotherapy? Maybe yes. More studies should be performed to better understand the role of natural substances in cancer treatment.

Recent studies show that cancer drugs are not only ineffective in treating cancer, but that they cause the tumor to metastasize aggressively, and, thus, decrease the lifespan of cancer patients. Also chemotherapy is astronomically expensive, leaving many patients or their families financially ruined while the drug companies continue to profit.

Do your research before you commit to being poisoned with chemotherapy.

The Cancer Odyssey: Discovering Truth and Inspiration on the Way to Wellness

Cancer Odyssey

If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting… and set out on a truth-seeking journey, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue,
and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher,
and if you are prepared … to face … some very difficult realities about yourself …
then truth will not be withheld from you. (From the movie Eat, Pray, Love).

 

The Author: Margeret B. Bermel, MBA

She lives on Long Island with her husband and cats. She graduated from Marywood University with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in Music. She is an MBA from Hofstra University, a First Degree Black Belt, and an avid golfer.

In 2009, Margeret was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and her world suddenly changed.  She started to chronicle her discoveries.  She stumbled upon the dirty secret of the cancer industry:  chemotherapy does not work.  As her research progressed to the discovery of the truths about conventional treatment, she also opened up to the inspiration that life offers to us all on a daily basis, if only we pay attention.  She started blogging about her discoveries.  The book unfolded as her journey unfolded.

Her Book

In October 2009, the surgeon leaned over me in the recovery room and shouted, “It was malignant.”  My husband then leaned over me and whispered gently, but with conviction, “We WILL grow old together.”  That day was the start of my journey through the labyrinth of the cancer industry.  The Cancer Odyssey: Discovering Truth and Inspiration on the Way to Wellness chronicles my journey, searching both for truth about the cancer industry, and for inspiration about the purpose of life.  

  • This is a book of survival, a book of encouragement to show others in this situation how to live and how not to die.
  • This book is about how to be brave enough to resist the pressure of the medical “standard of care”, how to explain to well-meaning family and friends that you are going against conventional medicine, how to be open enough to find inspiration in life and to achieve happiness.  This is the only way to survive cancer.
  • This book is a blueprint to help others to overcome the fear of cancer and to return to wellness, by finding their own truth and their own inspiration.
  • This book offers an approach to dealing with cancer from a new viewpoint – to empower people to challenge the medical advice of chemotherapy that most people have unquestioningly accepted as the only option.  It encourages people to question and research, and to take their health care decisions into their own hands, because survival depends upon making the right decision.
  • The author is a survivor by choice, sheer luck, profound faith, and determination.  She is an ordinary person who was called upon to do the extraordinary:  overcome cancer and live to tell the story.

Why She Wrote this Book

  • To raise enough reasonable doubt about the motives and ineffectiveness of the cancer industry in approaching this disease so that people will start to question the “standard of care” treatment—chemotherapy.
  • To challenge the readers to suspend their belief system in the traditional approach to cancer.  At one time or another, everyone will hear a doctor tell them that they or a loved one have cancer and that they need chemotherapy.
  • To help others who suddenly find themselves caught in the same situation that I suddenly found myself in over a year ago:  the cancer trap.
  • My mission is to encourage people to ask questions and receive answers that are satisfactory to them.  I think it is important to both listen to your gut and to learn about various options.  I am not a medical practitioner and I cannot offer any medical advice or recommendations.  I can only encourage people to find the treatment that is right for them.  Although I am a strong proponent of natural treatments, in some circumstances the conventional treatments may be appropriate.  My intention is to help people set their fear aside to enable them to approach this challenge with the strength to ask the questions that need to be asked, in your situation, “How will this treatment help ME?

 The Message She Wants You to Know

  • We must stop going along with the conventional “inside the box” thinking, that chemo is the correct knee-jerk reaction to cancer.  It is not, and we must challenge it.  Chemotherapy is NOT the solution that people believe it is.
  • The cancer industry is complacent. There is no motivation to improve the product line because business is booming.  With ‘early detection’ marketing, more and more people are diagnosed with cancer every day.  People are buying what they think they need.  There is no reason to make “a better mousetrap.”
  • Big Pharma is the driving force behind the millions of futile treatments and resultant deaths … people should finally start asking questions and demand answers, and stop dying.
  • Chemotherapy is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated upon the American public.   The Big Pharma-FDA complex must be exposed as a cartel colluding, not on curing cancer, but on generating profits.
  • Cancer treatment is the Rolls-Royce of the medical profession.  This is where the real money is.  Oncologists are the Rolls-Royce sales team of the cancer industry.  What will it take to get you into this car today?  What will it take to get you to sign up for chemotherapy today?  Very strong sales tactics. A sense of urgency.  Scare tactics.
  • It is not about altruism.  It’s about “show me the money.”  People need to hear this message before making the very real life and death decision about chemotherapy.  The war against the cancer industry is the real “battle for truth, justice and the American way.”  Think of chemotherapy as kryptonite.  It is toxic.  It can harm healthy cells and organs.  It can kill the cancer.  It can also kill the patient.
  • Does chemotherapy work?  Maybe, sometimes, with some specific cancers.  But very often, it does not work. Some cancer cells may die, but the collateral damage is the patient’s life.
  • Approximately 600,000 Americans die each year ostensibly from “cancer”—but are they actually dying from the treatment?  A very provocative question.
  • Everything we thought we knew about chemo didn’t come from data sources, it comes from media sources fed by the pharmaceutical companies selling their wares.
  • Chemotherapy may be the correct choice in a particular situation, but it should be a “choice” and not a “given.”  The choice should be made only after a thorough review of all facts and all options.  The oncologist, much like a salesman, will try to create a sense of urgency in order to make the sale.  Recognize this as a sales tactic and don’t succumb to it.  Insist upon taking the time to do your research.
  • Who is the FDA protecting us from?  If no one was dying in this country from cancer and cancer treatment, then it might be appropriate for the FDA to block other treatments from the marketplace.  We would say that cancer treatment is efficacious.  There would be no need to search for an alternate treatment.  There would be no need for this book.  But 600,000 deaths annually?  These people all took the treatment, and we know that they took the treatment because the statistics don’t track the people who decline treatment.  Something is very wrong here.  It doesn’t add up.  It must be challenged.  The actions of the FDA must be scrutinized.

 Words of Advice

  • Over a year ago, I had major surgery and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I wrote the first story on January 1, 2010 … On that date, I was only 2 months out from receiving a diagnosis, and on that date, I stopped reeling from the fear, panic, dread, despair, and anxiety, and took control of my life.  What you are feeling today, I also felt.  It is a scary place to be, but feel that I am holding your hand to guide you through this storm.  You will be able to follow the progress I made by making discoveries about treatment options (what works and what doesn’t work) and discoveries about life options (what we can do to save our own lives).
  • This has been a tremendous effort, a change in lifestyle, a change in eating habits, and a change in mental and emotional patterns–eliminating stress from my life, even in stress-producing situations.
  • The key to recovery from cancer is the awareness of truth; this will lead to making informed choices.  I learned the truth about chemotherapy and so I avoided it.
  • Hopefully, you may find that some of my discoveries will help you through your own process.  My focus is on healthy living, and on natural alternatives to toxic treatments.  In some situations, some type of treatment may be the correct choice; however, it is very important that you ask questions and know exactly what your options are.
  • Find a medical professional who fits your comfort level.  If your gut is telling you something is wrong with what you are hearing, then it probably IS wrong for you.  Don’t be afraid to get a 2nd, 3rd, 4th opinion.  Do not just go along with recommendations without question.
  • Chemotherapy is the big killer, not cancer per se, but chemotherapy.  Chemo is not all that it’s cracked up to be.  Learn everything you can before you or your loved one agrees to it. Choose the right path for you to return to wellness.
  • Listen to your gut, listen to your heart, think this through.  You are your own best resource.  You are your own best healer.  Do your research, read a lot.  Do not panic.  You have time.  Take a deep breath and you will get through this.  Trust.  BE WELL! You can do this.
  • Through my own health circumstances, I was forced to research this issue.  I am grateful every day that I was able to sift through the deception and misleading statistics, and decline the highly toxic “standard of care” which I believe would have led to certain death.  Many people do not do this; they succumb to the scare tactics; they are too afraid not to go along with the conventional recommendation.
  • Read this (book) first before taking chemo.  Once it is understood that the cancer industry is driven by the profit motive, and not by altruism, then you have empowered yourself to ask the questions that need answers.  Find out specifically HOW chemo will help YOU in your specific situation.  Find out if taking chemo will make you BETTER.  This is key.  Most people taking chemo think that if they go through with it, if they take their medicine, that they will emerge healthy.  Many people do not emerge from chemo.  It turns out to be a slow, painful death.
  • The point is: find out exactly what you are getting into, BEFORE you get into it.  Keep an open mind as you read through this.
  • Start to notice what people say at funeral services for family and friends who died from ‘cancer’.  People will whisper in hushed tones that they think that it was the ‘chemo’ and not the ‘cancer’ that killed the deceased.  Pay attention.
  • People are starting to realize that chemo doesn’t work, and that the cancer industry has to come up with something better than this. Demand answers. Demand better options.

More about The Cancer Odyssey click these links:

http://www.thecancerodyssey.com/

http://www.just-say-no-to-chemo.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Cancer-Odyssey/110880959001636