Cancer & Chemotherapy

Cancer & Chemotherapy - choices to make

This a letter I wrote today to a very old friend with whom I am very close concerning her choice on how to follow up her treatment of breast cancer. She had surgery and six weeks of radiation therapy. The doctors would like her to now follow up with chemotherapy. She lives in the USA.

Dear ,
I understand that the second opinion on your health was to do chemo. As you know the doctors need to follow the protocols that are set up for each situation. The type of cancer you had was aggressive so it requires a protocol that includes chemo. The doctor cannot really say otherwise even if he / she would like too or they are liable. You know this already but it is very important to put into account on whatever you decide to do.

I think this link says it all - most doctors would not choose the therapy they are prescribing - http://www.naturalnews.com/036054_chemotherapy_physicians_toxicity.html

There are many interesting things in this article above - like the doctors are prohibited by the FDA to recommend diet, food supplements and herbs to patients. Why?

I sent you this link already from a cancer research scientist on the role of the cells environment, bacterial infections and inflammation promoting cancer - http://www.edge.org/response-detail/23735
This is same view as in Ayurveda. We treat the body and help re-establish normal metabolic functions. We also use herbs that reduce or remove inflammatory conditions - the most famous of which is Guduchi.

I recommended that you take Guduchi a few months ago - here are studies showing why you should continue to take it: http://bpb.pharm.or.jp/bpb/200603/b03_0460.pdf - shows anti-cancer properties

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9505214

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0367326X98000173

If you have friend that can get into PubMed they can find many more studies about this plant. If I had cancer I would start a vegan diet and take 6 grams per day of this herb Guduchi. I would also use wheat grass juice or barley grass juice to give more "alive" nutrients to my body and help remove the toxic chemicals I have taken or received. Small doses (300 to 500 mg per day) of spirulina are also helpful to remove the chemical toxins left in your body. Spirulina is best taken in the morning for six to twelve months.

The bottom line is that we all want you to live and stay alive. Choosing chemo now when your body is tired and weak is not the best timing even if you are positive about it. It makes more sense to wait until your body is strong and has good energy levels before choosing that kind of therapy. The question of choosing to do chemo or not is yours alone with your husband & daughter having the second say in the matter as they are the closest to you. Ultimately no-one can choose it for you. I may say personally that I would never choose chemo, but do I really know this for a fact unless I am confronted with the choice? No, I don’t think I do. With my patients I present the facts I have about any problems and / or treatments and let them decide.

I know you have not asked for my advice, but it would be to wait six months before doing chemo if you decide to do it. This logic is based on strengthening your immune system and overall health before going through a draining treatment like chemo. Personally I am not pro chemo, but if you should fall into the 2% to 5% of people that it helps I would be happy if you did it to save your life.

The last thing in this discussion of cancer is the fear factor that doctors use on patients to get them to comply with the treatment recommendations. From my perspective a therapy must not have merit if the doctor needs to resort to menacing the patient with fear in order to get the patient motivated to follow the treatment. We all have cancer cells in our body, sometimes they are even "aggressive" types, mostly not. Yet, the body is able to control them through normal immune function. Telling a patient that if you "have one cell of cancer" left you can die is really a heavy psychological manipulation. I saw a study this last week that said it takes women three years to recover from the shock and stress of being miss-diagnosed for breast cancer - what to say of the fear tactic to tell your patient you are going to die because "there is one cell left in the body"? I personally think this is criminal. You are being manipulated by fear (as if there was not enough fear already!) by the medical system. I think you need to take this into account before making any decision on what treatments to follow up with.

Most of all I would just like to say that I love you and want you to live, so finally whatever you choose to do I support.

Love Atreya

Side Effects of Chemotherapy

Consider the following statement from cancer specialist Professor Charles Mathe, who declared:

“If I contracted cancer, I would never go to a standard cancer treatment centre. Cancer victims who live far from such centers have a chance.” ⁵

Walter Last, writing in The Ecologist, reported recently:

“After analyzing cancer survival statistics for several decades, Dr Hardin Jones, a professor at the University of California, concluded: ‘...patients are as well, or better off, untreated. Jones’s disturbing assessment has never been refuted.’” ⁶

Or what about this?

“Many medical oncologists recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumor, with a hopefulness undiscouraged by almost invariable failure.”

(Albert Braverman, MD, “Medical Oncology in the 90s”, Lancet 1991, vol. 337, p. 901)

Or this?

“Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.”

(Allen Levin, MD, UCSF, The Healing of Cancer)

Or even this?

“Despite widespread use of chemotherapies, breast cancer mortality has not changed in the last 70 years.”

(Thomas Dao, MD, New England Journal of Medicine, March 1975, vol. 292, p. 707)

Chemotherapy is an invasive and toxic treatment able supposedly to eliminate cancer cells.

Unfortunately, though, its ferocious chemistry is not able to differentiate between the cancerous cell or the healthy cell and surrounding healthy tissue.
Put simply, chemotherapy is an intravenously administered poison that kills all living matter. Repeated chemotherapy and repeated radiation treatments kill the whole body by degrees. The immune system is hit particularly hard by chemotherapy and often does not recuperate enough to protect adequately against common illnesses, which can then lead to death.

Some 67 per cent of people who die during cancer treatment do so through opportunistic infections arising as a direct result of the immune system failing because of the aggressive and toxic nature of the drugs.⁷

What is this, if not death by doctoring?

And the side effects from both chemotherapy and radiation itself are extensive. They can include dizziness, skin discoloration, sensory loss, audio/visual impairment, nausea, diarrhea, loss of hair, loss of appetite leading to malnutrition, loss of sex drive, loss of white blood cells, permanent organ damage, organ failure, internal bleeding, tissue loss and cardiovascular leakage (artery deterioration), to name but a few.

Two years ago, Hazel was diagnosed with breast cancer. She described her chemotherapy as the worst experience of her life:

“This highly toxic fluid was being injected into my veins. The nurse administering it was wearing protective gloves because it would burn her skin if just a tiny drip came into contact with it. I couldn’t help asking myself, ‘If such precautions were needed to be taken on the outside, what is it doing to me on the inside?’ From 7 pm that evening, I vomited solidly for two and a half days. During my treatment, I lost my hair by the handful, I lost my appetite, my skin color, my zest for life. I was death on legs.”

We shall be hearing more from Hazel later, although under very different circumstances.

It seems, though, that with chemotherapy we are once again looking at the acceptable face of King Charles’s ammonia treatment and, once again, being administered by the highest physicians in the land. Similarly, on the toxicity of radiation “therapy”, John Diamond noted that it was only when he began his treatment that he began to feel really ill.

Senior cancer physician Dr Charles Moertal, of the Mayo Clinic in the USA, stated:

“Our most effective regimens are fraught with risks and side-effects and practical problems; and after this price is paid by all the patients we have treated, only a small fraction are rewarded with a transient period of usually incomplete tumor regressions…” ⁸

Dr Ralph Moss is the author of The Cancer Industry, a shocking exposé of the world of conventional cancer politics and practice. Interviewed on the Laura Lee radio show in 1994, Moss stated:

“In the end, there is no proof that chemotherapy actually extends life in the vast majority of cases, and this is the great lie about chemotherapy: that somehow there is a correlation between shrinking a tumor and extending the life of a patient.” ⁹

Scientists based at McGill Cancer Center sent a questionnaire to 118 lung cancer doctors to determine what degree of faith these practicing cancer physicians placed in the therapies they administered.

They were asked to imagine that they had cancer, and were asked which of six current trials they would choose. Seventy-nine doctors responded, of which 64 would not consent to be in any trial containing Cisplatin—one of the common chemotherapy drugs they were trialing (currently achieving worldwide sales of about US$110,000,000 a year)—and 58 of the 79 found that all the trials in question were unacceptable due to the ineffectiveness of chemotherapy and its unacceptably high degree of toxicity.¹⁰

The following extract is taken from Tim O’Shea at The Doctor Within:

“A German epidemiologist from the Heidelberg/Mannheim Tumor Clinic, Dr Ulrich Abel, has done a comprehensive review and analysis of every major study and clinical trial of chemotherapy ever done. His conclusions should be read by anyone who is about to embark on the Chemo Express.

To make sure he had reviewed everything ever published on chemotherapy, Abel sent letters to over 350 medical centers around the world, asking them to send him anything they had published on the subject. Abel researched thousands of articles: it is unlikely that anyone in the world knows more about chemotherapy than he.

“The analysis took him several years, but the results are astounding: Abel found that the overall worldwide success rate of chemotherapy was ‘appalling’ because there was simply no scientific evidence available anywhere that chemotherapy can ‘extend in any appreciable way the lives of patients suffering from the most common organic cancers’.

Abel emphasizes that chemotherapy rarely can improve the quality of life. He describes chemotherapy as ‘a scientific wasteland’ and states that at least 80 per cent of chemotherapy administered throughout the world is worthless and is akin to the ‘emperor’s new clothes’—neither doctor nor patient is willing to give up on chemotherapy, even though there is no scientific evidence that it works! (Lancet, 10 August 1991) No mainstream media even mentioned this comprehensive study: it was totally buried.” ^10a

Most definitely, the power imbalance that exists in all doctor-patient relationships (whence comes the term “shrink” in psychiatry) is a key agent in determining the direction of treatment.