End Fatigue

New This Week — Vitality 101 News: September 16, 2008

Cancer—Natural Therapies Can Help

Dear Reader,

I sometimes joke that it is good that I helped develop an effective treatment regimen for CFS/Fibromyalgia instead of for cancer, because if I had developed a cancer cure I'd likely have been arrested. Sadly, this "joke" carries all too much truth. Although most oncologists are very well-meaning and caring individuals, chemotherapy and radiation therapy is an extremely profitable area. This makes it easy to simply go to conferences and see what the esteemed (and usually on the drug company payroll) professors are saying, promoting the newest and usually most expensive chemotherapy agents. The oncologists are assured that the treatment helps the patients, and it is profitable for the physician, so why question it. Meanwhile, it is implied that anyone proposing a natural (and therefore competing) treatment for cancer must simply be trying to "rip off desperate and vulnerable patients" and therefore physicians must protect the gullible public from these charlatans. This convenient belief system allows the medical establishment to self righteously insure that the public does not have ready access to alternative cancer therapies. Sadly, this protects the Cancer Industry's profits at your expense.

This is not to say that one should not take chemotherapy or radiation therapy for their cancer. In many cases, these can be life saving, and I recommend them along side natural therapies. In some cases, however, these treatments offer minimal benefit at the cost of enormous toxicity, and in other cases (such as blocking testosterone in early prostate cancer patients—see the research brief below) actually may offer the patient no benefit despite causing marked toxicity.

I know it is hard to know what to do when your oncologist (and most that I've met are incredibly caring and well meaning) slams taking natural therapies on one side while your natural doctor attacks the chemo as killing you. The good news is that there is really little or no conflict between natural and medical cancer treatments—just between the people offering them. The premise of "Comprehensive Medicine," which is to use the best of natural and prescription therapies, applies brilliantly in treating cancer.

I have found that knowledge is power, and that an informed patient, given expert guidance, usually does well. Because of this, I recommend that my cancer patients get a medical report on their specific type and stage of cancer from Jan Guthrie at Health Resources. It costs about $500 (cost is based on the complexity of the case), but if one has cancer it is very worthwhile. She will put together a detailed report (free of any financial bias toward either the natural or standard medicine side) of the actual studies and review articles for both the natural and chemo/radiation options. Though the studies are written in "medicalese," the study abstracts/summaries will give you a good sense of just how effective (or ineffective and toxic) various treatment options are, so you can make an informed choice. To help you interpret the report and guide you on creating an optimized treatment program, I recommend you work by phone with a health consultant who can help you interpret and make sense of these studies, and guide you in general. Though he is not a physician, I highly recommend Rev. Bren Jacobson (by phone 443-949-0409; he charges $95/hour, which is a real bargain given his expertise in sorting through the research on both standard and natural therapies). He is extraordinarily smart and knowledgeable, is very comfortable working with the technical research, and has a wonderful knack for telling what's helpful vs. nonsense and sales hype.

In this week's research briefs, I will review a few recent studies relating to natural cancer treatment and prevention. Most cancers, in my experience, will have research on natural treatments that are very promising. These include breast, prostate, and colon cancers. In addition, cancer pain is very treatable. There is hope. You can take back control of your life—even if you have cancer!

Read more »

RESEARCH BRIEFS

In this week's issue, we will look at a few recent studies on cancer treatment and prevention using natural therapies. This is a tiny fraction of a large body of research in this area—of which most physicians are ignorant. Also, my website has some earlier articles on nutrition and cancer and on the importance of optimizing vitamin D levels in preventing (and likely also treating) cancer.

Vitamin D May Improve Survival in Colon Cancer Patients

In this study involving 304 subjects diagnosed with colon cancer, those whose blood levels of vitamin D were in the top 25% were twice as likely to survive as those in the lowest 25%. Read more »

Colon Cancer Recurrence Reduced with Flavonoids

Flavonoids reduced colon cancer recurrence from 20% to zero. Read more »

Vitamin B6 May Decrease Colon Cancer Risk

Higher vitamin B6 level is associated with a 20% lower risk of colon cancer. Read more »

Antioxidant Supplementation May Reduce the Side Effects of Chemotherapy

Read more »

Testosterone Blocking Medication NOT Helpful for Early Prostate Cancer

Read more »

Testosterone Therapy Does NOT Increase Prostate Cancer Risk

Read more »

Curcumin (Turmeric) May Slow Advanced Pancreatic Cancer

Read more »

Breast Cancer and Iodine Deficiency

Breast cancer may be helped by Iodine (a future study). Read more »

FEATURED QUESTIONS FROM READERS

Q: DHEA helps her CFS a lot—but causes breast tenderness Read more »

Q: Is there help for Polymyalgia Rheumatica and Temporal arteritis? Answer »

This Week's Joke:

One-liners Worth Passing On

Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.

Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.

The best vitamin for making friends: B1.

If you can't be the tablecloth, don't be the dishrag.

I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.

There are two rules for ultimate success in life: (1) Never tell everything you know.

Don't hate yourself in the morning—sleep till noon.