Let’s hope so. Time and again I have used the image of a WWI battlefield as a totem for what it means to be “at war” with cancer. Lots of dead soldiers, of course. But it’s always the battlefield that comes off worst.
The soldiers are our cells; the battlefield is our body. Remember that image when you hear of Nixon’s “war on cancer” being touted around.
What is needed is smarter cancer treatments, not more deadly “killer” treatments. We need ingenuity, not violence. The old idea of blast-it-to-hell is not just wrong, it’s damnably wrong; in fact quite wicked and lazy.
That’s what has got oncologists a bad name. Belt away with chemo or radiation, pocket the money and then (patient died), “Next!”
But as I keep saying—and this puts me out of step with propaganda-based holistic thinkers (most of which have NEVER treated cancer patients!)—there are good doctors and researchers out there, worrying at the problem and working away from the orthodox side of the fence. Decent people.
And they are getting results.
Even allowing for the usual massaging of figures, there is no doubt that orthodoxy has, in the main, understood that working WITH Nature and WITH the immune system is the only way that makes sense.
A new report, the AACR Cancer Progress Report 2011, released this month by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), gives some cause for optimism.
From 1990 to 2007, death rates for all cancers combined dropped 22% for men and 14% for women, resulting in nearly 900,000 fewer deaths during that time, according to the report.
Today, more than 68% of adults live five years or more after being diagnosed, up from 50% in 1975. The five-year survival rate for all childhood cancers combined is 80%, compared to 52% in 1975.
There are about 12 million cancer survivors living in the United States; 15% of them were diagnosed 20 or more years ago.
So don’t forget that, when you are reading the latest cancer “testimonial” about an unproven treatment. There are MILLIONS of testimonials for orthodox therapy you never get to hear about.
Where the report falls down—and what we can never know—is how much of this improvement comes from people adopting alternative treatments and methods. It’s pure speculation to say a few, some or very many. We just don’t know, honestly.
But remember these are official figures, so it covers people in the system. Something is working. There are real improvements, not just fake statistics.
One of the biggest successes is very real: breast cancer deaths fell about 28% from 1990 to 2006. It wasn’t caused by the introduction of a new treatment, that’s for sure. So what was it? We think that is due to women stopping HRT such as Premarin in droves.
Colorectal deaths have fallen 28% in women and 33% in men; deaths from leukemia have fallen nearly 15% in women and 10% in men; and deaths from stomach cancer have fallen 34% in women and 43% in men.
Many more men are also surviving prostate cancer, with death rates falling 39%.
Now I have written elsewhere that a 5-year survival rate is not all that exciting. I wouldn’t consider it a “success” if the patient died 5½ years after my treatment.
But the important thing is the trend. As I said, it does represent significant changes in the way orthodoxy looks at overcoming cancer. There is a better understanding of how to harness the immune system to fight the cancer; more targeted drugs that interfere with the cancer while leaving healthy cells alone; and treatments that are based on specific genetic characteristics of the cancer.
According to co-chair of the report Dr. Judy Garber, president of the AACR and director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston: many of the advances in treating cancer stem from molecular biology, which is unlocking the genetics of tumors that has led to an “explosion of knowledge” about how cancer grows.
Molecular biology is revealing a great deal about what makes cancer tick and, as a result, we learned that cancer is fundamentally a set of genetic diseases. Not that it’s inherited, but the problems that make cancer cells become cancer cells instead of normal cells is that their genes change.
Genes direct cells to divide or when not to, and when to die (so-called apoptosis). Cancer is an out-of-control process in which errors in the genes causes cells to continue to divide rather than to die, or to leave the place where they’re growing and to grow new colonies elsewhere: metastasic spread.
Understanding which genes are driving the errors inside the cell has led to the development of more targeted treatments. This working WITH Nature can only be an improvement.
The really dismal killers, like pancreatic cancer, ovarian and lung cancer are most deadly because they are so late in revealing themselves, often riddling the entire body with metastases before the patient is diagnosed. Figures for recovery remain desperately low.
If you have pancreatic cancer one of the very few proven successes is Beard’s enzyme therapy. It was later re-released by William Donald Kelley DDS and is currently available from Nicholas Gonzalez, who did some pioneer research work with this therapy that has stood the test of time.
I’ve described for you, in great detail, many alternative therapies, such as the Kelley/Beard Method. A sweeping review of alternative therapies that work (and some of those that don’t) is to be found in my new “Cancer Research Secrets”.
You can learn more and get yourself a copy here:
I hope I can subscribe to your papers, I cannot make contact with the link you sent.
Barbara Merlin
merlinest@aol.com
Can’t say if AACR stats are reliable. It’s hard to tell these days good un-biased reporting from bad. I’m unpleasantly surprised that this article is giving some kind of endorsement for orthodox therapy (not to say that it doesn’t help some patients at least in the short-run), especially in light of Prof’s other writings in the need for detoxification and better nutrition as really “curing” the condition of cancer. We all know that it’s detoxification (on all levels) and better nutrition that’s going to cure people of cancer, NOT the latest chemotherapy poison coming from the breaking research of molecular biology. How is a person’s body getting healthier using chemotherapy and radiation?? After all, why is the person creating toxic cells? Because they’re body has become an environment conducive to that. Chemotherapy and radiation, as we all know, is just adding more toxicity to a person who’s already suffering from the last stage of toxicity – cancer. (There might be some merit to IPT, but that’s very low-dose chemo. usually done with holistic therapies that including ways of detoxification and nutrition.)
Also, “survival” doesn’t equal “well, happy quality of life.” Survivors include people living in chronic pain or without a colon, or without a voicebox or without some vital body part and they may be cancer-free as far as radiological testing and bloodwork is concerned, but how about down the line, if there are more years ahead…the new cancers or diseases that come up because of the treatments endured. and they’re just deemed “acceptable” as a side effect…Are secondary cancers even counted? so, yes, they are “surviving,” but are they well and happy, back to their normal selves or do they have to “accept” treatment side effects that make for a ruinous life as par for the course? In fairness, only the person who endured the treatment can say for sure, although if it is a victory, it’s hard-won. One thing is for sure is that they are not healthier after all those treatments (unless they added some kind of holistic therapies to it). Granted, the article did mention that 5-yr survival is not much of a yardstick as far as survival, and it mentions that the survival stats don’t make clear if holistic therapies were done with orthodox therapy. Molecular biology is not what’s going to make patients with cancer any healthier, although it might debulk their tumors for a while. Tumors are just a manifestation of the systemic disease process, not the disease itself. Not just “survival” but “thrival” requires a new, healthy internal environment.
Too much emotion here and not enough rational thinking.
What are you going to do about the 12 million survivors in the USA alone? Are their lives “not valid”, because they don’t fit your view of what is right and proper treatment? Did you ask them what their quality of life was like and whether it was worth trading for more years? I think their “testimonials” would be worth hearing. To me, you are making fun of others and dismissing those who go the conventional route as fools who end without a voice box etc. That’s very unkind. Where is your data to support the assumption this is the only kind of survival? How do you explain the thousands of patients known to me who survived and did well after chemo etc?
Also, you didn’t really read the article properly, did you? Just a few key words “triggered” your reactions.
Molecular biology is the ONLY way to go. Unless we understand our enemy, how do we hope to overcome it? Are you willing to go back to being an eskimo or tribal native in a mud hut, just to abolish cancer? I don’t think so. Therefore we must learn WHAT cancer is and how it behaves and why natural diet, oxygen etc should be so beneficial.
As for your comment of “thrival”, I’ll give that some recognition when people are willing to eat, drink and live sensibly NORMALLY, not just when faced with a terminal disease.
Oh yeah, back to the topic at hand : ) , in regard to:
“From 1990 to 2007, death rates for all cancers combined dropped 22% for men and 14% for women, resulting in nearly 900,000 fewer deaths during that time, according to the report. Today, more than 68% of adults live five years or more after being diagnosed, up from 50% in 1975.”
With the explosion of cancer screenings being done in the 1970’s, more cancers are being diagnosed just because there’s a way of finding them (let alone the fact that there are more people getting cancer and the why, separate from the more ways to diagnose, NEVER gets addressed)- this would include many more EARLY-stage, DORMANT cancers and even false-positives than ever before (do the false positives balance out false-negatives – this would something else to find out about), so these could potentially dilute the statistics, making the death rates look like they’re going down, only because of the adding of so many more early, dormant cancers to the pool that weren’t terminal anyway.
When the cancer estbl. addresses why cancer has outtaken heart disease as the #1 killer in this country and focuses on prevention and reducing the toxicities associated with the development of cancer, then I’ll be happy to see what comes of statistics. I guess it’s hard to feel optimistic about supposed death rates from all cancers falling, when I see cancer clinics popping up everywhere in the past 10 years.
thanks for letting me comment!
Wow, this topic got me commenting, must be a good blogpost then : )
“In regard to your comment: To me, you are making fun of others and dismissing those who go the conventional route as fools who end without a voice box etc. That’s very unkind.”
Maybe it didn’t come across the right way – i have no intention of making fun or dismissing any survivor, as I’ve known some myself, who really did everything conventional medicine had to offer, however sacrificial that was. It’s everyone’s choice with what path they choose and that’s exactly what I was speaking to, is the fact that these are sacrifices that shouldn’t have to be made, at least not immediately so, if patients are given access to full-spectrum approach to their disease when offered orthodox therapy – and, not just the choices of radical surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. I’m saying ways to detoxify and add nutrition to their regular treatment.
As for “Where is your data to support the assumption this is the only kind of survival?”
I’m not saying that that this is the only way of survival, but what happens when people get surgery which is usually the first route (followed by either chemotherapy and/or radiation)? The surgeons are usually surgically removing an organ or an area, sometimes partially, sometimes fully. Unfortunately, it sometimes can be radical, depending on the location of the cancer, of course, because some function gets irreversibly changed or lost. As mentioned above, a full-spectrum approach needs to be made available in all oncology centers, so this can be done more reservedly.
As for “How do you explain the thousands of patients known to me who survived and did well after chemo etc?”
This is good news, and more should be done to follow up with these patients. Is it correct to assume that they had access to holistic therapies as part of their care? So that they are able to detoxify and supplement from the effects of not only the treatments, but of the disease itself, in creating a new internal environment. That’s just what I want to say, is that people need to be given the choice of say, having colonics, hydrotherapy and some other treatments as you mention in your book, as part of the treatment. Ideally, they should not have to go on a quest to find it for themselves. That’s all I’m saying, through my rant, lol.
Let’s look at prostate cancer. A HUGE number of cancers were added to the base due to PSA testing — and 95% were never ever going to kill in the patients’ life time. No credit goes to the medical establishment. But their addition makes it look like we’re doing better. This is just one of untold numerous “errors” in the phony aggregation of the statisitcs to suggest we have made progress on the war on cancer — so we can continue to fund it and continue the treatments. Our ernestwhile Editor needs to do a lot more research from those competent renown and independent researchers who have taken the same raw data and showed that we have made hardly an iota’s progress in 40 years. I have been in cancer research for more than 25 years. It is a wasteland inhabited by the worst of the medical community. I am utterly appalled by this no-nothing article that parrots the spin artists. Please go do your own homework before becoming a patsy to the spin specialists. I am disappointed in you.
I get weary of the cookie cutter mentality Steve. You disappoint me.
You don’t seem to have an original thought in your head, just parroting others, to use your own term.
You don’t seem to be aware you are writing one of the world’s leading pioneers in alternative health.
Please let me have the references for your “cancer research”, I am certainly keen to read it. Or maybe you could describe for me the methods you use, as a physician?
You hold patients in contempt whose choice it is to follow the orthodox path. Millions do and I know thousands personally who have turned to alternatives to help their fight, and done very well.
Along with an army of bigots out there, you seem to believe that YOU hold the poll position on what people should do and must do.
I, in my humble way, have allowed patients to do as they choose, with support for whatever path they decided upon.
I suggest you try and be a bit more humble and tolerant of different points of view than your own.
If I ever get cancer (God forbid) I would not choose chemo. I think it’s negative. But that doesn’t mean I deny others the right to think for themselves.
BTW you are silly and wrong: prostate cancer is not diagnosed by PSA – it’s diagnosed by biopsy. Maybe you don’t know as much as you claim?
In the end, I think the Australian chemo review…even allowing for a large margin of error… shows that whatever the improvements we are seeing in survival rates have little to do with chemo, and it is from something else.
http://scientificliving.net/2011/01/where-are-the-chemotherapy-statistics-i%E2%80%99ll-show-you/
It is such a learning process to root out the negative energy when sincerely criticizing mainstream medicine. I still have a long way to go with that process! In the end, making everyone into your sincere friend seems to be the only way of succeeding in convincing mainstream oncologists to jump into integrative medicine.
I try to tell people with cancer to kindly insist oncologists give them evidence in writing that a particular chemo regimen will help them. When they get awkward responses to that request, some start to think more seriously about the integrative approach.
I did notice that Doc. Keith do not refer a single case of cure due to the use of alternative medicine like the use of Ormus to cure cancer. Nevertheless there are thousands of reported cases of cures ascribed for Ormus. As a Ormusian healler i can assure you that plenty cancer sufferers did get cured by using Ormus that I did produce and offer them. Do you have any opinion about this?
Well, let’s say I wouldn’t recommend it to my patients.
When you can prove something can have a negative weight, you might get me to look at the evidence (NOT testimonials).
Just found your website. I like what I see thus far.
I’m curious if you’ve ever heard of cancertutor[dot]com. My sister got cancer years back and I took it upon myself to study alternative treatments and found them.
Look forward to reading more.
Shane
P.S. And you use Thesis. You are a wise doctor indeed. 🙂
I know Webster Kerr very well, yes. We don’t always agree but we respect each other.