Cancer: Alternatives to Chemotherapy and Radiation

Part #1 Cancer versus Alternative Medicine for Cancer.... a series of discussions on cancer treatment.

My wife and I watched Brian's Song last night. In that movie, based on a real story, is about the relationship ending in friendship of Chicago Bears running backs Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers. It shows how they helped each other through difficult times -- especially when Piccolo is stricken with terminal cancer.

Post by Eric Plott.

In his cancer the doctors kept taking one cancer out, then chemo, then another when it was found elsewhere, and finally in the end the cancer metastasized into the liver. His immune system was destroyed by various rounds of chemo, his condition so weak, he had nothing left to fight with. He died.

I told my wife, and this is my view folks, that I would not take that path. I believe in alternative medicine. It has kept me alive and out of the hospital through years of genetic problems with clotting, phlebitis, and nearly dying several years ago. A clot went through my heart and I nearly died. I attribute my life to God and alternative medicine. I have kidney weakness left from a nasty accident. I use herbs to support my kidney function since 1999. I have never taken drugs for any of it. I am 61 this year and hanging in there pretty well. So having gone through severe health problems up to this point without standard medicine, why would I use it for cancer. If I get hit by a semi or brake a leg, yes I would go to the doctor. I go get a physical so I know where the state of my health is so I can then use alternative medicine to correct any problems. Emergency medicine is a valid use for standard medicine. There are very expert at keeping your body parts together after a car accident.

When I met my wife, she was on medicine for allergies, migraine headaches, high blood pressure, and cholesterol. She is not on any of it now. Her doctor who sort of believes in alternative medicine is very happy with my program. He cannot say it does not work, since She gets lab tests that confirm the success of my regimen. I have to say living with Her as Husband, helps to keep him compliant. I make sure we eat well, that she does not binge on things, that we get exercise, and that she takes vitamins and a supplement regimen that is safe and not toxic to his liver or kidneys. When I met her , she was on medicine for migraines, but still having headaches that kept him in bed days at a time. The medications were not working and even if they had, most of them are toxic to the liver and kidneys. His headaches now are only due to not drinking coffee when she should. That is his only vise and I have let that be after not succeeding in getting him to quit. You have to pick your fights when married.

Coffee is less of a problem than most other lifestyle factors. I personally am happy, that I am not controlled by coffee. I don't like anything that takes control away from my life. It is interesting that people who go on those survival weekends where you must leave your comforts home, fail at an alarming rate, because of severe caffeine withdrawal migraines. If you get a migraine when you don't drink your coffee for a half day, that is addiction folks. It is a legal addiction but nevertheless, an addiction. Marty went through cataract surgery, and his only problem was not being able to have coffee in preparation before the surgery. That was a real problem.

Why I will not contribute to the American Cancer Society.

I do not give one cent to the American Cancer society because there are herbs and alternative medicine that works on cancer. There are therapies you can get in Europe but not here that are successful. Thousands die every year from cancer, but standard medicine doctors will not even consider alternative therapies. They will let the patient die first. If a patient even asks for alternative therapies, doctors will say they don't work, even when they have no answers for that patient. The medical system will force you to use standard medicine for your cancer. That is the destructive, killing views of most American doctors. Doctors don't have an answer but you cannot use alternative medicine.

Does alternative medicine work on cancer?

Does radiation and chemotherapy really work? Mainstream medicine does not talk about deaths from 2nd and third cancers after these standard medicine treatments. What is the quality of life going through chemo and radiation over and over again?

Alternative therapies for cancer do not always work, as standard medicine therapies do not in a majority of cases work.

Most often standard medicine does stop the first cancer, but wastes the immune system, so that the patient DIES FROM another cancer recurrence later. Below are some study research facts that confirm this statement. I could give you many more studies to look at.

View the whole article athttps://www.caring4cancer.com/go/cancer/effects/lesscommon/secondary-malignancies.htm

"Long-term survival was lower among those with second cancers. Conditional on surviving for 2 years, the survival at 5 years was under 50% and nearly 70%, respectively, for those with versus those without a second cancer in the first 2 years. These findings confirm the exceptionally high rate of second cancers (especially of the aerodigestive tract) following oral cancer, describe the clinical and pathological features of patients with multiple cancers and indicate the importance of preventive measures." Pub Med

"Secondary malignancies are cancers caused by treatment with radiation or chemotherapy. They are unrelated to the first cancer that was treated, and may occur months or even years after initial treatment. Some treatments increase the risk of developing a second cancer, such as the chemotherapy drugs etoposide, radiation therapy for some lymphomas and childhood leukemia, and treatment with both radiation therapy and chemotherapy together. Preventing secondary malignancies involves avoiding these treatments that clearly increase the risk of second cancers and ensuring you do not receive too much treatment for your particular disease or risk factors." from Caring for Cancer

"Researchers have found that compared with the normal population, patients with Hodgkin’s disease are more likely to die from second cancers. Evaluation of long-term complications in more than 1,000 patients with Hodgkin’s disease revealed that these patients had a sevenfold increase in death from causes other than Hodgkin’s disease compared with the normal population. The specific risk of dying from a second cancer was increased 6 times compared to the normal population. In patients treated when they were younger than 21 years of age, the risk was even greater with a 14-fold increase in death from a second cancer. The risk of second cancers was the greatest in those patients who required the most treatment." Caring for Cancer

More than 80 percent of children with ALL are cured with current treatments and are at risk of developing secondary cancers. Treatment with radiation therapy appears to increase the risk of developing a second cancer. In an evaluation of 800 children who had survived at least 10 years after treatment for ALL, researchers concluded that there was no increased risk of second cancer in nonirradiated patients but that those treated with radiation appeared to have a 20-fold increase compared with the general population. The researchers observed 44 secondary cancers of which 41 were related to radiation therapy. Most of these cancers were classified as benign or of low malignant potential. " Caring for Cancer

Secondary cancers after testicular cancer - Patients with testicular cancers are usually treated with the combination of Platinol® (cisplatin), etoposide, and bleomycin (PEB) chemotherapy. Long-term complications from PEB chemotherapy include secondary cancers. Both etoposide and cisplatin increase the risk for developing leukemia in patients with testicular cancer. Furthermore, this risk appears to be related to the total dose of etoposide given. Patients with testicular cancer who are treated with a combination of radiation therapy plus chemotherapy are at the greatest risk of secondary cancers." Caring for Cancer

So seeing these stats, chemo and radiation, may buy you time, while you throw up, lose your hair, and feel like hell....and go through hell. You go through all of that, then a year or two later, you go through that hell again. You may go through it a third time.

Is that quality of life?

There are alternative therapies that do not destroy your immune system, that do not cause you to lose your hair, that do not cause you to throw your guts up for days, that do not poison your system and your healthy cells too. But you are never given the choice or even told about alternatives. You are told there is nothing else that you can do...just die!

? Alternative therapy after Chemotherapy and Radiation therapy

Alternative medicine will probably not work if you start the protocol, after you have been given only weeks or days to live, will not work well after chemo and radiation, and will not work well if you believe in your mind, it will not work. I have talked to a few patients who used natural therapies after chemo and radiation and lived many years afterward....but it is better to use alternative medicine before destroying your immune system with radiation and chemotherapy.

Attitude and Survival Rates with or without Alternative Medicine

Your positive or negative attitude toward a therapy, either standard or alternative medicine, will influence the success or failure of that program.

If you have real belief that the therapy will work, it increases your chances of survival. AIDS and cancer patients live longer with a positive attitude about their life. If you take a cancer diagnosis as a death notice, your body will help support those thoughts. If nothing else, patients live longer and with less pain, who have a positive mindset.

How can you have a positive mind set....it takes courage, faith, guts, and heart. Some people wallow in self pity when given a death notice. Others determine they will make every minute of their last days count. They do things they have put off. They spend time having fun with the ones they love, they direct their energy into the minutes or days left. Some of them actually don't die but get better. The ones who die, certainly have a better quality of life, as they are dying.

Would you rather die in a hospital bed or watching your family and loved ones, with those last days. You can still get pain medicine at home to ease the pain. I am not against pain medicine when you are dying. I think that is one valid use for strong pain killers. If you are dying, does it matter, that you are addicted to it?

In the next few articles, unless I am taken away by the AMA, I will tell you about some alternative therapies shown to work on cancer based on research studies and therapies not available in the United States. I will give you some priceless information so you can make your own choice if you are diagnosed with cancer. I will share how I would treat my own cancer diagnosis. I will tell you to seek a holistic doctor who has experience with cancer. I will even given you some resources to find a holistic doctor......to help you. I do think that getting help from a holistic doctor with experience in cancer, will increase your survival time.

I know many of you will not agree with this article. My advice to you is don't read it. If you do read it, it is your right to dismiss it or say it is garbage.....after your doctor knows best. He knows one thing, what is good for his bank account. They feed it profusely with the sales of drugs that line their pockets, and based on fraudulent research in many cases. Drugs that destroy the liver and kidneys, with side effects that cause worse health problems than when you started. It is your right to stick your head in the sand at all of this.

So read the next articles at the risk of opening your mind to alternative solutions.

Signing off, Eric Geoffrey Von Leonard Plott, Medical researcher, writer, and herbalist

Treating Cancer Effectively Means Treating The Body Instead of Just The Growths

Post by Eric Plott.

There are reasons why we get cancer but none of our treatments deal with these reasons. To treat cancer effectively you need to understand what the disease is and why it appeared in the first place and when you learn that, you will realize that just removing growths seldom work long term. The only way to remove cancer permanently is when someone deals with the reasons why it first grew because if you don’t it will only come back again in some other area.

Because of the many misconceptions associated with cancer we all believe it is an isolated problem but cancer is always a problem with the entire body and the growth itself is telling you that something is wrong with the body. That’s why you need to treat the whole body and the only way to do that is to find the reasons why the cancer first grew and remove those reasons. When you do that the body will heal itself through the immune system.

Cancer is rarely a genetic problem and the majority of cancers appear because of environmental factors such as the wrong food we are eating and other lifestyle ways we are now living. Of course the treatments today involve poisoning or burning rapidly growing cells which are cancer cells but they also destroy rapidly growing healthy cells as well. Also the side effect of radiation and chemotherapy is more cancer at some later stage and you won’t be told that.

You may wonder why we have radiation and chemotherapy which damages the body but that is in line with all of our drug based medicine. Today we only have a medical care system which is profit driven and that is why our drugs are synthetic or artificial which then becomes profitable. Our treatments for cancer today are all money orientated treatments and harm the body and the reasons why so many people are dying is because these treatments are only a short term solution.

Because of the control of the cancer industry doctors are only allowed to use the three treatments that are in place. They are not taught or don’t know any other way to treat cancer. The disease today is well understood; all the causes are known so the only approach to beat the disease so it doesn’t come back is to make important changes to your diet and lifestyle which then corrects the reasons why it first appeared.

There is little doubt that the skyrocketing cancer rate now days is a direct result of an unhealthy lifestyle and if people really knew the truth about it, would they subject themselves to those ineffective treatments. It’s because of our blind faith in our medical care system, that we summit to these treatments believing there is no other way.

There is most definitely other ways to win with cancer but someone needs to take charge of their health and learn about these ways to heal the body. Cancer is seldom cured by just treating it but it can be cured with changes through knowledge.

Alan Wighton is an experienced health researcher and has specialized how a natural approach to cancer can have a far better outcome than our current way of treating the disease. To learn more about how the body can overcome health problems such as cancer go to;www.cancerhealed.com

The Flesh-Eating Pineapple

It’s Historical Popularity… and the Next Cancer Treatment?

Post by Eric Plott.

HISTORY

Firstly… some interesting pineapple history that I bet (most) of you didn’t know (unless you have read a pineapple history or listened to series one, episode two of the podcast ‘The museum of curiosity’ *).

The pineapple was originally from Brazil (though there are different varieties from elsewhere). The pineapple was spread by natives around South America and eventually to the Caribbean and the Indies – which is where the famous Christopher Columbus discovered it in 1493 and brought it home to Europe.

The pineapple did not make it to England until the 1600s, and it became a HIT in the 1700s. Everything was made in pineapple shapes and painted with pineapples. It was THE status symbol! – If you had a pineapple under your arm in the 1700s… WELL, you were just the richest, coolest kid on the block. I am speaking literally though. People quite seriously took a pineapple to parties to show off, carrying it around for weeks until the pineapple started rot. You could even rent a pineapple for an evening.

Pineapples were expensive too. They cost about 5000 pounds each (around $8000AUD) by today’s standards – OR the cost of a new coach. You can just picture an 18^th century gentleman weighing it up:

“new coach… or pineapple… hmm”.

Initially you had to grow them yourself, but this was a very difficult and expensive endeavour in an English climate. The pineapples would be grown in hot pits and boys would be payed to sit and sleep in them – just in case the pit caught on fire.

Post by Eric Plott.

A Victorian pineapple pit. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/arosmae/149…

BROMELAIN

When eating fresh and delicious pineapple… I have often wondered why it leaves my tongue feeling like I just took to it with sandpaper… Allergic? No.

This is a common phenomenon. You can find complaints in forums all over the internet of sore and even bleeding tongues, gums and lips after eating pineapple.

Pineapple is the only known source in nature of the enzyme Bromelain. Bromelain actually digest proteins… so when you eat pineapple. It’s essentially eating you back! But don’t worry, once you swallow the pineapple the acids in your stomach destroy the enzymes.

It is also often suggested that workers in pineapple fields have no fingerprints because the bromelain in the pineapple wears them away. I’m not certain that this is true, but theoretically it could occur over time. What I do know is that it’s used as a meat tenderiser, and that if you leave it on the meat too long it will just turn to mush.

Pineapple field in Ghana. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ghana_…

Despite eating your mouth, bromelain has become recognised for its health benefits and is useful in medical treatments for a number of ailments and diseases. For starters it is part of an approved treatment for inflammation and swelling, particularly after surgery and it has been proposed for treating a number of other inflammation based disorders including osteoarthritis, autoimmune diseases and viral infections. It is also useful for removing damaged and infected tissues from burn wounds.

More recent research has pointed at its potential use in cancer treatments. A few preclinical studies (that is; early research not yet tested in humans) have indicated that it has antitumor properties and, for instance has been found to stimulate death of breast and ovarian cancer cells. One study tested the effects of bromelain on breast cancer and found evidence that women who were given bromelain (just swallowed) started producing cells that targeted and killed breast cancer cells.

However, more study in humans and on how to apply treatments will need to be conducted before bromelain can be applied to cancer treatments.

Moral of the story: Eat pineapple!

My question is however… why does the pineapple have bromelain? What is it’s purpose to a pineapple plant? Sadly I have not found the answer. If you know what/where it is please comment.

Great medical reference: Chobotova, K; Vernallis, AB; Majid, FAA (2010). Bromelain’s activity and potential as an anti-cancer agent: Current evidence and perspectives. Cancer Letters. 290/2 P148-156

* I highly recommend these podcasts. They’re full of comedians, scientists and other interesting people, providing thoughts, stories, histories, random facts and some nonsense. They can be downloaded from iTunes.

This entry was written by S.H.W. and posted on October 7, 2012 at 3:50 pm and filed under Class of 2012, general. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

12 Comments

Tina

Posted October 7, 2012 at 10:28 pm | Permalink

Very interesting read!!! Fascinating – do you know if doctors have recommended bromelain (through the consumption of pineapples) for patients? Perhaps in older people with arthritis! I think I might have to encourage my grandmother to eat more pineapple!!
S.H.W.

Posted October 8, 2012 at 1:13 pm | Permalink

As of yet there have been no conclusions about using Bromelain in treatments, perhaps there hasn’t been a complete study on humans as of yet or they haven’t completed studies on any potential side effects and how Bromelain may interact with other medications.
However, there is still plenty of evidence that Bromelain is a useful anti-inflammatory agent for arthritis and other inflammatory disorders/infections etc.

I am no medical doctor. In fact I study Plants :). Therefore I do not wish to pretend I can give your grandmother medical advice. But… if I had arthritis and wanted to take Bromelain as a treatment… I probably would take it as a supplement and not eat loads of pineapple. As I mentioned above… too much pineapple can make your mouth sting and bleed, so a supplement would allow you to have higher doses without that happening.

Here is a great review of clinical studies that tested bromelain as an arthritis treatment:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC538506/
Dave

Posted October 8, 2012 at 1:31 pm | Permalink

Completely explains why I’ve never been able to find pineapple flavoured protein bars.
Tash

Posted October 8, 2012 at 1:45 pm | Permalink

Fascinating! I always wondered why my tongue tingled afterwards, I thought I had an allergy like most people that you mentioned in your post!

I have to day though, not a fan of my food trying to eat me back

Are there any uses for Bromelain that are not medical? Aside from as a status symbol of course (that seems so crazy!!)
Jim

Posted October 8, 2012 at 1:59 pm | Permalink

Is there any evidence that Bromelain can digest chitin from insect exoskeletons or mammalian teeth?
I’m wondering whether it’s purpose is for preventing herbivory. I think grasses do this with silicon crystals that erode the mandibles or teeth of herbivorous animals over time. Ants have magnesium and other metals in their mandibles to reduce wear, but this would probably be ineffective against chemical decomposition.
S.H.W.

Posted October 8, 2012 at 2:34 pm | Permalink

Tash: To tenderise your meat (mentioned above): you can buy it in a powder form that you sprinkle over a piece of meat. No other uses that I am aware of. But other parts of the pineapple are used to produce textile fibres like ‘Piña’. It’s used a lot in the Phillipeans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi%C3%B1a

Jim: I couldn’t find anything in the literature suggesting bromelain as a defence against insects. The pineapple has a pretty defensive outside, but i guess it is possible if its preventing some kind of burrowing insect? It’s most common attackers are smaller mammals and boars, and I assume most of these play a role in seed dispersal. Perhaps the bromelain protects the seeds somehow?
Ebony

Posted October 8, 2012 at 3:29 pm |