CHAPTER 11

VIEWING CANCER HOLISTICALLY:

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

When a new cancer patient steps into my office, the first question that goes through my mind, no matter what type or stage of cancer they have, is: “What are the causes of this person’s cancer?”

Discovering the cause of the cancer is the first and most important step in its cure. It is also important to understand something about the physiology and behaviour of the average cancer cell, as this understanding is going to be very important in facilitating the cancer cure. As we will see before the end of this chapter, cancer is not really a disease but an adaptation by the body to an imbalanced and toxic internal milieu. It is a desperate attempt of the body to try to maintain homeostasis in a hostile environment. It may surprise you to know that cancer cells were once part of the normal cells of your body – they are not the enemy, something else is! It is not the cancer tumour that will kill you, per se, but the causes that initially were responsible for creating the cancer cells. Indeed, cancer is a SURVIVAL MECHANISM.

When I begin testing cancer patients to determine the causative factors, using the IDEL Diagnostic Programme^[1] (see Chapter 2), I usually find between 15-20 or more causative factors. The testing is comprehensive and takes about 5 hours of clinical time, but it can be the difference between life and death – any other way is guesswork.

Cancer is multidimensional

Cancer is certainly multi-dimensional with interconnecting causes on different levels. Cancer is related to a change in the biochemistry of the normal cell – factors such as nutrition, pernicious agents (including medicinal drugs) and radiation can all directly affect the cell. On the physical level nutritional deficiencies, chronic inflammation caused by microorganisms such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites, food intolerances as well as congested detoxification pathways, pH, redox and resistivity changes, toxic metals and organic xenobiotics, geopathic, electromagnetic, mobile phone and ionizing radiation stress can all be involved.

On a psychoemotional and spiritual level  suppressed negative emotions, emotional traumas, negative beliefs, systemic entanglements (Hellinger)^[2] and blocked or distorted bio-energy flows - as found in the acupuncture meridians (teeth and scar foci) - are also contributing factors – most of these have been discussed in chapter 2 and other chapters of this book.

These are all trigger factors that can make cells divide uncontrollably. It must be stressed that it is never one cause but a myriad of causes all interacting over time to cause the cellular degeneration. Even though oncologists and cancer researchers place emphasis on the genetics of cancer, this is a small component of this cascade that is usually responsible for no more than 7% of pathogenesis.[3]

Besides, a series of papers written by Ilmensee, Mintz and Hoppe in the 1970-1980’s showed that replacing the fertilized nucleus of a mouse ovum by the nucleus of a teratocarcinoma did not create a mouse with cancer. Instead, the mice when born were cancer free.^[4] These studies support the theory that abnormalities in other cell structures outside of the nucleus, such as the cell membrane and the mitochondria, as well as functional disturbances in cellular energy production and cell membrane potential, are also involved in cancerous transformation.

Moreover, oncogenes can be altered by their environment, the cell’s internal terrain and surroundings and generally abnormal cellular oxygen metabolism ("dysoxygenosis").^[5] Given that the gene pool has not really changed for thousands of years, why is it that cancer was a rare disease 40-50 years ago. If you were a medical doctor working in a large hospital in the 40’s and 50’s you would be lucky to see just a few cases of cancer per year. Why have the genes changed so drastically and decided to kill so many people now? Maybe we should be looking at other more significant causes?

Cancer is not a disease!

Andreas Moritz, a holistic practitioner, researcher and author has made this profound statement in his book, “Cancer is Not a Disease:”^[6]

“Cancer does not cause a person to be sick; it is the sickness of the person that causes the cancer.”

The crucial goal in cancer cures is to eliminate all the cancer cells in the body, not simply the tumour. In order to achieve this one must work on many levels to bring the body back into balance, eliminating the causative factors and using non-toxic, natural remedies to halt the rapid proliferation of cancer cells, while modulating the immune system. This is the premise of the Holistic Model of Cancer that I am espousing here.

Holistic Medicine sees cancer as a disease of the total organism, not just a localised event. It is a systemic disease that is multifactorial in its causes. It is therefore crucial to understand the workings of cancer cells – how do they respire, what are their by-products, how do they differ from normal cells and why? It is this understanding that I believe will lead to thinking ‘outside the box’ – something that is imperative if we are going to have half a chance at curing the patient.

Treatments like chemotherapy and radiation can certainly poison and kill cancer cells, but the problem is that these treatments also kill good, healthy cells too, such as in the bone marrow, gastrointestinal tract, liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, immune system and more. Once these organ systems become damaged, it may be impossible to reverse this damage and then the cancer cells will proliferate at a higher rate and further upset the homeostasis of health. These poisonous, toxic treatments also cause much inflammation in many cells of the body to the point that hair follicles cannot hold onto the strands of hair on your head.

How can a real cure for cancer occur at the expense and destruction of other parts of the body? Tumour regression and removal does not cure the underlying causes of the cancer – this is where the main focus of any therapy must be, to address the underlying causes of the cancer which is the main sickness. And let’s not forget the first sentence of the Hippocratic Oath that both medical doctors as well as naturopathic physicians swear to:

Primum, Non Nocere (First, Do No Harm)!

Chemotherapy and radiation – is this the solution?

Cytotoxic chemotherapy agents can cause a host of adverse effects, ranging from short-term, self-limiting adverse reactions to death. Many chemotherapy agents are themselves carcinogenic, or may increase the risk of secondary tumours due to immunosuppression. For example, 2 to 12% incidence of acute leukemia has been observed 2 to 10 years after treatment of Hodgkin’s disease with chemotherapy.[7]

Even with the extensive use of chemotherapy, and often its over-prescription, there is very little change in mortality rates over the last 50 years. Modern radiotherapy and chemotherapy were not applied widely until about 1965. In fact, mortality rates in the chemotherapy era have gone up. Between the years 1950 and 1989, the age- and population-adjusted mortality rate for all races, males and females increased 10%. Overall, the advent of chemotherapy has not greatly affected mortality rates.[8]

In 1986, McGill Cancer Center^[9] scientists sent a questionnaire to 118 doctors who treated non-small-cell lung cancer. More than three quarters of them recruited patients and carried out trials of toxic drugs for lung cancer. They were asked to imagine that they themselves had cancer, and were asked which of six current trials they themselves would choose. Of the 79 respondents, 64 (81%) said they would not consent to be in a trial containing cisplatin, a common chemotherapy drug. Fifty-eight or 74% of the oncologists found all the trials using any type of chemotherapy unacceptable. What reasons did they give? Basically, they quoted the ineffectiveness of chemotherapy and its unacceptable degree of toxicity.

In 1990, the highly respected German epidemiologist, Dr. Ulrich Abel^[10] from the Tumor Clinic of the University of Heidelberg, conducted the most comprehensive investigation of every major clinical study on chemotherapy drugs ever done. Abel contacted 350 medical centers and asked them to send him anything they had ever published on chemotherapy. He also reviewed and analyzed thousands of scientific articles published in the most prestigious medical journals.

It took Abel several years to collect and evaluate the data. Abel's epidemiological study, which was published on August 10, 1991 in The Lancet, should have alerted every doctor and cancer patient about the risks of one of the most common treatments used for cancer and other diseases. In his paper, Abel came to the conclusion that the overall success rate of chemotherapy was "appalling." According to this report, there was no scientific evidence available in any existing study to show that chemotherapy can "extend in any appreciable way the lives of patients suffering from the most common organic cancers."

Abel points out that chemotherapy rarely improves the quality of life. He describes chemotherapy as "a scientific wasteland" and states that even though there is no scientific evidence that chemotherapy works, neither doctor nor patient is willing to give up on it. The mainstream media has never reported on this hugely important study, which is hardly surprising, given the enormous vested interests of the groups that sponsor the media, that is, the pharmaceutical companies. A recent search turned up exactly zero reviews of Abel's work in American journals, even though it was published in 1990. I believe this is not because his work was unimportant - but because it is irrefutable.

Another more recent research study has been published in the journal Clinical Oncology. This meta-analysis, entitled "The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year Survival in Adult Malignancies"^[11] set out to accurately quantify and assess the actual benefit conferred by chemotherapy in the treatment of adults with the commonest types of cancer. All three of the paper's authors are oncologists. Lead author Associate Professor Graeme Morgan is a radiation oncologist at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney; Professor Robyn Ward is a medical oncologist at University of New South Wales/St. Vincent's Hospital. The third author, Dr. Michael Barton, is a radiation oncologist and a member of the Collaboration for Cancer Outcomes Research and Evaluation, Liverpool Health Service, Sydney. Prof. Ward is also a member of the Therapeutic Goods Authority of the Australian Federal Department of Health and Aging, the official body that advises the Australian government on the suitability and efficacy of drugs to be listed on the national Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule (PBS) – roughly the equivalent of the US Food and Drug Administration.

Their meticulous study was based on an analysis of the results of all the randomized, controlled clinical trials (RCTs) performed in Australia and the US that reported a statistically significant increase in 5-year survival due to the use of chemotherapy in adult malignancies. Survival data were drawn from the Australian cancer registries and the US National Cancer Institute's Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) registry spanning the period January 1990 until January 2004.

Wherever data were uncertain, the authors deliberately erred on the side of overestimating the benefit of chemotherapy. Even so, the study concluded that overall, chemotherapy contributes just over 2 percent to improved survival in cancer patients.

Yet, despite the mounting evidence of chemotherapy's lack of effectiveness in prolonging survival, oncologists continue to present chemotherapy as a rational and promising approach to cancer treatment. Associate Professor Graeme Morgan says: "Some practitioners still remain optimistic that cytotoxic chemotherapy will significantly improve cancer survival. However, despite the use of new and expensive single and combination drugs to improve response rates...there has been little impact from the use of newer regimens.”

The Australian authors continued: "...in lung cancer, the median survival has increased by only 2 months [during the past 20 years, ed.] and an overall survival benefit of less than 5 percent has been achieved in the adjuvant treatment of breast, colon and head and neck cancers."

Basically, the authors found that the contribution of chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was 2.3 percent in Australia, and 2.1 percent in the USA. They emphasize that, for reasons explained in detail in the study, these figures "should be regarded as the upper limit of effectiveness" (i.e., they are an optimistic rather than a pessimistic estimate).

Often statistics are manipulated based on false statistics, as well as misunderstandings regarding terminology.^[12] According to Dr. Ralph Moss,^[13] cancer researcher and author of many books such as The Cancer Industry:^[14]

“If you can shrink the tumour 50% or more for 28 days you have got the FDA’s definition of an active drug. This is called a response rate, so you have a response….(but) when you look to see if there is any life prolongation from taking this treatment what you find is all kinds of hocus pocus and song and dance about the disease-free survival, and this and that. In the end there is no proof that chemotherapy in the vast majority of cases actually extends life, and this is the GREAT LIE about chemotherapy, that somehow there is a correlation between shrinking a tumour and extending the life of the patient.”

The cancer establishment is really bent on shrinking tumours, even though there is no relationship to survival benefit. An article in the British Medical Journal concurred - it observed that while tumour shrinkage is the usual way to measure the efficacy of chemotherapy, "radiological shrinkage of solid tumours . . . often has little or no survival benefit . . . . Unfortunately, few studies have compared chemotherapy with supportive care alone."^[15]

A 1984 review of 80 studies of chemotherapy for breast cancer found that 76 of them had looked only at tumour shrinkage, not at effects on survival or quality of life; and three of the remaining four had found no survival advantage for the drugs.^[16]

One of the nation’s top statisticians in the field of cancer is Hardin B. Jones, Ph.D., former professor of medical physics and physiology at the University of California at Berkeley. After years of analyzing clinical records, this is the report he delivered at a convention of the American Cancer Society:^[17]

“In regard to surgery, no relationship between intensity of surgical treatment and duration of survival has been found in verified malignancies. On the contrary, simple excision of cancers has produced essentially the same survival as radical excision and dissection of the lymphatic drainage.”

What, then, is the statistical chance for long-term survival of five years or more after surgery?^[18] That, we are told, depends on the location of the cancer, how fast it is growing, and whether it has spread to a secondary point. For example, two of the most common forms of cancer requiring surgery are of the breast and the lung. With breast cancer, only sixteen percent will respond favourably to surgery or X-ray therapy.

With lung cancer, the percentage of patients who will survive five years after surgery is somewhere between five and ten percent - these are optimistic figures when compared to survival expectations for some other types of cancers such as testicular chorionepitheliomas.^[19]

An objective appraisal, therefore, is that the statistical rate of long-term survival after surgery is, on the average at best, only ten or fifteen percent. And once the cancer has metastasized to a second location, surgery has almost no survival value. The reason is that, like the other therapies approved by orthodox medicine, surgery removes only the tumour. It does not remove the cause.

Radiation and/or radiomimetic poisons will reduce palpable, gross or measurable tumefaction. Often this reduction may amount to seventy-five percent or more of the mass of the growth. These agents have a selective effect - radiation and poisons. They selectively kill everything except the definitively neoplastic [cancer] cells. For example, a benign uterine myoma will usually melt away under radiation like snow melting, but the active neoplastic cells in the tumour will remain. The size of the tumour may thus be decreased by ninety percent (known as the “response rate”) while the relative concentration of neoplastic cells is thereby increased by ninety percent.

As all experienced clinicians know - or at least should know - after radiation or poisons have reduced the gross tumefaction of the lesion the patient’s general well-being does not substantially improve. To the contrary, there is often an explosive or fulminating increase in the biological malignancy of his lesion. This is marked by the appearance of diffuse metastasis and a rapid deterioration in general vitality followed shortly by death.

From the data available it would seem that the use of post-operative irradiation has provided no discernible advantage to patients in terms of increasing the proportion who were free of disease for as long as five years.^[20] This is an embarrassingly difficult fact for a radiologist to face, for it means, quite literally, that there is little justification for his existence in the medical fraternity. Consequently, one does not expect to hear these facts being discussed by radiologists or those whose livelihood depends on the construction, sale, installation, use, or maintenance of the multi-million-dollar linear accelerators.

A 1987 review of eight trials from around the world found that the risk of death after ten years for women who had not been treated with radiation after their breast surgeries was 26 percent lower than for women who had gotten.^[21] "The majority of cancers," wrote Dr. John Cairns of Harvard in 1985, "cannot be cured by radiation because the dose of X-rays required to kill all the cancer cells would also kill the patient."^[22]

The potential risks involved in handling cytotoxic agents have become a concern for health care workers. The literature reports various symptoms such as eye, membrane, and skin irritation, as well as dizziness, nausea, and headache experienced by health care workers not using safe handling precautions. In addition, increased concerns regarding the mutagenesis and teratogenesis [deformed babies] continue to be investigated. Many chemotherapy agents, the alkylating agents in particular, are known to be carcinogenic [cancer -causing] in therapeutic doses.^[23]

In a courageous letter to Dr. Frank Rauscher, his boss at the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Dean Burk condemned the Institute’s policy of continuing to endorse these drugs when everyone knew that they caused cancer. He argued:

“Ironically, virtually all of the chemotherapeutic anti-cancer agents now approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use or testing in human cancer patients are:

1. highly or variously toxic at applied dosages;
2. markedly immunosuppressive, that is, destructive of the patient’s native resistance to a variety of diseases, including cancer;
3. usually highly carcinogenic [cancer causing].

These now well established facts have been reported in numerous publications from the National Cancer Institute itself, as well as from throughout the United States and, indeed, the world. Furthermore, what has just been said of the FDA-approved anti-cancer chemotherapeutic drugs is true, though perhaps less conspicuously, of radiological and surgical treatments of human cancer.

If it is true that Orthodox chemotherapy is (1) toxic, (2) immunosuppressant, (3) carcinogenic, and (4) futile, then why would doctors continue to use it?^[24] The answer is that they don’t know what else to do. Patients usually are not scheduled into chemotherapy unless their condition seems so hopeless that the loss of life appears to be inevitable anyway. Some doctors refer to this stage, not as therapy, but experimentation, which, frankly, is a more honest description.

Another reason for using drugs in the treatment of cancer is that the doctor does not like to tell the patient there is no hope. In his own mind he knows there is none, but he also knows that the patient does not want to hear that and will seek another physician who will continue some kind of treatment, no matter how useless. So he solves the problem by continuing the treatment himself.

An interesting study would be to compare the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiation with no treatment at all. Would the cancer patient live longer if they received no treatment whatsoever?

One of the few studies that had made this comparison was conducted by Dr. Hardin Jones, professor of medical physics and physiology at the University of California, Berkeley.^[25] He told an ACS panel:

"My studies have proven conclusively that untreated cancer victims actually live up to four times longer than treated individuals. For a typical type of cancer, people who refused treatment lived for an average of 12 ½ years. Those who accepted surgery and other kinds of treatment lived an average of only three years. . . . I attribute this to the traumatic effect of surgery on the body's natural defense mechanism. The body has a natural defense against every type of cancer."

Dr. Jones was speaking fourty years ago, but more recent data are lacking, because studies comparing treated and untreated patients are no longer being done. To fail to treat potentially curable patients with "proven" methods is now considered unethical. Most drug studies merely compare the effects of two treatment regimens, both more or less equally toxic, on the size of tumour growth.

In a 1991 study in which chemotherapy was compared to no treatment in 250 women with metastatic breast cancer, the drugs not only did not improve survival but significantly decreased the quality of life.^[26]

According to Dr. Cairns, chemotherapy prevents death in only 2 to 5 percent of cancer cases. The chance the drugs themselves will kill the patient is about the same: somewhere between 2.5 percent and 5 percent.^[27]

With early breast cancer, on the other hand, a modest survival benefit has been found. A 1992 British review of 31 randomized trials involving 11,000 women found a slight increase in overall survival after 10 years for patients given "polychemotherapy" (more than one drug for more than one month). The women's chances of being alive 10 years later, however, were still only 51.3 percent with the drugs, versus 45 percent without them a mere 6.3 percent survival benefit. And this grim prognosis was for women with breast cancer in the early, "treatable" stages.^[28]

Despite these very modest benefits, the National Cancer Institute has recommended chemotherapy for all breast cancer patients, whether or not they have visible signs of cancer after surgery. The theory is that projected over thousands of women, a significant number of lives will be saved.^[29]

The same year, the General Accounting Office issued a report on the effectiveness of chemotherapy in breast cancer. It focused on patients with cancers of the type thought to benefit most from the drugs. The GAO found no detectable increase in the survival of these patients, despite a threefold increase in the use of chemotherapy since 1975.^[30]

The problem especially for the 93.7 percent who aren't benefited is the drug’s crushing side effects. Virtually all chemotherapeutic drugs are toxic and immunosuppressive. Being unable to distinguish between cancerous and normal cells, they wind up killing both. Most also cause secondary cancers, which can show up many years after "successful" chemotherapy.^[31]

If the conclusion from the research that we have examined so far is that surgery, chemotherapy and radiation have little to offer the cancer patient in terms of a cure, then we need to look elsewhere. Again, I would like to bring your attention back to the real causes of cancer, and not the symptoms which is basically the tumour. We need to understand the basic physiology of a cancer cell in order to better comprehend why a normal cell decides to convert into a cancer cell. It is basically a survival mechanism in order to adapt to a polluted environment where oxygen levels have dropped to such a degree that the aerobic cell becomes asphyxiated. Let’s look closer at some of the research that has been done to demonstrate this.

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