I’ll never forget the look of uncertainty on the oncologist’s face when he gave me my cancer diagnosis. A different doctor had the same look when he gave my husband his diagnosis 10 years later. I chose not to take the path my doctor laid out for me – intensive radiation therapy and chemotherapy. My husband went down that path and I had to watch as his body broke down; he ultimately lost the fight, but not to cancer. He contracted an infection that he couldn’t beat because his immune system had been so depleted from the conventional cancer treatments.
What most people don’t understand is that the cancer doesn’t usually kill someone. More often, it’s the treatment that does.
A cancer diagnosis opens the door to scary conversations about treatments that may seem overwhelming. My hope is in the near future more and more healthcare providers will also discuss long-term holistic treatments and other options. I don’t want us to consider ONLY traditional medical treatments when the statistics don’t definitively establish that they work.
Allow me to arm you with some information you might otherwise have no reason to know about:
- Chemotherapy drugs are the most toxic substances ever put deliberately into the body. These drugs make you throw up, lose your hair, give you life-threatening mouth sores, slough the entire lining of your intestines and wreck your immune system. Research has shown that once people have had chemotherapy they no longer can respond to nutritional or immunologically-based treatments for cancer.
- The research suggests that chemotherapy is an effective treatment in only 2-4% of the cancer cases in which it’s prescribed – specifically on patients suffering from Hodgkin’s Disease, Testicular Cancer, Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia, Choriocarcinoma, Wilm’s Tumor, and Retinoblastoma. That leaves about 96-98% of other identified cancers without any clinical evidence to suggest that chemotherapy is the answer.
- Oncologists prescribe chemotherapy at an estimated cost of $100,000 per patient/per year. You rarely hear an oncologist suggesting that a patient explore or compliment conventional chemotherapy with alternative or holistic healing methods. They have been trained to follow the conventional path and they’ve devoted many years to reaching a high level of expertise in the knowledge of how to administer drugs that are ultimately destructive to the body. Although doctors go into oncology to help cancer patients, the tools they’ve been given through their traditional training may actually harm more than they help.
- The drugs used in chemotherapy are carcinogenic in themselves and they disrupt the ability of our healthy cells to divide normally. The most common types of secondary cancers caused by chemotherapy are leukemias and lymphomas. The secondary cancer can take as little as a few months or as long as years to show up, so not a lot of information is out there on the true number of cancer patients who developed secondary forms of cancer as a result of chemotherapy. (You can research particular chemotherapy drugs for carcinogen reports through The US National Toxicology Program)
- Pharmaceutical companies, who make just over $100 billion per year in profits are not going to be motivated to pursue research and development of alternative cures. Cancer treatments are a BIG business!
Prevention and early detection are still our biggest tools, but if you or someone you love have already been diagnosed, there are alternative cancer treatments and/or treatments that can be combined to support conventional methods as well. Next week, I will explore this further.
I welcome your feedback and questions here and look forward to exploring deeper next week.
