COMBINING NATURAL AND CONVENTIONAL CANCER THERAPIES

by Walter Last

If you have been diagnosed with cancer, you obviously have the choice to opt for either orthodox or natural methods, or a combination of both. Most individuals reading this will be inclined to use conventional as well as natural cancer therapies in various combinations. However, the effect of natural therapies is different when used on its own than in combination with orthodox methods.

The German cancer researcher P.G. Seeger has experimentally demonstrated that the virulence or malignancy of cancers can be reduced and even be removed with high-quality live food. Cancer cells can gradually be converted back to normal cells. However, the more malignant the cancer cells are, the more difficult is this conversion. Above a certain degree of malignancy this no longer works, although even strongly malignant cancers may still become less malignant.

The degree of malignancy of a cancer depends mainly on the lifestyle, past and present, of the individual. With good nutrition and balanced emotions malignancy tends to remain low, and vice versa, but the main impact on malignancy comes from any kind of chronic stress and particularly medical treatment. Drugs, radiation, exposure to chemicals, and negative emotions, will all encourage a tendency to malignancy. Therefore, most medical treatments work against the nutritional normalization of cancer cells.

Surgery can have a positive effect by removing a toxic load from the body and stimulating healing responses, but a strongly negative effect comes from the chemicals used in general anaesthesia. They compromise the immune system for several weeks afterwards. If the tumour has been cleanly removed and there is good nutritional and emotional support, then this may not matter, the patient may be cured. However, if there is metastatic spread or other tumours are already present, then these may start growing much more strongly and become more malignant.

Surgery for a primary tumour is almost always “successful”. However, the real success becomes apparent only several years later. In many cancers the appearance of secondary tumours or metastases has been convincingly traced to the surgical removal of an earlier primary tumour. Orthodox medicine is aware of this danger and tries to minimize it with radiotherapy and chemotherapy. However, the latest statistics demonstrate that the survival rate is minimal and the patient usually only consents to this treatment out of fear and/or pressure from their practitioner and family. While it may slightly reduce the incidence of local recurrences and of patients dying of the same type of cancer, more individuals die instead as a direct result of the treatment, or of a different cancer, and generally these treatments lead to a much poorer quality of life.

Because radiotherapy and chemotherapy impose a considerable toxic load on the body and impair the immune system even more than surgery, they tend to increase the malignancy of any metastases that might already be present, or promote the formation of new tumours. Any perceived benefit, such as shrinking of tumours, is usually only temporary with much faster growth afterwards. In this case nutritional therapy will not be able to normalize the metabolism of any cancer cells present, and the only option is their destruction. At this stage nutritional therapy is still important to support the body, but it is no longer a primary therapy. The more toxic therapies are used, the less the cancer will respond to nutritional therapy.

At this stage nutrition and other lifestyle improvements will only have a minor effect on the eventual outcome. However, non-toxic tumour-destroying methods, in combination with nutrition and emotional therapy, may still be effective in destroying some tumours, rendering others dormant, or reducing their rate of growth, while also minimizing pain and improving quality of life.

There have been warnings that antioxidants may interfere with chemotherapy. However, more recent studies have shown an enhanced effect of chemotherapy when antioxidants were used in addition, and patients had less side-effects. To my knowledge the only good evidence for the use of chemotherapy is with some blood and lymph cancers, especially with leukaemia in children. However, even then there is a high price to pay.

A long-term follow-up study shows that such children develop 18 times more secondary malignant tumours later in life, and girls face a 75 times (7,500%) higher risk of breast cancer by the time they are 40. Chemotherapy for solid tumours also can cause leukaemia, a clear dose dependency has been shown whereby the incidence of induced leukaemia doubled between low dose and moderate dose groups and then quadrupled between the moderate dose and the high dose groups. A study of ovarian cancer found that the risk of developing leukaemia after treatment with chemotherapy increased 21 fold or 2100%. Also other tumours commonly develop after treating malignancies with chemotherapy. Therefore, if you choose, or in the case of children, are compelled to use chemotherapy, then it is essential to have high-quality nutrition not only before and during treatment, but continuing for many years afterwards.

A Better Option

Now let’s look at a different scenario. You have found a suspicious lump or been told that cancer is suspected. The first problem is to decide whether you want a biopsy. While it is the medical consensus that these are harmless, there is a considerable amount of research showing that biopsies may actively encourage the spread of metastases. For instance in 2004, a highly respected team at the John Wayne Cancer Institute in California reported a 50% increase of metastatic spread to nearby lymph glands after needle biopsy of breast tumours as compared to lumpectomy.

If you intend to use only natural therapy, at least initially, there is no real need to know whether it is malignant. A suspected cancer is hardly ever so urgent that something needs to be done immediately. On the contrary, regardless of whether you want to use only natural therapies or eventually may have surgery, you can expect to benefit greatly from an initial period of nutritional and emotional preparation.

If you do opt for surgery, make sure by prior written agreement with your surgeon that only the minimum is cut out, or just the 'lump', without making an effort to 'get it all' by removing all the surrounding lymph nodes. While removing lymph nodes may reduce the likelihood of a local reappearance, there is no evidence that it increases the survival rate, and generally, the more is taken out, the greater the traumatic after-effects. Lymph nodes are essential for healing the diseased area with subsequent holistic therapies; commonly only one or two lymph nodes are affected, usually the sentinel node and related nodes, and these can now be identified and selectively removed.

Another consideration is to have only local anaesthesia if at all possible. There is evidence that general anaesthesia causes considerable damage because it knocks out the immune system for a considerable period. This is a major factor in the development of metastases, or the later appearance of secondary tumours. With breast cancer, and probably all female cancers, any surgical intervention is preferable between days seven and twenty of the normal menstrual cycle. A study has shown that with surgery in the first and last week of the cycle, it was four times more likely that cancer recurred and patients died within ten years. Also avoid surgery close to full moon. At this time there is a much higher rate of complications from excessive bleeding.

Furthermore the vitamin D status before and after surgery is important. Recently, (April 2005) researchers from Harvard University reported that patients with the highest vitamin D intake who had surgery in the summer had a three-fold better disease-free survival and a four-fold better overall survival than patients with the lowest vitamin D intake who had surgery during winter. While this study was for lung cancer, similar results have been shown for most other cancers. Skin exposure to sunshine up to 20 minutes (producing about 20,000 IU of vitamin D) is much more effective than food sources of this vitamin.

Follow an optimal nutritional and emotional program for 3 to 6 months and see what happens. If the tumour has remained dormant or even regressed, then just continue what you are doing. If it has continued growing and you want to have it removed, then your body is now in a much better condition to prevent any metastatic spread and later recurrence. Keep up a good program for several years after surgery.

This article has been written for the newsletter of the Cancer Natural therapy Foundation of Australia (Melbourne).