Merged Sciences May Aid Cancer Treatment

(AP) Western science and traditional Eastern medicine could be combined to enhance treatment of cancer and other diseases, an oncology professor told a medical forum Sunday.

But comprehensive clinical studies must be carried out and patients must be educated to accept the combination of methods, Tony Mok Shu Kam, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told participants at a two-day medical forum in Singapore sponsored by the Lancet medical journal.....

A key factor in the integration would be convincing users of traditional medicine that modern science is as good as or better than their centuries-old methods.

A 2004 study in China showed that 49 percent of women who were being treated for breast cancer with traditional Chinese medicine believed it to be an effective treatment for their disease.

Mok also referred to a Chinese trial he was involved in this year in which some prospective patients declined to be part of a placebo control study to test the effectiveness of a traditional medicine when they learned their chances of getting the medicine were only 50-50. They preferred to go to a traditional doctor who would definitely prescribe the treatment they sought.

Integrative Medicine Grand Rounds

The University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson publishes Grand Rounds in many disciplines to the Web. Below are the recent Integrative Medicine Grand Rounds. They are all excellent. If you ever wondered what is going on in alternative medicine cancer clinics around the world check out the first link to Ralph Moss.

View this program live
First Thursdays from 12:00 to 1:00pm MST starting in January

April 11, 2007	Promising CAM Cancer Clinics Around the World Ralph Moss, PhD Disclosure: Presentation will include the discussion of unlabeled/investigational drug use.
April 5, 2007	Why do researchers tell us CAM does not work when thousands of patients experience the opposite? Vinjar Fonnebo, MD, MSc Epidemiology, PhD, NAFKAM, University of Tromso, Norway
March 1, 2007	Integrative Medicine and Biomedicine: Paradigm Shift or Paradigm Clash? Ian Douglass Coulter, PhD, LHD Disclosure: Presenter has nothing to disclose
February 1, 2007	Origin and Clinical Application of the Functional Medicine Model Jeffrey S. Bland, Ph.D. Chief Science Officer, Metagenics; President, MetaProteomics; Founder, Institute for Functional Health Disclosure: Presenter has an affiliation or financial interest with Metagenics, Inc.
December 7, 2006	Ethical Issues in CAM and Integrative Medicine John Tilbert, M.D., M.P.H. Disclosure: Nnothing to disclose.
November 2, 2006	Herbal Medicine and Nutritional Supplements for Children: What Do We Really Know? Ben Kigler, M.D. Disclosure: Nothing to disclose.
June 1, 2006	The Quantum Paradigm in Health and Disease Stuart Hameroff, MD; Professor, Anesthesiology, Psychology; Director, Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona Disclosure: Nothing to disclose.
May 4, 2006	An Integrative Approach to ADHD Sandy Newmark, M.D. Disclosure: Nothing to disclose.
April 6, 2006	Clinical Issues: Controversies and Updates in Women's Health and Natural Medicine Tori Hudson, ND, Professor, The National College of Naturopathic Medicine; Clinical Professor at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine and Bastyr University Disclosure: Nothing to disclose.
March 2, 2006	The Darker Side of the Physician's Life Daniel Shapiro, PhD Disclosure: Nothing to disclose.
February 2, 2006	Preventing Relapse from Addictive Disorders: The Role of Mindfulness & Acceptance John Astin Disclosure: Nothing to disclose.
December 8, 2005	DSHEA: A 10-Year Retrospective on the Science, Regulation and Politics of Dietary Supplements Loren Israelsen, JD President, LDI Group, Inc. Disclosure: Nothing to disclose.
April 9, 1999	Is Integrative Medicine the Medicine of the Future? A Scholarly Debate Arnold Relman, M.D. Editor-in-Chief, New England Journal of Medicine & Andrew Weil M.D. Director, The University of Arizona Program in Integrative Medicine
Download or player here to view these video stream files.

Educational Objectives:
Discuss clinical, scientific and/or policy information related to the practice of Integrative Medicine; relevant protocols and/or procedures for patients that will directly improve patient care.
The University of Arizona College of Medicine at the Arizona Health Sciences Center is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

Antioxidants with Chemotherapy

My patients that are receiving chemo. and/or radiotherapy tell me that their Dr's. tell them not to take antioxidant nutritional supplements. Upon investigation it appears that a prescribed known anti-oxidant drug Amifostine is used to protect against the side effects of chemo. and radiation and that antioxidant rich foods are not prohibited by Oncologists during treatment. So the picture of the use of antioxidants may be more nuanced than what Oncologists are saying. Below are literature reviews published in respected journals that shed more light on this issue. Alex

Antioxidants and Other Nutrients Do Not Interfere With Chemotherapy or Radiation Therapy and Can Increase Kill and Increase Survival, Part 2 (pdf)
Charles B. Simone II, MD; Nicole L. Simone, MD; Victoria Simone, RN; Charles B. Simone, MD
Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine Mar/Apr 2007 • Vol 13, No. 2

Should Patients Undergoing Chemotherapy and Radiotherapy Be Prescribed Antioxidants?

Ralph W. Moss, PhD Cancer Communications, Lemont, Pennsylvania,
Integrative Cancer Therapies, Vol. 5, No. 1, 63-82 (2006)

I welcome your comments.

DR. LORRAINE DAY BEAT CANCER

A Plan For Building The Immune System

by Lorraine Day, MD.

March1995

Cancer doesn't scare me anymore. I had it and got well by natural, simple therapies that you seldom hear about. I refused mutilating surgery, radiation and chemotherapy because studies in the medical literature and common sense told me that you shouldn't destroy your immune system while you are trying to get well.

The following information is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as prescribing treatment. Treatment should be decided by each individual patient under the advice of a health practitioner. However, it is important for individuals to be informed about all options available for treatment and prevention of illness. The underlying basis and documentation for this program of building the Immune system are presented in my video, "Cancer Doesn't Scare Me Anymore."

Cancer is a disease of the immune system. Building the immune system is important in combating cancer as well as many other diseases. Disease is not confined to one organ or area but affects the whole body, as all parts are interconnected. Therefore, therapy must be a holistic approach to improve all body systems. A "magic bullet" approach rarely works for any significant illness. The following regimen will help build the Immune system for those who are ill or will help prevent disease in those not presently ill.

This Is a brief synopsis of the basic three part plan:
I) High quality nutritional intake.
a) A diet of vegetables, fruit, grains and nuts organically grown without pesticides and
prepared to maintain the maximum nutrition outlined in detail in my video including
specifics of the Gerson therapy with references provided. (Also, see Health and Healing
Newsletter, February 1995 Supplement)
b) If it can be tolerated by the intestines, at least 50% of food should be eaten raw including large quantities of fresh vegetable juices.
c) Elimination of all processed food, as well as sugar and salt.

2) Elimination of toxins from the body by colon cleansing with either enemas, colonics, colon cleansing and/or a high fiber diet.

3) Elimination of toxins from the local environment, including removal of toxic cleaning chemicals from the house and replacement with less toxic or nontoxic biodegradable cleaners.

Many other specific individual nutritional therapies and supplements including barley green, Essiac tea and. shark cartilage are helpful in certain instances and are presented in some detail in the video with numerous resources provided. Many have found that a basic regimen incorporating this three point plan with the addition of specific supplements, depending on the condition, has resulted in major improvement and even elimination of many diseases, including cancer.

If it were only this easy as Dr. Day describes it. I am not diminishing her story, but each person with cancer is unique, if it were just as easy as cleaning up the diet to cure cancer it would have been done. I do think everyone should follow the above recommendations. I am not willing to write off conventional care as much as Dr. Day and Dr. Whitaker are. Where I do think conventional care misses the boat is: 1) treating the whole person as a person, not just the disease. and 2) Use of herbs and nutritional supplements alongside of chemo and radiation. Alex

QUOTES FROM DR JULIAN WHITAKER, M.D. ABOUT CONVENTIONAL CANCER THERAPY

DR JULIAN WHITAKER, M.D.
http://www.drwhitaker.com/

We know that conventional therapy doesn’t work—if it did you would not fear cancer any more than you fear pneumonia. It is the utter lack of certainty as to the outcome of conventional treatment that virtually screams for more freedom of choice in the area of cancer therapy. Yet most so-called alternative therapies regardless of potential or proven benefit, are outlawed, which forces patients to submit to the failures we know don’t work, because there is no other choice.

The FDA, NCI and ACS, and the large treatment centres work to eliminate choice of cancer therapies, particulary better ones. They openly attack breakthroughs made by "mavericks", which they define as anyone outside their ranks. Folks, any serious study of how these entities work together to destroy hopeful approaches to cancer reveals a trail of corruption, conspiracy, dishonesty, and inhumanity that warrants desigantion of evil……..We continue to use them not because they work, but because those who perform them have so vigorously eliminated any other choice.

What I wouldn’t do if I had cancer

First, I would not even check in with a conventional oncologist, particulary not one from a prominent cancer institution. Their expertise is in implementing the erroneous paradigm that cancer must be purged from the body with toxic methods. This is, in my opinion, no more valuable than maps from the Flat Earth Society. When there is a paradigm shift---and we definitely are in the middle of one with cancer treatment---those sitting on the lofty perches of authority are the last to make the change, because they are guarding the paradigm about to be replaced. I don’t buy maps of a flat earth, and I wouldn’t go to the NCI or Memorial Sloan-Kettering Centre for cancer treatment.

What I Would Do.

I’d turn my back on 50 years of institutionalised expertise, because it follows the wrong paradigm. Everything that is done in medicine today or in any other discipline fits some paradigm. The paradigm I use for cancer is that it is a systemic problem in which the normal control mechanisms of your body are altered. Your immune system likely bears the largest burden for this control; thus, all techniques that enhance it are promising. Those that damage it are not.

"Conventional Medicine is locked into a dogma that believes that its way is the only way. Conventional doctors deny you have any alternatives to their drugs and surgeries. But you do have choices. And these enlightened treatments are far superior to the risky methods of modern medicine. . .which can be extremely dangerous to your well-being. . . . This enlightened new approach to health will lead contemporary medicine out of the Dark Ages of drugs and surgery, because it does work better. I know, because I use these alternative therapies every day in my medical practice. . . .Many of the patients I see are 'medical refugees' who have been abused and abandoned by conventional medicine. . . .The results we see are truly impressive, more so than with any drugs and conventional treatments they gave us in medical school. . . .The 'drugs or surgery only' approach that modern medicine uses to treat today's diseases is archaic."—Julian Whitaker, M.D.

I AGREE. ALEX

Low Dose Naltraxone Therapy

The following comes from The Compounder a newsletter by compounding pharmacist,
Larry Frieders.  I have found the info. on his site very interesting.

Dr. Julian Whitaker made a comment in his March 2007 newsletter
that reflects poorly on the way medicine is practiced today. He
was discussing 'Old Therapies, New Uses' when he writes, 'Most
disappointing, safe and effective therapies continue to be
ignored.'

To quote Dr. Whitaker, 'Today...LDN (low dose Naltrexone) is making inroads. It's not
because a drug company is advertising it on TV or paying for
research. Its patent ran out long ago, so there is no financial
incentive. Nor are many doctors prescribing it, since no drug
reps are spoon-feeding them info on it. But LDNs popularity has
steadily grown, driven by word of mouth from the many patients
whom it's helped.'

Naltrexone itself was approved by the FDA in 1984 in a 50mg dose for the purpose of helping heroin or opium addicts, by blocking the effect of such drugs. In technical terms, it is an opioid antagonist. By blocking opioid receptors, naltrexone also blocks the reception of the opioid hormones (endorphins) that our brain and adrenal glands produce - beta-endorphin and metenkephalin. Many body tissues have receptors for the endorphins, including virtually every cell of the body’s immune system.

In 1985, Dr. Bernard Bihari discovered the effects of a much smaller dose of naltrexone (approximately 3mg once a day) on the body’s immune system. He found that this low dose, taken at bedtime, was able to enhance a patient’s response to infection by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Subsequently, Dr. Bihari found that patients in his practice with cancer (such as lymphoma or pancreatic cancer) could benefit from LDN. In addition, people who had autoimmune disease (such as lupus) often showed prompt control of disease activity while taking LDN.

How does LDN work?

According to Dr. Bihari’s information, the brief blockade of opioid (endorphin) receptors that is caused by taking LDN at bedtime each night is believed to produce a prolonged up-regulation of vital elements of the immune system by causing an increase in endorphin production. Normal volunteers who have taken LDN in this fashion have been found to have much higher levels of beta-endorphins circulating in their blood in the following days. It is believed that the endorphins act to increase natural killer cells and other healthy immune defenses against cancer.

What diseases has it been useful for?

Some diseases for which Dr. Bihari has described beneficial effects of LDN:

• HIV/AIDS Pancreatic Carcinoma
• Prostate Cancer Carcinoid
• Hodgkin’s Disease Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
• Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphomas Rheumatoid Arthritis; Lupus (SLE)
• Lymphocytic Leukemia Psoriasis
• Neuroblastoma Behcet’s Disease
• Colorectal Cancer Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Naltrexone has been used in experiments to block the effects of acupuncture to prove
that acupuncture stimulates the opioid system.  So the idea here is that if you
can block the opioid system just a little you can get the body to produce more endorphins
and enkephalins to compensate and this in turn has a powerful upregulating effect
on aspects of the immune system. That sounds good, and because the dosages are low
it has very little side effects.    Alex

Genes gang up to help cancer spread, study finds

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Four genes gang up together to help cancer spread throughout the body, researchers said on Wednesday, including one affected by arthritis drugs.

And a second study found that 87 different genes work to help make cancer more vulnerable to drug treatment.

Both studies published in this week's issue of the journal Nature should help scientists develop more effective drugs to fight cancer, the second-leading cause of death in the developed world.


Cancer is highly treatable before it has spread. But once tumors break out of their initial spot in a process called metastasis, they are almost impossible to suppress for long.

Dr. Joan Massague, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and colleagues identified four genes that worked together to help breast cancer tumors spread to the lungs of mice.

The genes are called EREG, MMP-1, MMP-2 and COX-2.

Massague's team suppressed each gene one by one and found a small effect. "The remarkable thing was that while silencing these genes individually was effective, silencing the quartet nearly completely eliminated tumor growth and spread," Massague said in a statement.

The issue for me is finding the herbs and nutrients that work on EREG, MMP-1, MMP-2 and COX-2. This understanding of nutrients and herbs is important for cancer treatment.

Alex

Acupuncture, massage helpful after cancer surgery

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A combination of acupuncture and massage may help ease pain and depression symptoms after cancer surgery, a new study suggests.

Acupuncture has been shown in many studies to ease pain, and there's growing evidence that it helps quell post-surgery nausea. Massage, meanwhile, has been shown in certain studies to aid cancer patients' anxiety.

Until now, however, no studies have tried combining the two therapies for people undergoing cancer surgery -- a physically and emotionally difficult process.