Vaccines, Immune Function and Disease

Endotoxins and vaccines may, unexpectedly, trigger the immune system to prevent cancer. The evidence in this article is interesting, and compelling. Click on the title of the article to follow the link.

Many believers in alternative medicine, especially many of our patients, devoutly avoid vaccinations. The point of this article is not to argue the pros and cons of vaccinations but to review some fascinating data on immune function and disease.

Before scientists knew that endotoxins in cow manure dust stimulated the immune system and lowered risk of lung cancer, they already knew of another dust that was protective. Back in the 1970s, data showed that people working in cotton factories had a lower risk of lung cancer. Cotton dust, like cow manure, contains endotoxins.

Harvey Checkoway at the University of Washington has published a series of papers about this. He and his colleagues have followed the cancer rates of female cotton textile workers in Shanghai, China, for years. The more dust these women breathed, the lower their incidence of cancers. Note that I wrote the plural – cancers. The women had a lower risk for several cancer types including pancreatic, liver, lung and breast cancer.

Not all dust is protective. For example, workers in paper mills are at greater than average risk for cancer. This increase might be due to the dust or because of exposure to some chemicals used in the mill. Similar increased risk occurs in hard-metal workers.

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

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