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.

Green Tea May Help Fight Lung Cancer

March 12, 2007 -- Green tea may fight lung cancer and could inspire the creation of new lung cancer drugs, scientists report.

But it may be too soon to count on a cup of green tea to curb lung cancer. So far, the scientists have only tested green tea extract against human lung cancer cells in test tubes, not people.

The researchers included Qing-Yi Lu, PhD, of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

Lu and colleagues exposed a sample of human lung cancer cells to a decaffeinated green tea extract. The lung cancer cells marinated in the green tea extract for up to three days.

The green tea extract remodeled a certain protein in the lung cancer cells. As a result, the lung cancer cells became more likely to stick together and less likely to move, the study shows.

Antioxidants in green tea may have tweaked the cancer cell protein, but it's not clear whether one antioxidant deserves all the credit or whether several antioxidants worked together, the researchers note.

The study doesn’t prove that drinking green tea curbs lung cancer in people.

However, it may be possible to make new lung cancer drugs based on green tea extract, Lu's team suggests. Such drugs would target the lung cancer protein remodeled by the green tea extract in the lab tests.

The study appears online in Laboratory Investigation.

Acupuncture on Oprah

Oprah has done more to promote acupuncture than probably anyone has done.

Electroacupuncture to treat functional dyspepsia

The following comes from the C.A.M Report a web log that advertises itself as Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Fair, Balanced, and to the Point.

It’s only February, but I was wondering today what might be the most significant story in CAM for 2007. Perhaps it will be an increase in credible studies published in well-respected peer reviewed mainstream medicine journals.

Here’s one on effects of electroacupuncture in patients with functional dyspepsia. It was published in Digestive Diseases and Sciences. Follow the link here

Evaluating CAM to treat nausea and vomiting in cancer patients

The Oncology Nursing Society has posted a table that summarizes CAM studies on the treatment of nausea and vomiting in cancer patients. The studies were published between 1988 and 2005.

Here’s a summary of their findings.

* Acupuncture and Acupressure: Likely to be effective
* Guided Imagery, Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Music Therapy: Likely to be effective
* Psychoeducational (support and education): Likely to be effective
* Virtual Reality: Benefits balanced with harms
* Exercise: Effectiveness not established
* Hypnosis: Effectiveness not established
* Massage/Aromatherapy: Effectiveness not established
* Acustimulation (electroacupuncture): Effectiveness not established
* Ginger: Effectiveness not established