If I Had Terminal Cancer
Dr. Ralph Moss has written the book, Questioning Chemotherapy, which
documents the ineffectiveness of chemotherapy in treating most cancers.
On November 19, 1977, he was fired for telling the truth to the public.
At a press conference on November 18th, he and the Second Opinion
working group released a well-documented 48-page report that stated the
top officials of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center had lied
about the results of a study performed at the center regarding
"Laetrile" (a natural, alternative
cancer treatment).
Dr. Moss has gained credibility by writing eight books, including his
most recent work, Cancer Therapy: The Independent Consumer's Guide to
Non-Toxic Treatment. He also wrote The Cancer Industry, a
documented research work telling of the enormous financial and political
corruption in the "cancer establishment". He indicates that the
motivating forces in cancer research and treatment are often power and
money, and not the cure of cancer patients. He also writes, The
Cancer Chronicles, a newsletter reporting on new cancer treatments
and preventive measures.
Dr. Moss' work documents the ineffectiveness of chemotherapy on most
forms of cancer. However, he is fair in pointing out that there are
the following exceptions: Acute Iymphocytic leukemia, Hodgkin's disease,
and nonseminomatous testicular cancer. Also, a few very rare forms of
cancer, including choriocarcinoma, Wilm's tumor, and retinoblastoma.
But all of these account for only 2% to 4% of all cancers occurring in
the United States. This leaves some 96% to 98% of other cancers, in
which chemotherapy doesn't eliminate the disease. The vast majority of
cancers, such as breast, colon, and lung cancer are barely touched by
chemotherapy. However, there is another category where chemotherapy
has a relatively minor effect - The most "successful" of these is in
Stage 3 ovarian cancer, where chemotherapy appears to extend life by
perhaps eighteen months, and small-cell lung cancer in which
chemotherapy might offer six more months.
Effective cancer treatment is a matter of definition. The FDA
defines an "effective" drug as one which achieves a 50% or more
reduction in tumor size for 28 days. In the vast majority of cases
there is absolutely no correlation between shrinking tumors for 28 days
and the cure of the cancer or extension of life.
When the cancer patient hears the doctor say "effective," he or she
thinks, and logically so, that "effective" means it cures cancer. But
all it means is temporary tumor shrinkage.
Chemotherapy usually doesn't cure cancer or extend life, and it
really does not improve the quality of the life either, on the contrary,
it can greatly decrease the quality of life. Doctors frequently make
this claim though. There are thousands of studies that were reviewed
by Dr. Moss as part of the research for his book--and there is not one
single good study documenting this claim.
What patients consider "good quality of life" seems to differ from
what the doctors consider. To most it is just common sense that a drug
that makes you throw up, and lose your hair, and wrecks your immune
system is not improving your quality of life. Chemotherapy can give
you life-threatening mouth sores. People can slough the entire lining
of the intestines! One longer-term effect is particularly tragic:
people who've had chemotherapy no longer respond to nutritional or
immunologically-based approaches to their cancers. And since
chemotherapy doesn't cure 96% to 98% of all cancers anyway...People who
take chemotherapy have sadly lost their chance of finding another sort
of cure.
It's especially telling that in a number of surveys most
chemotherapists have said they would not take chemotherapy themselves or
recommend it for their families. Chemotherapy drugs are the most toxic
substances ever put deliberately into the human body. They are known
poisons, they are designed poisons. The whole thing began with
experiments with "mustard gas," the horrible chemical-warfare agents
from World War I.
Dr. Moss' position on chemotherapy
is supported by many major students of the study of cancer treatment. Following
are some examples: Dr. John Bailar is the chief of epidemiology at McGill
University in Montreal and was formerly the editor of the Journal of the
National Cancer Institute. In 1986 the New England Journal of Medicine
published an article by Dr. Bailer and Dr. Elaine Smith, a colleague
from the University of Iowa. Bailer and Smith wrote: "Some 35 years of
intense and growing efforts to improve the treatment of cancer have not
had much overall effect on the most fundamental measure of clinical
outcome - death. The effort to control cancer has failed so far to
obtain its objectives."
Dr. John Cairns, a professor of microbiology at Harvard, published
his view in Scientific American in 1985, "that basically the war on
cancer was a failure and that chemotherapy was not getting very far with
the vast majority of cancers."
As far back as 1975, Nobel Laureate James Watson of DNA fame was
quoted in the New York Times saying that the American public had been
"sold a nasty bill of goods about cancer."
In 1991, Dr. Albert Braverman, Professor of Hematology and Oncology
at the State University of New York, Brooklyn, published an article in
Lancet titled "Medical Oncology in the 1990s," in which he wrote:
"The time has come to cut back on the clinical investigation of new
chemotherapeutic regimens for cancer and to cast a critical eye on the
way chemotherapeutic treatment is now being administered."
Dr. Braverman says that there is no solid tumor incurable in 1976
that is curable today. Dr. Moss confirms this and claims that the
greatest breakthrough in the objective study of chemotherapy came from a
biostatistician at the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Ulrich Abel. His
critique focused on whether chemotherapy effectively prolonged survival
in advanced epithelial cancer. His answer was that it is not
effective. He summarized and extended his findings and concluded that
chemotherapy overall is ineffective. A recent search turned up exactly
zero reviews of his work in American journals, even though it was
published in 1990. The belief is that this is not because his work was
unimportant--but because it's irrefutable.
With the extensive documentation in Dr. Moss' book, and all the
statistics developed by the experts, why is chemotherapy still pushed by
the large majority of oncologists? Dr. Moss feels that "there's a
tremendous conflict going on in the minds of honest, sensitive, caring
oncologists." They're in a very difficult position because they've been
trained to give these drugs. And they've devoted many years to reaching
a very high level of expertise in the knowledge of poisonous, deadly
compounds. They're really in a bind, because they went into oncology to
help the cancer patient, yet the tools they've been given don't work.
And they see what happens to physicians who "step out of line" and treat
cancer with alternative means.
Armed raids, loss of licensure, professional smearing and ostracism
are some of the consequences. These could all be related to the
quotation in the book made by Dr. Lundberg, editor of the Journal of the
American Medical Association. At a recent National Institute of Health
meeting, he said of chemotherapy: "[It's] a marvelous opportunity for
rampant deceit. So much money is there to be made that ethical
principles can be overrun sometimes in a stampede to get at physicians
and prescribers." You never heard that on the evening news.
The economics of cancer treatment are astounding.
Cancer treatment is close to $100 billion annually ($100,000,000,000).
The chemotherapy part of that by 2005 will be up to $12.5 billion.
Looking from another angle: the Bristol Myers company owns patents on
twelve of the nearly forty "FDA-approved" chemotherapeutic drugs.
The president, past president, chairman of the board, and a couple of the
directors of Bristol Myers all hold positions on the board at Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Dr. Moss' book details the failures (and very few successes) for
chemotherapy with more than fifty types of cancer, includes a complete
description of the major chemotherapy drugs, and has a section about
questions to ask your doctor. All of Dr. Moss' books and Cancer
Chronicles newsletters are available from Equinox Press, 1-800-929-WELL
or 718-636-4433.
We are obviously losing ground with conventional cancer treatment,
because the death rates keep going up. The reason for this is because
conventional treatment is based on a faulty standard: That the body must
be purged of cancer by aggressive and toxic methods such as surgery
chemotherapy and radiation therapy. This, of course, seemed reasonable
back in 1894 when William Halsted, M.D. did the first radical
mastectomy, but it has proven to be so wrong over the last 50 years that
continuing to adhere to it constitutes more fraud than honest mistake.
However, this standard still dominates conventional cancer therapy, and
until that changes, we will continue to lose ground with cancer.
Dr. Whitaker, a firm believer in Dr. Moss' work and alternative
cancer therapy goes on to give some of his personal views:
Statistics Don't Tell the Real Story
What is lost in the unemotional statistic of 500,000 cancer deaths
per year is how those people died. Dr. Whitaker goes on to say more
about the treatment of cancer: In my opinion, conventional cancer
therapy is so toxic and dehumanizing that I fear it far more than I fear
death from cancer. 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 that we know don't work, because there's no other
choice.
Personal Belief Systems Determine the Choices You Make
Because cancer treatment is such a sensitive issue, I need to set
some ground rules before I tell you what I would do if I had cancer.
What follows is what I personally would do. It is not a recommendation
for you, and should not be considered as such. It is not even what my
wife would do (that would be her decision), nor is it what my young son
would do (that would be the joint decision of my wife and myself). The
choices to be made in treating cancer are not easy ones, because there
is so little certainty of cure in any of them. The course that someone
chooses to take is very personal, and reflects not only that person's
knowledge of the options, but also his/her beliefs.
Yet, because we are strongly influenced by our natural fear of death,
we line up for conventional cancer therapy, not so much believing that it
will work, but hoping that it will not fail. If expensive,
debilitating procedures to eliminate acne scars had the same failure
rate as cancer treatment, they would be abandoned. It is only because
cancer is so often fatal that conventional approaches were not abandoned
long ago. We continue to use them not because they work, but because
those who perform them have so vigorously eliminated any other choice.
My Imaginary Cancer Scenario
by Dr. Julian Whitaker
Though I would approach my own dilemma with hopes of total cure, I
would be the first to admit that, regardless of the course I took, the
chances of that are small. Consequently, my choices of cancer therapy
are a mix of science and philosophy. They are as much a reflection of
how I would struggle for survival as of how I would wish to die if the
struggle failed. For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume
that I have just been diagnosed with cancer of the lung, and a
particularly virulent one. Before going into what I would do and why,
let me say what I wouldn't do, and why.
I Wouldn't Take A Passive Role
If I am going to fight for my life, I want to do just that. I am
always perplexed by the news stories of some celebrity, doped to the
gills with heinous poison, "courageously battling for his life."
What does this mean? The celebrity, who simply accepts conventional cancer
therapy, is no more "courageous" than a laboratory mouse. This is not
to say that what the celebrity is doing is wrong, only that it is the
very opposite of a willful act of courage.
Taking a passive role with today's conventional therapy is terribly
dangerous. Jackie Kennedy, after a "courageous fight," succumbed to
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma - or did she? Her early demise, attributed to
the cancer, was a shock to cancer specialists worldwide, and brought
into question the real cause of her death. She had been given an
unproved protocol of very high-dose chemotherapy. The drugs alone
could easily have caused her death - and this would not be unusual.
There are numerous cases of iatrogenic (doctor-induced) deaths from
chemotherapy.
I'd Actively Fight For My Life
On the other hand, the cancer patient who says, "no, thanks" to
chemotherapy recommended by large cancer treatment centers, and takes
off to Grand Bahamas Island to receive Immuno-Augmentative Therapy (IAT);
or to Houston, Texas, to receive antineoplastons from Dr. Stanislaw
Burzynski; or who heads to the public library to make a battle plan, has
begun fighting and is acting courageously.
Whether I win or lose, that is the course I would take. What have I
got to lose? Conventional treatment is toxic and simply doesn't work,
so I would throw my lot with something safe that might work, and folks,
a lot of approaches fit that description. I also believe patients who
seek alternative therapies are more optimistic. They have only one
worry - the cancer - not the cancer and the therapy!
Here's What I Would Do
(by Dr. Julian Whitaker)
I'd turn my back on 50 years of institutionalized expertise, because
it follows the wrong paradigm. Everything that is done in medicine 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.
Also, cancer cells are different from normal cells in many ways,
including their metabolic profile. At least one non-toxic therapy,
hydrazine sulfate, takes advantage of this difference. It has been
shown in double-blind trials published in respectable journals to
significantly reduce the severe weight loss (cachexia) of advanced
cancer, and markedly improve the patient's emotional state, almost to
the point of euphoria. It is also inexpensive. Even though hydrazine
sulfate has been shown to be effective and non-toxic, and it makes the
patient feel better, it is ignored by every major cancer center. Yet I
would take it immediately. (For more on hydrazine sulfate, see Ralph
Moss' book, The Cancer Industry.)
First, I would Change My Diet
I would switch to a mostly vegetarian diet. I'd also take Nutritional
Supplements, especially "Superfoods," such as GREENS+ (800/643-1210)
or Green Magma (from Healthy Directions; 800/722-8008, ext. 572). These
supplements include the phyto-chemicals, antioxidants, vitamins, and
minerals required for optimal health. I would enhance that basic
program with the following:
Vitamin C - 10,000 mg per day in divided doses. Ewan Cameron, a
Scottish physician, did a study in which 100 cancer patients were given
10,000 mg of vitamin C for the rest of their lives, while control
patients were not. The patients on vitamin C lived much longer than
the age-matched controls. The Mayo Clinic did two studies on vitamin
C, and in both studies found that vitamin C did not help. However,
both studies were set up in a manner that almost guaranteed failure.
Frankly, I think that this was done intentionally to generate negative
publicity for this non-toxic approach.
[Vitamin C-E combination is part of our
Exsula Superfoods.]
Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) - Used as an effective therapy in congestive
heart failure, CoQ10 has only recently been studied as a cancer
treatment. Cancer patients have been found to have deficiencies of
CoQ10. Clinical trials in breast cancer have resulted in
no further metastases, improved quality of life
(no weight loss and less pain), and partial remission in six of 32
patients.
[CoQ-10 is part of our Exsula
Superfoods.]
Essiac Tea - 2 ounces 3 times a day. This blend of four herbs
-burdock root, sheep's sorrel, slippery elm and Indian rhubarb root- has
its genesis in Native American medicinal folklore. Since it was
"discovered" by Canadian nurse Rene Caisse in the 1920s, thousands have
claimed to have had their cancers cured by this tea. I'd keep on
searching. We have the formula if you are interested in purchasing the
individual herbs in bulk.
Finally, you should know that if I were battling cancer - or any
serious disease, for that matter- I would be in a constant search for
effective, non-toxic therapies. One place to begin that search is with
Ralph Moss, Ph.D. He is probably the most knowledgeable writer in the
world on alternative therapies for cancer, and has recently published a
530-page book, Cancer Therapy, The Independent Consumer's Guide to
Nontoxic Treatment and Prevention. (Equinox Press, New York, NY, 1995).
In addition, Dr. Moss offers a report service called Healing Choices,
which ascertains, through a questionnaire, the type and severity of
cancer, and suggests alternatives. This costs $250, and it is well
worth it. If I had cancer, I would start here for more information.
You can get more information by sending a large SASE to The Cancer
Chronicles, 2 Lincoln Square, Suite 31A, New York, NY 10023, or by
calling Melissa Wolf at 718/636-4433.
Another source of information is People Against Cancer, which
provides a comprehensive counseling service called the Alternative
Therapy Program. It includes a review of your medical records by a
network of doctors using alternative therapies. It also costs $250.
People Against Cancer can be reached at 515/972-4444. Their Internet
address is:
http://www.dodgenet.com/nocancer.
A study, done at The University of San Francisco Medical School, and
ignored by the media, followed 120 terminal cancer patients for ten
years. They were divided into two groups: Group A went the conventional
chemo/radiation route, Group B either did nothing or sought alternative
treatments. Not surprisingly, the survival rate was much better in group B.
You decide.
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