Happy Healthy YOU
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Kelly Spencer - Happy Healthy YOU
(A wellness column by Kelly Spencer: writer, life coach, yoga & meditation teacher, holistic healer and a mindful life enthusiast!)
We all know someone with it or someone affected by it. How can we not? Canadian Cancer Statistics Advisory Committee states expectations of two in five Canadians developing cancer in their lifetime.
In his 1971 U.S.A. State of the Union address, President Richard Nixon promised Americans that he would begin “an extensive campaign to find a cure for cancer.” He added, “The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease.”
Here we are, almost a half a century later, over $900 billion spent in research, and the mortality rate, while decreased is still staggering.
Have you ever asked yourself why? I often wonder, as Nixon referenced, how we can split atoms and make space ships but can’t figure this out?
Each year, in the USA alone, allopathic (conventional) treatments generate over $200 billion of revenue. Gosh, try doing the math about how much cancer pharmaceutical profit has been made over the last five decades, since one of the world’s most powerful country’s leader declared war on cancer. (Hint: it can’t be calculated on your standard calculate).
A decade ago, NBC reported a unique situation in the medical world. Unlike other kinds of doctors, cancer doctors were allowed to profit from the sale of chemotherapy drugs.
"The significant amount of our revenue comes from the profit, if you will, that we make from selling
the drugs," says Dr. Peter Eisenberg, a private physician who specializes in cancer treatment. And while historically, medical doctors were given “bonuses” for ordering certain prescriptions, American oncologists were buying chemotherapy drugs wholesale and selling them to patients at a marked up prices, stated the NBC report.
The first versions of chemotherapy drugs were called “nitrogen mustards” and were discovered by accident during World War II. It was discovered that people exposed to an accidental leak of a nitrogen bomb, developed significantly reduced white blood cell counts.
In 1942, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center secretly began treating breast cancer with these nitrogen mustards. No one was cured. Chemotherapy trials were also conducted at Yale University around 1943 where 160 patients were treated. Again, no one was cured. But, since chemotherapy shrank the tumors, researchers were so excited that they proclaimed the chemotherapy trials to be a “success.”
While most conventional cancer treatments revolve around a mix of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, some people question their efficacy - particularly chemotherapy. I know I do.
As an ex-Registered Nurse I saw the toxic effects chemotherapy had on the patients. Since chemotherapy drugs are unable to differentiate between “healthy” cells and “cancerous” cells, they kill everything. Even worse, they can create more cancer! I saw time and time again, a patient's tumor decrease with treatment, only to be shocked by the rapid growth of the original tumor or even a new tumor, once treatment ceases.
Charles B. Simone, M.MS., M.D., Founder of the Simone Protective Cancer Center and an Oncologist states, "Little or no progress in the treatment of adult cancers has been made. A man or woman who gets prostate or breast cancer today will live as long as the person who developed these same cancers in 1920. Nothing we've done in a century has substantially reduced deaths."
Dr. Simone agrees certain cancers have been helped - lymphomas, childhood leukemia, Hodgkin's, and the type of testicular cancer that afflicted Lance Armstrong. But more common cancers affecting average citizens - colon, breast, prostate, and lung - have not been aided by the War on Cancer's conventional treatments.
"In the war on cancer, the disease is only half the battle,” says Simone.
The impact of chemotherapy on the body can be brutal and deadly. It lays waste to your immune system, which is your first line of defense against cancer. Another direct effect of chemotherapy is… ironically... cancer. Yeah, it’s printed right on the chemo drug warning labels (in small print, of course). For instance, Doxorubicin may increase your risk for developing leukemia (cancer of the white blood cells), especially when it is combined with other chemotherapy drugs and radiation.
Cyclophosphamide increases the risk of bladder cancer and ovarian cancer. And the list goes on and on.
My father had chronic lymphocytic leukemia. also called CLL, for over a decade. His disease progressed over the years and he was experiencing night sweats, weakness and fatigue and had an enlarged spleen. He was not dying but the disease was definitely advancing.
My dad’s oncologist prescribed him a chemotherapy for CLL to “reduce and delay the advancement of symptoms”. The doctor prescribed the highest recommended dose of Leukeran. The toxic symptoms on his body were almost immediate. He was unable to finish his second round of chemotherapy it was so hard on his body. Within a week or two, he started complaining about severe pain in his leg, just above his knee. The doctors dismissed it as a gout which is a side effect of this drug. This is a kind of arthritis when uric acid crystals deposit at a body joint. But his pain was not in the knee but just above it. They gave him more prescriptions to treat the new symptoms of pain. Another few weeks had passed and he could no longer walk because of the pain in his leg. An x-ray showed his femur, the large bone in the thigh was broken. A tumor had formed inside his femur and grew with rapid speed until the bone broke. Tumors are a side effect of the this chemotherapy, Leurkeran.
Three weeks later, my father passed away from a tumor bleeding in his gastrointestinal tract. These “side effect” tumors developed rapidly everywhere: brain, lungs, liver and bone. In essence, my father was told to improve the quality of his life, he should take this chemotherapy. In reality, this chemotherapy ended his life.
Sadly, the truth is that many people who “die from cancer” really die from conventional treatments long before they would have actually succumbed to the cancer itself.
It’s a tough topic that no one wants to ever have to discuss, and definitely that no one wants to experience. But most of us will... through self-experience or someone we know and love.
What can we do?
I recently met a man that said “no thank you” to his doctor. He was given a diagnosis and a deadly prognosis. He was informed of the usual treatment options of surgery, radiation or chemotherapy.
My new friend decided if he was going to die, he didn’t want to experience all those known awful side effects. So he took his health into his own hands. Eighteen months later, his cancer is gone.
He opted for alternative options with great success and is offering free information on his experience with cancer and treatments.
There will be a “Cancer and Alternative Options” seminars open to the public on Feb. 3 7-9 p.m., Febr. 10 7-9 p.m. and Saturday, Feb. 18 2-4 p.m. If you would like to hear a different perspective for you or someone you love and hear about alternative options for prevention and treatment, please feel free to attend. To book a seat at any of these seminars, please call 519-688-1188 or email info@indigolounge.ca.
(If you would like to see an article on a specific topic, please email kelly@indigolounge.ca)