User's Guide to Natural Therapies for Cancer Prevention and Control

INTRODUCTION

The world’s major pandemic disease is not AIDS, tuberculosis, or SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome); it is cancer. Cancer is a leading cause of death, and hardly a family has not mourned the loss of one or more of their members from cancer. It cuts across both sexes, and all ages, countries, and income classes. Almost 624,000 people in Canada and the United States will die from cancer in 2004. Modern medicine has not yet discovered why it occurs or how to treat it effectively, in spite of its overriding emphasis on science, genetics, and antibiotics, and its enormous expenditure on research and development.

Although the Cancer Prevention Coalition (2002) reports that the incidence of smoking-related cancer in men has declined markedly, there has been a major increase in the incidence of predominantly nonsmoking-related cancers in men and women, and also in the incidence of childhood cancers. The National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society repeatedly misled the public by their assurances of major progress in the war against cancer for over two decades. They completely reversed themselves in May 2002, and admitted that the incidence of cancer is expected to double by 2050.

Current Standard Cancer Treatments

The current three primary treatments for cancer are surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Each treatment is serviced by an army of specialists and subspecialists and supported by the medical literature, our medical institutions, and tons of money. Yet the increase in the ravages of cancer have not been stopped, and the result of the treatments are almost if not as bad as the disease. The impact of the side effects of treatment on the patient’s quality of life is too high, the cost of treatment is prohibitive, and the therapeutic results are so dismal that it has been argued that many patients would be better off if they avoided all treatment. Most oncologists (cancer doctors) agree that these three treatment methods have exhausted their potential. They are now placing their hopes on the relatively new research areas that use monoclonal antibodies (a pure type of antibody produced by a single cell), vaccines, anti-angiogenesis drugs (drugs that halt the development of blood vessels), and tyrosine kinase inhibitors (a new group of cancer therapy agents) to fight cancer.

The Need for Alternative Treatment Methods

Because of traditional medicine’s lack of success in cancer treatment, alternative and natural cancer therapies have been used for several decades by a few clinicians outside of the vast cancer industry. Their results and conclusions are systematically disregarded or derided, even though there are many case studies published in the medical and alternative literature. Medical progress depends upon the individual efforts of those few dedicated physicians motivated by the need to have better treatment and who are willing to move outside of traditional boundaries; however, the findings of these researchers are ignored. The reason is that our current accepted medical practices rely solely on patented drug therapies and exclude all natural products.

Unfortunately, the potential for further advances in current traditional cancer treatments are limited. Modern surgery is remarkable but probably cannot progress much more, and improvement in radiation treatments and its therapeutic effects will be slow. Chemotherapy works on the principal that it kills the cancer cells but is somewhat less toxic to normal cells. The rate of improvement in chemotherapy is very low. Chemotherapy depends on very expensive drugs controlled by the drug companies.

The cancer establishment demands that proof of research results be based on prospective double-blind, randomized clinical studies. This type of research requires that the method used to analyze data and determine results is described in advance (prospective), that researchers and patients don’t know which patients get the real treatment and which get a placebo (double blind), and that the variables in the study are applied randomly (randomized). These studies are very costly and usually aren’t feasible for clinicians who work outside of institutions funded by other sources, such as drug companies. But such tests are demanded before the possibility will be accepted that nontraditional outside of the box biological treatments have value. In my opinion, the present requirements bar is too high and needs to be replaced by the plausibility factor. This means that as the number of good clinical studies (in which a patient is directly observed) increases and are reported, it becomes more and more plausible that natural substances are helpful. When this new, more realistic bar is accepted, there will be a major increase in research to establish the merits of complementary medicine.

The Cancer Prevention Coalition report provides a wide-ranging description of many of the reasons why so little progress has been made in the area of cancer research. It recommends that the role of integrated and holistic medical practice be encouraged. The report states:

With the growing trend towards pluralism and dialogue, major changes are developing in the understanding and practice of health care. Key is the emergence of integrated and holistic medicine, which poses a powerful challenge to conventional modern high-tech medical practice in industrialized nations, apart from providing low cost care in lesser-developed countries. This challenge has been reinforced by the belated recognition of the ineffectiveness, danger and inflationary impact of a wide range of medical interventions, such as hormone replacement therapy, and surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee. Not surprisingly, it is estimated that some 40 percent of all Americans are now making many million more visits to integrated and holistic health care providers than to primary care physicians.

Integrated practitioners have clearly established themselves as teachers, rather than just treaters. As such, integrated and holistic practitioners, institutions, and organizations should be mobilized to play a lead role in the STOP CANCER Campaign, and one which could attract larger grass roots support than any other group. They could do this by shifting the current near exclusive emphasis on cancer treatment to at least equal emphasis on primary prevention, and providing the public with information on unknowing exposures to a wide range of avoidable causes of cancer, including carcinogenic prescription drugs, high dose ionizing medical procedures, and carcinogenic ingredient and contaminants in food and other consumer products, besides the importance of healthy and holistic lifestyle practices.

This report could have added orthomolecular medicine as an area that should be integrated and studied, but this term is not well known in medicine and its practices are even less known. Orthomolecular medicine is the practice of preventing and treating biochemical abnormalities, and treating their resulting diseases, through supplementation with optimal amounts of vitamins, amino acids, and other substances naturally found in the body. This is the main reason I have written this book. Its role is to teach, to explain, and to encourage physicians and healers in general and the public at large that there is promise in using natural therapies fortified with optimum, often large, doses of needed nutrients. The plausibility is great that these therapies improve treatment outcome and disease prevention.

Orthomolecular Medicine and Plausibility

Orthomolecular medicine is based on the use of optimum doses of nutrients. The optimum dose range is enormous. These large doses have been called megadoses, but this term has no accurate meaning, because it varies tremendously depending upon the nutrient and illness. It can mean 3,000 milligrams (mg) of niacin daily when the recommended daily dose to prevent pellagra is