Yes...funny how that works, isn't it?
Posted on 12/30/2001 9:33:13 AM PST by Go Gordon
My aunt has cancer and is currently undergoing traditional treatment. To date, it does not appear to be working. At Christmas dinner, I was told she was contemplating looking into alternative treatments, specifically one offered at St. Georg Hospital in Germany. There, they offer Whole Body Hyperthermia.
From the literature Hyperthermia appears to be a process where the entire body (except the head) is super heated to 106 or 107 degrees. I have absolutely no medical background whatsoever. So I was hoping for two things to come from my post. 1) Does anyone know about the success or lack thereof of this procedure or know about St. Georg Hospital. 2) does anyone have any good suggestions for other possible alternative treatments.
In case its helpful, although I don't have all the details, I think the cancer started in the uterus, but has now spread to the lungs and elsewhere.
—William Donald Kelley, D.D.S., M.S.
One answer to cancer
http://www.drkelley.com/CANLIVER55.html
Yes. I think she has been through, or is going through chemo, and has recently started some kind of clinical drug testing. But the drugs apparently make her feet tingle and go numb. Now they want to increase the dosage, which may increase the problem in the feet to the point of not being able to walk. Thats what started the Christmas dinner conversation about alternatives.
Thats when I thought about freerepublic - the best darned web site in the world. I knew if there was anything out there that could help, some freeper would know, or be able to point me in the right direction. Based on the responses so far, my trust has not been misplaced. Thanks for your insight....
BTW, to all that have helped, God bless you....John
Be that as it may, it's been demonstrated that sharks do indeed get cancer. Check out the links on my profile page. Aptosis -- programmed cell death -- is what will finally rid the world of cancer.
Before giving up on traditional treatment, try and determine what medical research facility is the world leader in treatment for your aunts type of cancer and go there. At such facility she will receive care from the formost experts in the field and may be able to benefit from protocols unavailable to the average oncology patient under care of a local practitioner.
I know of several cancer patients, myself included who after being told by their local physician to get their affairs in order went to premier medical research facilities and are doing fine and disease free many years after initial diagnosis of lung, prostate, metastatic malignant melanoma and colorectal cancer. Our family physician is an older man who approximately 15-20 years ago was diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia. At the time, hairy celled leukemia was virtually 100 percent fatal. He went to a research facility and took part in a clinical trial of a drug called alpha-interferon. It turns out, alpha-interferon is a near 100 percent cure for hairy celled leukemia. had he not gone to that research center, he wouldn't have been able to take part in the clinical trial and would have died a few years before the drug was approved for treatment of the disease.
And I would stay away from sites like that "QuackWatch" ... its been my experience that's where the real quacky lies.
My prayers are with you and your aunt.
On Studying Cancer
I am all for making an informed and well researched decision. And think most people who use alternatives are generally well informed on their treatments as well as their disease.--from a previous poster.
The problem is twofold:
1. Most of what people who take the 'alternative' route use for sources for research is without scientific merit.
2. They generally lack both the knowledge and skill to read, to understand, and to interpret the papers that present the results of basic science research. This is no put-down to these people, but just a statement of fact. It's true for any question that presupposes both a certain level and breadth of knowledge of a particular topic, whether it's the engineering of coal-fired electrical plants, the handgrinding of solid carbide surgical burrs, or restaurant management. The sheer amount of information (and disinformation) that's out there on any subject is staggering. It takes much time and effort to get a sense of what's current in just one little area of one little area.
Suppose someone is diagnosed with colon cancer and he says he doesn't trust his doctor because all he'll recommend is surgery and he's in league with the surgeons to give them more work. Besides, the thought of surgery is really scary and is a positive confirmation both of the presence of a deadly disease as well as his own inability to do anything about it on his own. Consequently, he says he's going to take the 'alternative' route to treatment and is going to research things on his own. Since he doesn't trust medical science because of its monetary self-interest, everything medical science says is suspect. Where does he go, then, for information? To those who sell alternative medications and procedures? The same can be said of them in terms of self-interest. Does he type in 'colon cancer' AND 'cures' into some search engine? If he does, he'll come back with literally thousands of web pages (Altavista using the above criteria) which can take thousands of hours to read. But even then he has only scraped the surface and all the while the cancer is progressing toward a more serious condition.
The lone researcher still has to have some way of separating the pages with accurate information from those that are simply untrue and from those which are actively misleading. How will he do it? Simply being willing to research will have no positive effect on the progression of his cancer. The tumor doesn't give a rat's ass [this is a tumor immunology joke since a lot of cancers are implanted on a rat's hind quarters] about how hard the person it's going to kill is willing to work to become truly knowledgable about it. It has its own set of conditions and timetable.
If he wanted to go to the principal scientific journals in the field of medical research in general, cancer in particular, and colon cancer specifically, he would be faced with the same problem. If he went to PubMed, a resource of thousands of peer-reviewed journals in the fields of medical science, and entered "colon cancer" AND review into the PubMed Query in order to find articles which give an overview of the subject of colon cancer and the research being done in it, he would get a return of 1273 articles. And these are not the primary source papers. If he just looked up 'colon cancer', he would get a return of 9158 papers on the subject. The problem would still remain of learning sufficient background material as well as techniques in human physiology, animal physiology, genetics, pharmacology, molecular biology, surgery, cell biology, etc., etc., to be able to understand what the papers are saying.
In addition to that, he would need enough experience to be able to read the papers and determine whether their results were arrived at in a way that others could independently reproduce. He would need to know how those results applied to males versus females, old versus young, with this or that complicating medical condition. After that, he would still need the knowledge and experience to be able to judge whether the conclusions the researchers draw from their results were valid.
And finally, he needs some way of determining whether he is picking one thing and rejecting another because it does or doesn't appeal to what he has already decided he wants to be true.
Meanwhile, he's been diagnosed with a particularly deadly form of cancer that needs treatment NOW. What should he do? The best thing, since he lacks time and expertise, is to go to someone who has gone through all of that training mentioned above. That person is called a medical doctor. Some of them specialize in the diagnosis of the disease; some, in the medical treatment of it; some, in the surgical treatment of it; some, in the radiological treatment of it. They work together to pool their knowledge in the subject as it applies to one person in particular and try to find the most effective way of treating the disease in that individual. The single individual becomes the recipient of the benefits of hundreds of thousands of hours of study and experience he could not possibly get on his own.
So sometimes doctors are wrong. They aren't gods. They don't know everything. But in general they'll be far more likely to know what to do in a given medical situation than some clerk at General Nutrition Center with a certificate in herbal bowelology he got mail order from The Center for Wholistic Healing.
by aruanan
There is no worse form of scammer than those who prey on people with cancer.
I know a lot of oncologists, and I dare anyone here to suggest they're in it for the money. Every single one of them would be overjoyed to train in a different line of work if a true cure were found.
Yes...funny how that works, isn't it?
Here is a link to a book at Amazon by Dirk Benedict, who starred in 2 TV shows in the 80's (Battlestar Galactica & The A-Team). He says that he cured his prostate cancer by switching to the Macrobiotic Diet. This book explains why he chose to do that, and also about his experience since:
Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy
Finally, here is a link to the Kushi Institute in Massachusetts. It is an educational center that teaches people about Macrobiotics:
I personally have read Dirk's book, and do believe him when he says that he cured himself of cancer with this. I think it is something worth checking out. No matter what she decides, I wish the very best to your Aunt, and to the rest of your family.
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