Defeat Cancer (11 page)

I have other patients who will contact my office and say, “My doctor says that this is quackery, so why should I do this?” When this happens, I know that we are in trouble. Such patients aren’t operating out of faith, and that is a problem. The man with stage four pancreatic cancer had faith, but it wasn’t an irrational faith. He chose to see me, based upon what he had read about me and his initial interactions with the staff at my office. He wasn’t into magical thinking; he was far too smart for that. He just had faith that he was going to get well, and this belief helped him to get well. He read
about what I did, decided that my treatments were his best option and had no fear or anxiety about his decision to come see me.

Anxiety kills. Stress turns on the sympathetic nervous system, and when this system turns on, the body breaks down. When this physiological-stress nervous system (sympathetic nervous system) turns on, it breaks down tissue that’s needed for energy at the time of stress. Stress is antithetical to healing. The man with pancreatic cancer was told that he was going to die, but he chose to handle the situation without fear. He wasn’t naïve, but he wasn’t afraid. He dealt with it. If people with cancer can’t get over their fears, that’s going to affect their healing. At our practice, we think fear and anxiety are our greatest enemies. Patients that don’t have faith in what we do can’t get well. Their brains are more powerful than our therapies, and if they are being treated by a doctor that they don’t have faith in, that’s scary for them. If I was being treated by a doctor that I had no faith in, I would be out the door of his office so fast—no, I would be crawling out of his window! Even if patients do my treatments, if they don’t believe in them, their brains will override anything that I can do biochemically for them. The brain is powerful. In order to heal, people need to have faith in the type of treatment that they are doing.

That’s why we are selective about the patients we treat. It’s not for our benefit, but for theirs. There’s no point in taking in a patient who would rather be at Sloan-Kettering Clinic, doing conventional treatments. I have patients who somehow got talked into coming to my office, but they would really rather not be here. So we try to “feel them out” beforehand. I can tell if they would rather be in the conventional medical world, and if so, I must tell them, “You really shouldn’t be here.” Whenever I do that, they almost look relieved. But I have to tell them this, even though I know that conventional medicine isn’t going to work for them, because receiving conventional care is what they need in order to feel okay emotionally. American conventional medicine may not be the best for treating cancer, but it’s still the authority, and some people need that, along with the fancy facilities and expertise that conventional medicine
provides. We are on the fringe of medicine, and that makes some people nervous.

It may not always be the patient who’s nervous, either, but the patient’s cousin who’s a nurse and who thinks we are crazy. There are usually plenty of relatives who think that their loved ones with cancer should be going to the Mayo clinic, instead of to the “crazy doctor in New York who does enemas.” People with cancer have to have faith if they are going to go the alternative route with their treatments, because they aren’t going to get support for this kind of medicine from their local doctors and families. In fact, they usually get the opposite and they have to be strong enough to stand up to that.

Patients who have a lot of fear and anxiety are always tough to heal. Everyone who comes in for cancer treatment is scared, yes, but they have to have faith to get over that, and believe that they are going to get well, even though their local doctors may have told them that they are going to die. The people who believe that they are going to get well, no matter what, are those who have the best outcomes.

I believe that attitude is the single most important determinant of success for any type of treatment, although if patients don’t believe in the therapy that they are doing, they won’t ultimately comply with it, anyway. Even if they do, their brains will sabotage it, because they don’t believe in it, and their brains can shut it off, but if they are able to reverse their thinking, their physiology completely changes for the better.

Some people are so driven by fear that they can read the case reports on our website and still ask questions like, “How come there isn’t someone like me on there?” No single person is exactly like another, yet a person operating out of fear and anxiety will find a way to minimize or undermine the power of those successful cases. They will say things like, “Well, (that person who got healed) is a man rather than a woman.” Or, “I’m from Toledo, but this other person who got well is from Cincinnati, so how can I relate to that?”
People shouldn’t underestimate the power of fear and anxiety, because it can undermine most anything.

In any case, people with that level of fear about my treatments don’t belong in my office, because the experience would be difficult for them. I would prefer that they go to Sloan-Kettering, if they are more comfortable there. Most of the patients that we accept would rather die than go to a major cancer tertiary treatment center, though. They don’t care what the doctors think. Those that have “Sloan-Kettering syndrome” (and I say that with respect because I was going to spend my life there) are patients who need the authority and support of the medical community behind them, so places like Sloan-Kettering are where they belong. I don’t do what the doctors there do, but they are still smart people.

You know, nobody trusts what politicians say anymore. People are even skeptical about religious authorities. But the one great authority that they still respect is doctors and conventional medicine. I have seen journalists who don’t believe what any politician or religious authority tells them go to Sloan-Kettering or the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and take what they are fed there as if it were the Word of God. They don’t question it nor understand it, but perhaps due to the influence of pharmaceutical companies, or ego, they tend to believe that medicine is comprised of wonderful, dedicated scientists searching objectively for the truth, not people with prejudices and egos like everyone else! So medicine remains, in our culture, one of the last great bastions of authoritarian control that people bow down to and don’t question too much.

Statistically, the success rate of conventional treatment for most cancers hasn’t changed much over the last 50 years. Most patients who have been cured had cancers that were localized at the time of their diagnosis and which were cured by surgery. Chemotherapy and radiation can do nothing for most solid tumors of the lung, breast, pancreas, ovaries, liver, colon, and uterus, especially when they are metastatic. Like Suzanne Somers said in her book,
Knockout,
few cancers today respond to chemotherapy. Those that do are the same ones that responded to chemotherapy nearly 30 years ago; the childhood leukemias, testicular cancers, choriocarcinomas, Hodgkin’s disease, and certain lymphomas. So for the great majority of cancers, chemotherapy and radiation still do nothing, just as they did nothing 50 years ago! The only way that conventional medicine can cure these cancers is if they are caught early and can be surgically removed, but most of the time, they aren’t caught early. So for the great majority of cancers, the standard approach, including immunotherapy, doesn’t do much at all. There has been very little progress despite all of the claims.

I’ve often asked myself this question. Some oncologists may do conventional treatments for the money, but I think most are well-intentioned. However, if they are experts in pancreatic cancer, for instance, then they know that their patients just don’t get well. What kind of expertise is that? If I was an oncologist who was an expert in pancreatic cancer, I would get so discouraged. I mean, I’m supposed to be an expert and I can’t get anyone well? And year after year, these “experts” are treating patients who are dying. I guess they hope that there will be some effective new treatment on the horizon. That’s the cheerleading approach to medicine—that there will always be some new remedy down the road that works, but in conventional cancer care, there haven’t been that many new remedies and those that have been invented aren’t that great. Take the new drug, Avastin, for example. I read in the Wall St. Journal that it has earned five to six billion dollars in revenue. It’s supposed to stop cancer angiogenesis (new blood vessel growth), and has been heralded as a miracle drug. All cancers were supposed to respond to it, but not only does it not do anything for breast cancer, for which it was highly promoted, it also has serious side effects and the FDA is thinking of yanking it for breast cancer, after millions of dollars have already been spent on its development. It made the front page of the New York Times, but it just doesn’t work well for breast cancer.

Managing hundreds of very sick patients is a lot of work for a physician, and my wife will tell you that I work seven days a week. I also have to keep up with all the new research, but I don’t regret my decision to become a doctor. It’s a choice I made, and it’s a lot of fun because I see most of my patients get well. If I was an oncologist and most of my patients didn’t get well, it would be a depressing job for me. Then again, most oncologists don’t interact much with their patients. They work with nurses, who administer the chemotherapy to their patients. Here at my office, I work one-on-one with my patients. I have also seen a lot of oncologists detach from their patients when they don’t do well. As their patients get worse, the oncologists come to see them in their hospital rooms less and less, and most of their care ends up being through orders which they give to their nurses. I think that emotionally detaching from their patients helps them to do their job.

One of the problems with getting our treatment approach into mainstream medicine is that enzymes and nutritional supplements can’t be patented, and therefore, aren’t studied and promoted because drug companies don’t want to fund anything that can’t be patented. I understand the position that the drug companies are in, but there needs to be a change in our governmental policies, too, and the government is in collusion with the drug companies. There are a thousand full-time drug company lobbyists in Washington. That’s two for every congressman and senator! They are all working full-time, making six figure incomes and trying to influence medical legislation. Right now, drug companies are happy about the new health care legislation under President Obama, because their drugs will all be covered by the new health care laws. This is because their lobbyists have cut special deals with congressmen in the back rooms in Washington. The drug companies will make billions of dollars under these new laws. There is nothing in medical legislation that favors alternative medicine. That’s why drug companies aren’t fighting Obama’s health care plan. Their drugs are going to
be paid for now, by taxpayers—to the tune of billions of dollars in profits per year. There is so much collusion between government research institutions like the NCI (National Cancer Institute) and the drug companies. I know because I worked with the NCI for ten years and it’s like the Harvard business school for the drug industry! You go to work for the NCI, FDA, NIH (National Institutes of Health), and after five or ten years, you can go to work as an executive for a drug company and earn 1.5 million dollars per year. These government institutions are training ground for drug company executives. And for them, scientific truth is secondary to profit.

One of the nice things about living in a relatively free country is that people can still raise their voices and protest such injustices, but the fact that no drug company opposes the Obama Care health plan is detrimental to the work of people like me, because we receive no support, no insurance coverage, and no research funding for our treatments. It all goes to the drug companies.

Sadly, politicians don’t understand medicine, and if the information that they receive about it doesn’t come from a drug company lobbyist, then they don’t hear about it, don’t care, and aren’t interested in any other type of medicine. So the only way that people like me survive is because of word of mouth. People hear about my office and the successful results that we have here, and they come. Or they hear about it through books, like this one and Suzanne Somers’. The interest in alternative, or natural, medicine is driven strictly by the American population. It’s a wonderful thing to see. This interest persists despite the enormous antagonism of the NCI, NIH, government research groups, and the drug companies that would rather get rid of supplements and doctors like me. We survive only because of public demand, because the voice of the people demands that we exist. The support for what we do isn’t going to come from the government or the drug companies—that I promise you. They couldn’t care less about successful cancer treatments in alternative medicine. They actually think the world would be better off without supplements and “alternative” medicine.

My greatest challenge as a practitioner is helping my patients to get over their fears. They are facing death, so of course they are afraid, but they have to get over it. In terms of changing the world, I don’t think globally, but instead work on a one-on-one, personal level with people. This is a patient by patient battle, and each battle must be fought differently and I must think fast in order to determine how to best fight each one. So my greatest challenge is the next patient who will walk into my office on Monday morning and how I will work with them to get them better. Every patient who comes to see me is an adventure. Every battle has to be fought in a slightly different way. So as for changing the world, for me, it’s one patient at a time.