Nutritional Treatment of Cancer (part1)
Revisiting my earlier ideas about writing a book on the nutritional treatment/prevention of Cancer
A question in response to yesterday’s “ask me anything” post has provided me the opportunity to explain and expand a few ideas that I’ve actually been carrying around for at least 20 years, precisely since 2001 when I relocated from Seattle Washington to Houston Texas at a time when my stepfather was confronted with simultaneous lymphoma and melanoma and my mother was having a recurrence of ovarian cancer. Also around that same time in my clinical practice, I was working with many cancer patients. As a result of these experiences plus my previous training in Oncology in naturopathic medical school, I had started to formulate a protocol for cancer patients based on the best available research, the most practical implementation, and the best “bang for the buck” to keep the price affordable while providing the most important benefits with the minimal occurrence of adverse effects.
“When the oncologists observed success following their treatments, then they attributed the success to their medical interventions whereas when the same doctors observed success following my nutritional protocol they denigrated the same results achieved with lower cost and lower toxicity as attributable to “spontaneous remission” or an “error in diagnosis”, which was apparently easier for them to accept than the fact that my nutritional intervention was working.”
In fact, the first book that I ever began to outline was for the nutritional treatment of cancer although I later opted to write on Integrative Orthopedics and then Integrative Rheumatology, the latter of which evolved over the course of 10 years (plus 100 written articles, 20 books, and another doctorate degree) into Inflammation Mastery.
Inflammation Mastery 4th Edition is 1,882 pages full-color printing equivalent to 25 individual books available internationally in paper and ebook formats.
More recently in 2022, I’ve had the idea of revisiting this theme but from a slightly different angle emphasizing the treatment of “early”* cancer obviously for the goal of preventing it from developing into clinically significant disease.
Back in 2001, I had initially planned to write the book in 10 sections/chapters which approximated my early clinical protocol which was centered around 10 treatments. Ten treatments in most cases is sufficient, and much more than that becomes overwhelming for patients who are already sick, stressed and physically and financially strapped due to their diagnosis. I suppose that my early clinical experiences and successes in the treatment of cancer also introduced me to the beast of medical politics and professional bias because what I noticed is that any time we had success in the treatment of cancer the oncology doctors would always call it “spontaneous remission” or “wrong diagnosis” even though they had confirmed the aggressive/terminal cancer diagnosis with biopsy, laboratory tests, imaging and surgical samples. When the oncologists observed success following their treatments, then they attributed the success to their medical interventions whereas when the same doctors observed success following my nutritional protocol they denigrated the same results achieved with lower cost and lower toxicity as attributable to “spontaneous remission” or an “error in diagnosis”, which was apparently easier for them to accept than the fact that my nutritional intervention was working.
Their ego defenses were like Kevlar exoskeletons that prevented them from learning from new experiences, new observations, and new scientific evidence.
After all, no-one wants to admit to themselves that they suffered through 11 years of daily abuse for 120 hours per week just to become puppets for the pharmaceutical industry and have their dream of helping humanity hijacked and then morphed into professional territorialism.
Again, the context here is that I was practicing in Houston Texas, home of the world-famous Houston Medical Center which is essentially an entire neighborhood if not an entire city of specialty clinics and hospitals which draws people from all over the world, especially when they are confronted with advanced or more complicated diseases. As such, I was either collaborating with or competing with some of the world’s most highly-trained and most ego-defensive oncologists. Their ego defenses were like Kevlar exoskeletons that prevented them from learning from new experiences, new observations, and new scientific evidence. After all, no-one wants to admit to themselves that they suffered through 11 years of daily abuse for 120 hours per week just to become puppets for the pharmaceutical industry and have their dream of helping humanity hijacked and then morphed into professional territorialism1.
* In truth, I don’t know if I really need to distinguish between early cancer and more advanced cancer with regards to the implementation of this protocol. To be sure, some of the details change (more quantitatively than qualitatively), but the underlying physiology and pathophysiology remain largely the same. So if I were to title the book specific to “early cancer” then that might discourage people with more advanced disease from accessing the protocol. On the other hand, keeping it specific to “early cancer” would certainly be more conservative and less likely to bring censorship and attack from the medical industrial complex, which is very territorial—not in protecting patients or its expertise but in protecting its profits and positions of power, as noted in the specialty journal The Oncologist—PDF provided below:
“New developments in cancer treatment include expensive technological “bells and whistles” which physicians must ultimately evaluate objectively, despite lush advertisements from companies with obvious vested interests, and authoritative testimonials from biased investigators who presumably believe in their own work to the point of straining credulity and denying common sense. ... translate: economic improvement, not biological superiority."
“For Cancer in situ, is there a nutrition strategy to keep Cancer in situ?”
For the sake of completeness and organization/centralization, I’ll provide my reply to yesterday’s “ask me anything” post here and will then continue to develop this theme in additional posts in the near future. My reply below is in response to a question about addressing early localized cancer or what we call “cancer in situ” which essentially translates to cancer “on/in site”which means that it’s localized to a very small area:
For sure! But of course different types of cancer behave differently and provide either more or less opportunity for therapeutic intervention. For example, cervical cancer in women readily provides the opportunity for local/topical treatments which of course is completely different from a cancer in an internal/inaccessible organ such as the liver or kidney. Furthermore, some cancers are just easier to "reverse" than are others – again cervical cancer in women is relatively/generally easy to reverse in its early stages. Importantly and additionally, cervical cancer in women has a strong viral component as well as a bacterial/microbiome component both of which can be modified in addition to trying to treat the cancer itself. If we're talking about a different type of cancer – let's assume prostate cancer in this case – then of course the dynamic is much more complicated because some of those tumors are quite slow to grow while other types are impressively aggressive even affecting men in their 30s. Sometimes we either can or cannot address the hormonal aspect of tumors that are typically affected by hormone receptors; classic examples here are breast cancer and prostate cancer but also other types of cancers such as colon cancer. Regardless of all of the above, we can still intervene with nutritional supplementation and dietary modification. The first book that I set out to write 20 years ago was actually on cancer therapy because I was “treating” a lot of cancer patients at that time when I was in private practice in Houston Texas. Vitamin D shows good benefit, and you can take a look at the videos I provided previously with regard to using vitamin D and selenium against cervical cancer in women.* If you want to provide more details I might be able to answer more specifically. Thanks for your question.
Territorialism can refer to: Animal territorialism, the animal behavior of defending a geographical area from intruders