When singer Warren Zevon was diagnosed with lung cancer, doctors gave him three months to live. He refused chemotherapy because it would have interfered with working on his last album. He said in an interview, “I didn’t want any drastic alterations in my health – other than dying.”
Warren lasted a year. And he kept right on smoking, till the end. Not exactly a holistic approach, but he quadrupled their estimate without treatment. Using their logic, I guess someone could actually make a case from this that cigarettes are four times as effective as chemotherapy for terminal lung cancer.
Perhaps you too have finally said – No more – whatever happens will happen. You’ve refused further standard cancer treatment because you’ve found out either through research or through personal experience, that for the vast majority of cancer cases, it just doesn’t work. People’s last months are made miserable with no upside.
So there you are, without a net. Guess what? There never was one. So forget the politics of hospitals and insurance. You may feel that they ran their game on you and the required funds were transferred from one account to another in some data base somewhere, and here you are sitting at home looking out the window.
A good warrior must always assess his present position, evaluate his losses and assets, and move forward. So what have you got? Well, you’re alive. Maybe they predicted that you wouldn’t make it this long or else you’ve got X amount of time to live. Who cares? What do they know? You’re no longer on their agenda, so now your calendar’s wide open. You refuse to die on schedule.
What else have you got? Well, you still have some kind of immune system left, or else you’d be dead.
WHAT IS CANCER?
Everybody talks about the immune system, but few can tell you what it is. Your immune system is a complicated system of cells and biological reactions which the body employs to ward off invaders and to prevent its own cells from deteriorating and mutating. The immune system is responsible for recognizing foreign proteins and cells and for triggering an attack against them.
The immune system is a never-ending second-by-second check of all your cells to see if they still look like the rest of you. If they don’t, they’re immediately attacked: the inflammatory response.
Most legitimate researchers, including Nobel prize winner Sir MacFarlane Burnet, [22] know that in the normal body hundreds of potential cancer cells appear every day. These defective mutated cells are usually destroyed by the normal immune system and never cause a problem. Cancer only gets started when a failing immune system begins to allow abnormal cells to slip by without triggering an attack on them.
Other cancer cells do not trigger the immune response at all because the DNA is not that different from normal cells. Then they begin to proliferate, having lost the ability to specialize. De-differentiation. That’s what cancer is. Runaway tissue.
So looking at it this way, a tumor is a symptom, not a problem. A symptom of a failing immune system. (Moss, [22])
Here’s another headline: Most cancers are not found until autopsy. That’s because they never caused any noticeable symptoms. Examples abound: 30 – 40 times as many cases of thyroid, pancreatic, and prostate cancer are found in autopsy than ever presented to the doctor. According to a study cited in top British medical journal Lancet 13 Feb 93, early screening often leads to unnecessary treatment: 33% of autopsies show prostate cancer but only 1% die from it.
After age 75, half of males may have prostate cancer, but only 2% die from it. This means that the immune system can hold many problems in check, as long as it is not compromised by powerful procedures. The body has a powerful ability to encapsulate altered tissue areas, indefinitely.
BIOPSY VS. ENCAPSULATION
It’s this exact natural mechanism of protective encapsulation that is vehemently disregarded by conventional medicine whenever cancer is suspected. Usually a lump. We have to biopsy it, they cry, to see whether or not it’s cancerous. And immediately! Why?
First of all, by the time any lump is big enough to be detected, it has usually been there for at least a year, maybe several. So what’s the rush? Why not see how your body handles it, unmodified by human experimentation? If it remains unchanged over time, chances are the encapsulation can eventually be resorbed, or at least permanently walled off.
The act of biopsy physically violates the body’s evolved powers of self-protection by exposing the tumor to all the other tissues the needle had to pass through both on the way in and the way out. As well as oxygen. Any protective encapsulation is thereby breached and contaminated. This virtually invites metastasis.
It is well documented that tumors can be encapsulated for an individual’s entire life, never becoming active. These common sense notions are simply not entertained, not deemed worthy of consideration by the specialists who are anxious to let the billing cycles begin as soon as possible.
The medical philosophy behind biopsy is classic Kragen thinking: the body is a car, made up of unrelated, non-living, inert parts. What we do here will have no effect on anything else.
If a lump is discovered, anywhere, your phone will ring off the hook day and night until you agree to get the biopsy. The patient is not allowed to get too comfortable with the notion that the more time goes by without treatment, the better he feels. Or that the body actually has powerful resources of healing all its own, encapsulation being one of them.
You want to see some fancy doubletalking, bring this subject up with your oncologists. They’ll be very worried you even thought of it, and will go to extreme lengths to convince you that your body does not have this power of walling off invaders and tumors, despite what the histology and physiology texts have stated for the past 100 years.
Always remember, if you suddenly find yourself labelled as a cancer patient; is the result of every single decision by your doctors going to provide them with the highest number of billable drugs and procedures in the shortest amount of time? Always ask that question first. Is it a coincidence? Just try looking at it from that perspective and see if you can put the pieces together. Your health, comfort, safety, overall long-term well being? Not usually factored in.
Then consider delaying biopsy until some visible perceptible health change warrants such an invasive and potentially carcinogenic procedure. What’s the worst that could happen by doing that? Few people die of cancer only; most die of cancer treatment. That’s the far greater danger, statistically.
If you have cancer, guess which system is the most important to you at this time, more than it’s ever been before in your whole life. Right – your immune system. Now guess which system suffers the most from chemotherapy and radiation. Right again. So the one time in your life you most need it, your immune system will be weakened by those therapies. Billions of free radicals. That’s what the word cytotoxic means.
As we will see, most people don’t die of cancer; they die from cancer treatment. A study in Journal of the American Medical Association of 223 patients concluded that no treatment at all for prostate cancer actually was better than any standard chemotherapy, radiation or surgical procedure. (Johansson [41]) Unlikely the statistics would be any different today since the recommended procedures have not substantially changed.
DYING ON SCHEDULE
An astounding feature of the standard high pressure sales job for cancer treatment is when the doctor in his godlike fashion delivers that Wagnerian pronouncement that the patient has X years to live. Very sorry to have to tell you this but you probably have less than a year… Hard to understand why most people would still want to follow any advice from someone who has just told them that. Because what the doctor is saying here is that according to our best estimates, using our best available technology, drugs and procedures, our experience with patients who have what you have puts your life expectancy at…
Defies belief that most people just roll over and comply without any objections whatsoever. Social Darwinism at work again.
What a more logical, thoughtful individual might perceive from such a death sentence is that hey, this guy is telling me what will likely happen if I stick around and do what he says. Time to roll. Time for me to start looking around for a second opinion and see if I can’t find out about some other solutions to my situation that have a little sunnier outlook. Like a cure for example. Or survival. Somebody somewhere must have some better information than this for my little problem – it’s a big world out there.
And this is the type of initiative that leads people to investigate natural cures, programs that don’t include words like terminal and palliative and side effects and expiration date and cell death.
Alternative: the standard sheeplike compliance usually ends up as a self-fulfilling prophecy – they die on schedule.
Try this one. Best advice for someone who just been told how long he has to live: ask the doctors to put it in writing. Just ask them. They’ll never do it. Try and think about why not.
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