Don’t let your doctor talk you out of a life-saving therapy

You’ve got to hand it to these mainstream medical docs. They just can’t stand the idea that anything other than what they dish out as a “cure” for cancer patients will have any effect whatsoever.

And they’ll bend over backward to prove that.

But what you’ll hear, or not hear, from your doctor about anything other than the “slash and burn” approach to treating cancer is going to depend in large part on where he practices and what he specializes in.

Alternatives gaining acceptance
Talk about scare tactics!

Four doctors straight out of the Yale School of Medicine department of radiology are doing their best to frighten anyone considering complementary or alternative medicine (CAM) to treat their cancer.

The group just published a study warning that if cancer patients don’t simply accept whatever the mainstream dishes out to them… and instead decide to go an alternative route… they are “more likely to die.”

What these researchers did was to collect a decade’s worth of data from the National Cancer Database, focusing on several kinds of cancers, including breast and prostate. They then singled out a few hundred patients who didn’t take such standard treatments as chemo and radiation and matched them to patients who did.

I won’t go into the statistical details, but the conclusion by co-author and chief Yale prostate radiologist James Yu was that those errant patients could have potentially been cured, if not for those “unscrupulous alternative medicine practitioners.”

CAM was also attacked at a recent meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, whose past president sarcastically asserted that you shouldn’t think that chemo won’t be necessary if “you live a healthy lifestyle, and you eat tree nuts.”

Wow. I guess these guys are feeling the heat about the acceptance of CAM therapies at some major medical institutions, which are studying and using alternative techniques to treat not only cancer, but many other diseases and conditions as well.

For instance:

• High-dose IV vitamin C is currently included in cancer-treatment trials being conducted at several hospitals. And it’s already being used by mainstream docs, as well as numerous alternative practitioners, to cure — yes, cure — life-threatening cases of sepsis.
• Thomas Jefferson University Hospital’s integrative health center is offering homeopathic bee-sting venom as an alternative to popping risky pain killers, like opioid drugs.
• Duke University is using Chinese herbs to treat a number of conditions.
• The Mayo Clinic has now accepted yoga as a way to relieve stress and combat chronic pain.

But nowhere are such approaches being embraced more than at Johns Hopkins. Currently, its Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center is conducting a clinical trial in using mistletoe extracts to treat cancer patients.

Actually, what researchers there are looking to find out isn’t if mistletoe has any power to cure cancer — that’s something already acknowledged — but how high a dose can be used without causing any side effects.

You might recall that actress and author Suzanne Somers refused chemo when she was diagnosed with breast cancer almost two decades ago, opting instead to receive injections of mistletoe extract. And she’s far from the only cancer patient in the U.S. who has received — and benefited — from this natural compound.

In fact, mistletoe extracts have long been effectively used by clinics in Germany to treat cancer.

Needless to say, if you were to simply accept the advice of doctors who specialize in using radiation and chemo — and have never studied the merits of any other approach — as the last word in treating cancer, you’d be doing yourself a huge disservice.

Because as far as these guys go, that old saying really fits: When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

“Cancer survival takes a hit with alternative medicine” Charles Bankhead, August 11, 2017, Medpage Today, medpagetoday.com