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PATIENTS'	NATIONAL	By Recovered Patients
	CANCER	Not Governmental
	INSTITUTE	Cost Free, Non-Profit

A Step-by-Step Guide to Recovery for Cancer Freshmen

by Cancer Graduates at www.PatientsNCI.org

HOME PAGE and SITE INDEX

Please read our Welcome and Home Page Index, below this overall Website Index.

*** We apologize for the recent disruption of service. The previous hosting service took our site down without notification and erased our backup files. We are reconstructing the website from earlier records. Please bear with us as we work to get it all up to date. ***

A. INTRODUCTION - More about Cancer, Plus Reference Books, Directories, Doctor Lists, etc.

B. DEVELOPMENTS AND UPDATES for the 2008 Edition of this website. Turning off cancer with diet by Professor Campbell, Dr. Ornish diet reverses prostate cancer, Vitamin C found effective against cancer by government, etc.

C. TREATMENTS – INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE & the PATIENTS' PROTOCOL to reverse cancer. Conventional and alternative therapy, best tests, nutrition, detox, lifestyle, immunotherapy - the very steps thousands of us used to get well. Plus: How to protect yourself from some common cancer treatments that could make things worse.

D. CANCER GRADUATES. Our founders’ case histories and a list of recovered graduates you are invited to contact. Write us when you recover, too.

E. ADDED FEATURES. A few other websites of interest. Coming later: FAQ’s, etc.

F. OUR BENEFACTORS. We are supported by donated business services and by patients and friends like you. Please visit our donor list.

Now it's your turn to recover, just like we did. There are some wonderful new ways to treat cancer that make you feel better and stronger, instead of sicker and weaker. Thousands of us chose to combine modern NUTRITIONAL MEDICINE with IMMUNOTHERAPY to eliminate our cancers more naturally. This gave us more energy, and avoided the damage to hair cells, immune cells and brain cells that can result from conventional therapy. Others combined the best of CONVENTIONAL and ALTERNATIVE THERAPY, which is called INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE. Some of us were so-called "terminal" patients, given only months or weeks to live. As Mark Twain once said, the news of our demise was greatly exaggerated.

When NIH studied the delay between world research and the actual practice of American doctors they found an astounding gap in some areas as long as 20 - 50 years. Cancer is one of those areas. Most American doctors are still relying on the same approaches that were in use over half a century ago - surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. We are recovered volunteers who have been helping one another learn the new ways to conquer cancer and to stay cancer-free. Now we sponsor this web site for open-minded doctors who want to know more about the new ways, and especially to walk with new cancer patients step-by-step, from diagnosis, through that initial panic, to selecting treatments, to recovery, to staying well. We share our own experiences along the path to recovery, so you don't have to repeat our mistakes – mistakes that can make things much worse. And we share many tips from our doctors that can increase success rates dramatically, yet are often overlooked unless the patient asks for them.

Before we talk therapy, please let us share the most surprising lesson we learned about cancer . . .

Our doctors explained that cancer cells are a natural, normal condition - just as we always have millions of germs in our body that the immune system keeps under control. But when we let our immune system get too weak (by not eating enough fresh vegetables for instance) or create too many cancer cells to control (by smoking for instance) a cancer cell may escape the immune system. Then it normally takes a long time, about 5 - 20 years, for a cancer cell to grow into a tumor large enough to see.

(Our first big mistake. We didn’t know that biopsies, medications and procedures may cause cancer to spread faster, unless special steps are taken. But these steps are usually overlooked, so we cover them on the Testing/Biopsy page of the Treatment section.)

Our doctors also explained that we have layer upon layer of whole armies of various immune system cells, genes, peptides, enzymes, self-made chemotherapy agents, etc., that successfully control cancer all life long for most people. (We laymen usually lump the armies all together as our "immune system," but technically that is only a part of our anti-cancer armies.)

Researchers speculate that several of these anti-cancer armies have to be seriously weakened for cancer to keep growing our body. Below are some of the ways our bodies keep most people tumor-free all life long.

SOME OF YOUR BODY'S ANTI-CANCER ARMIES

DNA Repair Enzymes - cut and paste DNA corrections to fix cancer cells

Apoptosis – makes non-repairable cancer cells self-destruct

Antioxidants – prevent cancer-causing damage to cells

Liver enzymes - detoxify carcinogens so they don’t cause cancer

P53 Gene System - stops cancer cells from reproducing

B-Cells - make antibodies to attack cancer

Anti-Malignin Antibody - an antibody that kills cancer cells upon contact

Helper T-Cells - direct other cells to attack cancer

Cytotoxic T-Cells - poison cancer cells with their chemotherapy

Natural Killer Cells - bind, kill cancer cells

Tumor Necrosis Factor – chemotherapy made by our own cells

Lymph Nodes - trap cancer cells for destruction by macrophages

Macrophages - devour cancer cells

Tumor Suppressor Genes – induce death of cancer cells

Neutrophils - digest dead tumors

5 Antineoplastons - Newly recognized anti-cancer peptides

17 Angiogenesis Inhibitors – Stop blood circulation to cancer cells

Fruits and Vegetables - Your body's daily chemotherapy, including literally thousands of phytonutrients shown to strengthen and activate the above anti-cancer defenses, stimulate anti-cancer genes, inhibit cancer-promoting genes, inhibit blood supply to tumors, protect cells with antioxidants, inhibit cancer enzymes, balance hormones with phytoestrogens, detoxify carcinogens, fix cancer cells, attack cancer cells directly, make cancer cells self-destruct, etc, etc.

Nutrition may be the most powerful cancer therapy known because:

1. It directly fights cancer in hundreds of ways.

2. It helps to restore the body's own anti-cancer armies to fight cancer in hundreds of ways.

3. Nutrition can also be the crucial first step of IMMUNOTHERAPY - enhancing the immune system.

So here's the most important lesson that we learned about cancer:

In spite of millions of cancer cells that develop all life long - most people remain tumor-free. That means, even with a casual diet, their body's many built-in anti-cancer armies were 100% effective, automatically stopping every type of cancer they had, without medical help.

No other cancer treatment even comes close to being as powerful as a healthy human body - so protect it, restore it, use it to get well!

NOW . . . WELCOME TO A WONDERFUL NEW ERA OF MAINSTREAM CANCER THERAPY CALLED

"INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE"

INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE adds the body's own anti-cancer systems to conventional therapy to make a more complete therapy. The old conventional therapy alone could seriously damage these very systems. Many of our own recoveries, and scientific studies which we will reference, show that INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE can be easier, healthier, safer, and can provide much greater survival time than conventional therapy alone.

From what we have observed, many cancer failures in the past were not due so much to the aggressiveness of the cancer, but to weakened resistance of the immune system plus the limited selection of treatments then available to American doctors. INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE is curing both of those problems.

For half a century, American doctors have been limited to treating cancer with three 50-year old modalities - surgery, radiation and chemotherapy (including hormones). This was known as Conventional Therapy, and they became very good at it. Meanwhile thousands of us who needed other cancer treatments to save our lives had to go to international hospitals to get them. These treatments were known in America as Alternative Therapy. (Unfortunately any snake oil for sale on the web can also call itself Alternative Therapy - so be careful to discriminate between them and proven Alternative Therapy used by doctors in hospitals.)

Conventional Therapy specialized in destroying cancer by external means. Alternative Therapy specialized in building up the patient's immune system to destroy cancer by internal means. Together they make an ideal and synergistic partnership that dramatically improves success against cancer. So modern American doctors, 80% of patients, and even Congress have demanded that the full range of successful cancer treatments be made available in America. The combination of the two schools is now becoming legal and mainstream as INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE.

Under INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE doctors can start treating cancer more logically. In most diseases doctor's normally start with the least invasive treatments first, and only escalate to more invasive treatments when and if they are needed. (And if they really work!)

As one modern doctor put it at a 2005 nutrition symposium, "At last we can treat cancer logically, the way we treat heart disease – by starting with diet and lifestyle first."

This was music to our ears, because we have devoted the last twenty-some years trying to encourage INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE in America.

Yes, now cancer doctors can start with:

Phase I. Nutrition and lifestyle to "freeze" the cancer in place (See our TREATMENT web pages on how to temporarily stop cancer in it's tracks) while they encourage the body to heal cancer like it heals other sores.

If needed they can help to reverse cancer with other non-invasive treatments like boosting the immune system, called "immunotherapy."

Phase II. If a patient is too ill to respond, they can escalate to attacking the cancer directly with certain powerful treatments selected specifically because they are compatible with strengthening the immune system.

Phase III reserves invasive treatments like surgery, chemotherapy and radiation for those patients whose immune system does not respond rapidly enough. These treatments can be dangerous for patients because they typically damage the immune system, but this problem is relieved by those preceding steps to make it extra strong.

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The preceding SITE INDEX tells what is on the rest of the website.

The index below refers to the summary on this Home Page.

1. Why a Patients' National Cancer Institute is needed

2. Which Treatments Really Worked, Which Didn't

3. Other Important Lessons We Learned About Cancer

4. Conventional + Alternative = INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE

5. Anti-Cancer Diet Therapy - The most powerful treatment of all?

6. Getting Started

7. Seven Important Steps That Are Often Overlooked

8. The Three-Phases of the Patients' Protocol

1. Why a Patients' National Cancer Institute is needed

The government's National Cancer Institute (NCI) website is excellent as far as it goes (except for their nutritional information which seems to be inspired as much by politics as by scientific research and clinical trials.) But from the patients' viewpoint, some of the most important information is missing:

The government's NCI website reveals very little about the risks of conventional therapy, and what you can do to solve them. Surgery can spread cancer, chemotherapy and radiation can create new cancer cells. Hormones can create new colonies of cancer cells much harder to treat. We will share our doctors' solutions to these life-threatening problems. With a little extra finesse, these therapies often can be made much more successful against the cancer and less harmful to the patient.

Patients' NCI penetrates the powerful politics of the cancer business to try to get you the most honest information available. Many network news reports are really planted "infomercials." Even FDA approval of drugs may be linked more closely to campaign contributions than to science in certain suspicious cases. Some other websites are notorious for misleading information, usually to sell something at inflated prices. We try hard to make this website as reliable as we can. To avoid any conflict of interest, we don't sell or charge for anything. We survive on unsolicited donations. Our information comes directly from recovered patients and medical doctors already experienced in using conventional or alternative therapy or INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE to successfully treat cancer. Research reports come from professional publications. Commentary is from recovered patients, unless otherwise identified.

America has been criticized by other nations for using a terrorist model of cancer as public policy. Cancer is frequently described with frightening words such as "wild and savage, without a cure, an unknown mystery, "

It is true that cancers can be harder to cure than some other sores, but there is a long list of diseases with a worse prognosis. We face cancer cells and germs all life long. But our immune system is arguably much more successful at fighting cancer than the common cold - we get tumors so seldom compared to the number of colds.

Our volunteers are living proof that there already are successful cures for cancer – even our own "terminal" cancers.

There is no mystery to the main causes of cancer. Smoking and bad diet are extremely well documented in the research literature. It's just that the tobacco industry and the food industry don't want us to hear about it. They spend millions of dollars on contradictory "research" so they can call the truth "controversial".

Nor do we find much mystery in how to cure cancer. It is like baking a cake or fixing a car. If all the steps are followed correctly, the results are usually excellent. That's why we highlight seven of the most important steps in our recoveries that are often overlooked. We believe that including all seven steps in INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE is a powerful way to help insure success. If one chooses to leave out some steps, of course the results are less predictable.

More on these very special seven steps later on this page.

One advantage of the terrorist approach in public policy is that massive funds can be obtained from the public. Cancer and AIDS are the "cash cows" of the medical industry. But a very serious disadvantage is that the fear is used to keep doctors and patients from using better treatments that aren't politically correct, even after they are proven, even when there is no appreciable downside risk. The terrorist technique has been used to make us cling to primitive treatment concepts that are half a century old and outrageously expensive.

Many of us panicked and surrendered our common sense when we first heard that diagnosis of cancer. Patients' NCI tries to help get that common sense back, so patients and their doctors can stand up to the cancer business and participate in their own recovery. With INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE doctors and patients are free to choose a wider variety of treatments, including nutrition as in heart disease.

The combining of treatments in INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE is relatively new to many doctors, so our Resource web page includes books listing doctors and hospitals already familiar with it. You or your doctors can consult with them, or often they can refer you to a doctor closer to home.

One of our founders was given 6 months to live some 20 years ago. Her disseminated breast cancer was cured by alternative therapies, but she had to go to an international hospital to get them. We have been helping cancer patients to get these therapies in America ever since.

There are still some old school doctors who haven't caught up with the modern understanding of how cancer works, who don't realize that the body is killing cancer cells all the time. They say our founder couldn't have had cancer in the first place, but it was diagnosed at a famous American hospital, using biopsies and surgery (which spread it through her body). Another die-hard claim we hear is that it must have been cured by the placebo effect, because alternative therapies can't cure cancer. Obviously you won't get INTEGRATIVE THERAPY from doctors like these.

Our other founder recovered from prostate cancer over 8 years ago using early INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE, which was finally becoming available right here in America. We decided to celebrate that breakthrough in availability by creating this website to share the good news with everyone.

The Patients' National Cancer Institute website is designed to be a companion to the government's National Cancer Institute website by adding much more information on integrating the treatments, and successful clinical experiences of real anti-cancer diets. Also we cover quality of life tips on how our doctors helped us avoid hair loss, pain, loss of energy and dignity, etc.

We hope our small efforts over these 20-some years will continue to help build patient and doctor awareness of the new mainstream way to treat cancer - INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE.

2. Which Treatments Really Worked, and Which Didnn't ?

One special feature of this website is that we try to help you distinguish which conventional treatments really work, and which ones don't. And we do the same for alternative treatments. We understand that you don't have a lot of time to waste on false leads, no matter how well intentioned they may be.

The CHEMOTHERAPY CONTROVERSY will be one example. For some of us, and maybe for you, chemotherapy was a life-saving miracle. For others it seemed to do more damage than the cancer. An Australian study (Clinical Oncology (2004) 16:549e560) concluded that chemotherapy improves survival time 2.1% - 2.3% of the time.

Proponents say the study was flawed and insist that chemotherapy is 2 – 3 times better than that, and besides it relieves pain in some situations. Also they say chemotherapy is cancer specific. It works best for some blood cancers, possibly some children's cancers, testicular and other rare cancers. For the usual solid tumor it may not always be very effective.

Even if it does turn out to work for only 7% of cases, we are grateful to have it if we need it. We will report on this continuing controversy in more detail on the future web pages about the invasive therapies.

To find out if chemotherapy is right for your cancer, ask your doctor about its effects on "total survival time" (This is more meaningful than 5-years statistics which can be too distorted by earlier detection, or tumor shrinkage which may not be meaningful at all.) If the FDA has approved a certain agent for your cancer, they should have these total survival statistics. If there are no such statistics, it could mean that after 50 years of trying chemotherapy, they still haven't been able to prove that it works for your situation. (You will learn of many less-invasive, sometimes more effective, choices available in INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE on the TREATMENT web pages.)

Meanwhile you can find out more about chemotherapy for your cancer by reading the exceptional book, "Questioning Chemotherapy" by Doctor Ralph Moss. (No, we don't sell it, or anything else.)

The situation in alternative therapy is even more perplexing. Several treatment modalities, such as nutrition and immunotherapy have proven very effective against cancer for decades. These are the very treatments that saved many of us who were considered "terminal" by conventional medicine. Sadly, they were pushed aside by the false hype and obscene profits of chemotherapy, etc. (That's our opinion.)

We list far more clinically tested treatments on this website than a patient is ever likely to need to get well. Yet some patients continually hop from website to website reading about new gee-whiz products that sound so good! After watching the hype for many years, it is clear that very few work at all, and fewer still work well enough to make any difference in survival. Look for their clinical studies on survival time. Find any?