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 FOR THE 2009 EDITION

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

WEBSITE INDEX

A. INTRODUCTION – More about Cancer, plus Reference Books, Directories, Doctor Lists, etc.

B. UPDATES & DEVELOPMENTS for the 2009 Edition of this website. Newsweek challenges 50-year old conventional therapies. Turning off cancer with diet by Professor Campbell. Dr. Ornish diet reverses prostate cancer. Vitamin C found effective against cancer by NIH. Etc.

C. TREATMENTS & TESTS – The PATIENTS' PROTOCOL explains better ways that thousands of us used to reverse cancer, including better tests, Integrative Medicine, conventional and alternative therapy, nutrition, detoxification, healthier lifestyle, immunotherapy, etc. Plus: How to protect yourself from common cancer treatments that could make things worse.

D. CANCER GRADUATES. Our founders' case histories and a beginning list of recovered graduates you are invited to contact. Write us when you graduate 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.

WELCOME !

Now it's your turn to graduate from a cancer education, just like we did. We learned so many ways to make our lives healthier and happier, for us and our loved ones, that some of us actually became grateful to this cancer adventure. (Afterwards ! ) This is an authoritative source of information from doctors who specialize in curing cancer with nutrition and immunotherapy, instead of surgery, chemo, and radiation. We are the patients who were saved by their treatments. Most of us learned about these doctors and their life-saving treatments from other patients, so this website is our way to give back.

We sponsor this web site to share these international therapies with open-minded doctors, as these therapies are finally allowed into America as INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE. And we especially want 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 trial-and-error mistakes, mistakes that can waste critical time and make the patient much worse. We share many tips from our doctors that can increase success rates dramatically, yet are often overlooked unless the patient asks for them.

A special purpose of this website is to identify treatments that really worked, whether they are called conventional or alternative. They have had to pass 3 tests:

1. They are used and recommended by licensed American or international medical doctors, hospitals and clinics.

2. They are supported by science and by clinical experience.

3. These are the very treatments that we used to get well.

But remember, we are patients - not doctors - and can't say if what worked for us will work for your situation.

Thousands of us chose to combine NUTRITIONAL MEDICINE with IMMUNOTHERAPY to eliminate our cancers more naturally. This gave us higher energy, and avoided the destruction of hair cells, immune cells and brain cells that can result from conventional therapy. We believe nutritional therapy may be a particularly ideal treatment for widely metastasized “terminal” cancer because the more treatments patients get, the healthier they get - just the opposite of conventional cancer treatments. 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.

We used to have to go to international hospitals to get these cancer therapies that saved our lives. But now, pioneering doctors are providing these treatments in America. When NIH studied the delay between world research and the actual practice of most American doctors they found an astounding gap in some areas as long as 20 - 50 years! The special 2008 cancer issue of Newsweek decried the fact that most American cancer doctors still rely on the same basic approaches they were using over half a century ago - surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.

Cancer is the cash cow of the multi-billion dollar medical business in America. Entrenched interests have worked fiercely and successfully to protect their turf, fighting change by using official government agencies, local medical associations and questionable research to keep doctors and patients away from competing therapies. To their credit, Congress cracked this dike against change by forcing the National Institute of Health to open up to alternative therapies. But resistance is well funded and most of the time, it is still up to the patient to seek out these courageous doctors and their modern therapies. (See the INTRODUCTION section for directories and doctor lists.)

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

Our doctors explained that cancer cells are a natural, normal condition - just like we have millions of germs in our body all the time. Our body has trillions of cells being reproduced all life long, and it knows that millions of them will come out wrong. So it is designed to seek out mistakes and to fix or recycle these cells. What we call our immune system normally keeps both germs and cancer cells under control. But when we let our immune system get too weak (by not eating enough salad vegetables for instance) or we make too many cancer cells to control (by smoking for instance) a cancer cell may escape the immune system. Then it usually 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. Special prevention steps can be taken, but they are usually overlooked unless the patient asks for them. So we cover these special steps on the Testing/Biopsy page of the Treatment section.)

Doctors explained that we have layer upon layer of whole armies of various immune system cells, genes, peptides, enzymes, self-made chemotherapy agents, etc, 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 the immune system is only a part of our anti-cancer defenses.)

Researchers speculate that several of these anti-cancer armies have to be seriously weakened for cancer to keep growing in our body. Unfortunately, many of these very armies can be seriously damaged by conventional cancer therapy, especially chemotherapy and radiation, making it easier for cancer to return.

SOME WAYS YOUR BODY CONTROLS CANCER NATURALLY

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

Apoptosis – makes non-repairable cancer cells self-destruct

P53 Gene System - stops cancer cells from reproducing

Antioxidants – prevent cancer-causing damage to cells

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

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 – make chemotherapy to poison cancer cells

Natural Killer Cells - bind, kill cancer cells

Tumor Necrosis Factor – more 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 – Inhibit blood circulation to cancer cells

Fruits and Vegetables - Your body's daily chemotherapy, including literally thousands of phytonutrients shown to strengthen, activate and help 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, repair cancer cells, attack cancer cells directly, make cancer cells self-destruct, etc, etc.

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. Just imagine what they can do with a better diet! No other cancer treatment even comes close to being as powerful as a healthy human body with the right nutrition - so protect it, restore it, use it to get well!

A major problem with conventional therapy

is that it focuses on the destruction of the current tumor, often at the expense of the health of the patient. But cancer is a systemic disease and the tumor may be only a symptom of the body's sick anti-cancer systems that couldn’t do their job. Destroying the symptom without fixing the underlying cause can allow tumors to return again and again - especially when treatments like surgery, chemotherapy and radiation can damage the body's anti-cancer defenses even more. Too often, conventional therapy may only amount to temporary FIRST AID.

Alternative therapy focuses on restoring the health of the patient

and especially their own anti-cancer defenses. Then they can eliminate the tumor naturally as they were designed to do. Since the tumor may have several years head start, alternative therapy can also help the process along with many powerful treatments that attack the cancer cells directly like conventional therapy, but are especially selected to not damage health. For example, Vitamin C chemotherapy has been shown to kill about half of the types of cancer cells outright, and to severely weaken the rest. (See NEWS section for reference.) After recovery the patient maintains the health of the body’s anti-cancer defenses with good diet and lifestyle. Then future cancer cells can be eliminated automatically, so tumors cannot grow again. We see this as the real CURE.

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

"INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE"

INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE adds the body's own anti-cancer defenses to conventional therapy to make a more complete therapy. The old conventional therapy alone could seriously suppress these very defenses. We believe many cancer failures in the past were not due so much to the aggressiveness of the cancer, but more to the patient’s weakened cancer defenses plus the limited selection of treatments then available to American doctors. INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE is now 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 Cancer Therapies 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 can dramatically improve success against cancer. So modern American doctors, 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 in America as “INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE.”

Under INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE doctors can start treating cancer with more common sense. 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, like we treat heart disease – by starting with diet and lifestyle first."

This was music to our ears, because we have devoted over two decades to encouraging INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE in America.

Yes, now American cancer doctors can treat patients in three logical phases:

Phase I. Nutrition and lifestyle can help to "freeze" the cancer in place (See our TREATMENT web pages on how to temporarily inhibit cancer growth) while encouraging the body to heal cancer like it heals other sores. Cancer can be eliminated even faster by adding other compatible treatments like “immunotherapy” to supercharge the immune system.

Phase II. If a cancer is advanced, or a patient needs more help, doctors can escalate by attacking the cancer directly with certain powerful treatments selected specifically because they are compatible with making the patient healthier and strengthening the immune system. This phase would not include chemotherapy, radiation or other harmful therapies. In actual practice, doctors experienced in these therapies often launch both Phase I and II right away, as soon as baseline testing permits.

Based on international experience with thousands of patients and the confirming results of small controlled studies in America (See NEWS for references) we estimate that as many as 80% of cancer patients may get well after these two phases.

Phase III includes the conventional invasive treatments like surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. It is for those patients whose immune system does not respond fast enough, or for especially large, well-defined tumors. In the latter case, surgery can give the immune system a head start by de-bulking the tumor. Then the immune system only has to clean up the crumbs. So the doctor can go back to Phase I and II therapies to finish the job, and chemotherapy and radiation may not be necessary at all. These conventional treatments can be a risk for patients because they typically weaken the immune system. But if they are indicated, Phase I and II can help to counteract this problem by making the patient and their immune system extra strong in the first place.

Whenever conditions permit, we think conventional therapy should regularly be preceded with Phase I and II type treatments. They can fortify the patient and raise the immune system so high that it counteracts many of the potential risks of conventional therapy.

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

3. Other Important Lessons We Learned About Cancer

5. Nutritional Therapy – Arguably the most powerful cancer treatment of all !

6. Getting Help

7. Seven Critical Steps That Help Insure Success

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 some of their contradictory 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 are known carcinogens that 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 was 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 for 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 seven critical steps are followed correctly, the results can be excellent. We highlight these seven steps because they are so decisive and because some are so often overlooked. Combining them with INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE may be the most powerful way to help insure success. In many cases the seven steps were all that we needed to get well. 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 is a "cash cow" of the medical business. But a very serious disadvantage is that the fear is used to keep doctors and patients from using better treatments, 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, just 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 25 years ago. Surgery had spread the cancer throughout her body. She had to go to an international hospital to get the alternative therapy that saved her life. We have been helping American cancer patients to get these therapies 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, even though it was diagnosed at a famous American hospital, using biopsies and surgery. 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 10 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.

This 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, “chemo brain”, pain, loss of energy and dignity, etc.

We hope our small efforts over these 25-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 Didn't ?

One special feature of this website is that we try to help distinguish between 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 only 2.1% - 2.3% of the time. Proponents insist that chemotherapy is 2 – 3 times better than that – maybe it improves survival age 7% of the time. 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, and testicular 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 are in that 7%. 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 survival time. Are you in that 7% where it more likely to lengthen survival, or could you be outside of that 7%, where it might reduce survival time by making a patients health worse? If it does lengthen survival time, will it be by the typical weeks or months, or will it help more than that? Be aware that 5-years statistics can be very distorted by early detection 5 years sooner. And claims of tumor shrinkage may not be meaningful at all when it comes to survival time. If the FDA has approved a certain agent for your cancer, they should have these survival time 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. One give-away is the word “experimental” on the consent form. Be sure to ask for your form well before any procedures so you can actually read it and consider the warnings.

Unless patients are in the public eye, they may be less worried about the baldness and nausea from chemotherapy because they are temporary. The weakened immunity could become serious because it can make a common infection suddenly become deadly, but often it can be controlled with antibiotics and by staying away from people- especially school children. It’s true that chemotherapy can be carcinogenic, creating new cancers the day of treatment. But they won’t be large enough to detect for 2 – 10 years, and healthy cancer defenses may be able to kill them by that time.

What really made many of us decide against chemotherapy is something called “chemo brain.” We knew that some of us might never be the same person after chemo. The Journal of Biology published a laboratory study of three common chemotherapy agents, cisplatin, carmustine and cytarabine, and the study headline says it all: “CHEMOTHERAPY CAN BE MORE TOXIC TO BRAIN CELLS THAN TO CANCER CELLS. AND MAY CAUSE BRAIN DAMAGE. ” Sometimes a patient may no longer be able to do complex mental work or they may have a different personality after chemo. The damage to brain cells can be temporary, or long lasting, or permanent. So we refused to gamble on chemo and chose nutrition and immunotherapy in its place. To this day, we are so grateful to our doctors for their full disclosure of the side effects and the options.

Some good news is that alternative physicians have already developed natural methods to reduce or prevent brain damage and conventional researchers are hard at work trying to develop patentable drugs to do the same. Meanwhile, we hope doctors and their patients will consider using nutrition and immunotherapy in place of chemotherapy. It worked for us, and we expect that it will work for you. But if it doesn’t do the whole job fast enough, at least it could create a better time to try chemo, after the patient’s anti-cancer defenses are extra high to help counteract chemo’s immune suppression. We see it as a win-win decision.

Incidentally, on our TESTING webpage we describe an excellent blood test to monitor how well nutrition or chemotherapy is succeeding in clearing out the cancer cells. It’s called the AMAS test, and patients can actually watch the numbers go down instead of relying on an estimate of when they have done enough.

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! We have seen smart people jump from exciting promise to exciting promise until their time simply ran out.

Some patients loose time by searching for a “magic bullet” to cure their cancer. Unfortunately, there are many websites that will promise just such a magic cure. The con man's chief skill and talent is persuasion, so sadly, these are the web pages that patients often find the most convincing. Websites fake doctor's names, fake journal references, even fake FDA approval. One clue is that they usually have something to sell, or a book or website to refer you to, that has something to sell.

It is much faster and safer to work through scientific professionals who have their hands on the pulse of hundreds of new developments on the horizon than searching out the relative few a layman has time to find and check out. Most legitimate professionals operate at a physical address such as a licensed brick-and-mortar hospital or clinic, not just from a website. We provide directories to doctors and hospitals on the Reference page of the INTRODUCTION.

The more you know about your cancer the better. The web can be used to search professional journals and databases at the National Library of Medicine (WWW.NLM.GOV). There are other support websites specific for most types of cancer. Some are open minded, others just repeat an old party line. There are clinical trials listed on the government's NCI (WWW.NCI.GOV). You may want to find out what their protocol is so you can use it, but you may not want to actually participate in the trial because they often limit your other options. And what if you are put in the placebo arm? If you use search engines, be careful of the commercial .COM's who are there to sell you something. Look instead for .GOV, .EDU, or .ORG, which are usually safer.

3. Other Important Lessons We Learned About Cancer

For many of us, cancer became an invaluable education about our health and our lives, so we call ourselves

"cancer graduates"

Obviously we all learned about successful treatments. We had to read up on our cancers, and make lists of questions to ask our doctors, and write down their answers. Seeing that you are interested enough to write down their answers encourages doctors to take the time to give you more complete - and more accurate answers.

All HMO's, doctors, and hospitals are not the same. They do NOT always provide the latest or best treatments available.

More often than you might think, patients determine their own treatment, by the doctors they decide to ask. Doctors tend to recommend their own specialty. We found it was important to seek second opinions from doctors experienced in INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE or doctors of different specialties and different backgrounds, both conventional and alternative. Otherwise we could just get one-and-the-same opinion several times over.

Sometimes we had to reach doctors through telephone consultations. This broad diversity of input enabled us to identify outmoded recommendations that were unnecessarily harmful, and to find proven treatments that were more effective. The References web page of the INTRODUCTION can help you find doctors and hospitals.

Talking with other doctors also gave us the courage to be skeptical of the few that tried to rush us into buying their services. A tumor usually takes 5 – 20 years to grow large enough to see. This slow development should not be seen as an excuse to procrastinate, but as a potential opportunity to take the time needed to avoid mistakes and do it right. One patient had a type of prostate cancer that grows so slowly that independent medical experts usually recommend no treatment at all, just watchful waiting. But an over-eager surgeon claimed, "You have a stick of dynamite in your body and the fuse is burning." So timing is one of the key questions to discuss with each doctor. Their answers may tell a lot about the cancer and about the doctor.

It is not unusual for careful patients to take 1 – 2 months to interview different doctors to consider their different recommendations (They usually recommend their own specialties), to visit cancer patient support groups, to talk with patients who have recovered using nutritional therapy and using conventional therapy, etc. Meanwhile they are carefully monitoring the cancer, getting base line tests, and correcting other conditions such as high blood fats or heavy metals that may be inhibiting the body’s natural ability to cure cancer.

A few cancers (particularly lung cancer) may be discovered so late that time is very critical. For this reason we have a special web page in the Treatment section on methods our doctors used to “freeze” cancer right away. Note this is a temporary "first aid" freeze, but not a long term cure, because it may include steps that can only be temporary, such as caloric restriction. Some steps we took, such as vitamin C, can be implemented by patients immediately, but call your doctor first to make sure they are appropriate to your situation. (NIH has recently changed their position and now agrees with the international cancer hospitals that vitamin C is effective against cancer. See our NEWS page for more details.)

Over the years, we have seen different kinds of patients. One kind wants to do as much as possible to get well. The other kind wants to do as little as possible to get well. You can figure out who has the best prognosis. Of course there is a middle ground, depending on the patient's situation, and the stage of cancer.

A very empowering lesson we learned is that cancer can be changed from a negative problem to overcome, into an extraordinary opportunity for personal growth. This is one time that society gave us Carte Blanche to re-design ourselves and our lifestyles, to become that free and happy person we always wanted to be. Many of us believe that this was one of the most powerful factors in our successful recoveries.

We learned that eliminating a tumor didn't automatically cure us of cancer. We also had to restore our weakened anti-cancer defenses to stay cancer-free, and that could take months of good living.

4. Conventional and Alternative Cancer Therapy Results

So how effective have conventional cancer treatments been in America? The American Cancer Society and the government say success rates are improving "significantly", but the American Medical Association says, except for some rare cancers and children's cancers, most results have been "flat" for decades. Critics say that real improvements in earlier detection create the false illusion that cancer patients are living much longer. Distorting the picture even more, you will see that cancers which are detected 5 years earlier may be counted in some statistics as a 5-year cure, even when there is no treatment or improvement in patient survival time.

A premier cancer hospital in Houston, M.D. Andersen, once claimed a 50% cure rate, but had to retract that when challenged in court. More recently, Newsweek’s 2008 cancer issue used the figure of 65% for the amount of cancer patients who survive 5-year’s or longer. But this includes people who’s cancers were detected 5 years earlier than in the past. We have yet to find figures for conventional cure rates that authorities agree on.

Most of us turned to Alternative Therapy after we were declared terminal by conventional doctors. Often we went to international hospitals, where alternative therapy already is part of conventional therapy - in other words, INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE. Typically these international cancer centers claim about a 30% success rate for "terminal" cancer patients who have already received American conventional therapy which failed. For new cancer patients who haven't suffered from previous conventional chemotherapy or radiation, results can be much better.

Some international INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE cancer centers that rely primarily on non-invasive alternative therapy claim about an 80% success rate for the common cancers if the patient has not had too much chemo or radiation beforehand.

At last, America is beginning to measure the results of INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE. The prestigious Journal of Urology published a small clinical study by Dr. Gordon Saxe. He added an anti-cancer diet and lifestyle improvements to the conventional treatments patients had for prostate cancer. (See our News web page, for more information.) Although the sample size was too small to be statistically significant, the patients in this American clinical trial also had an 80% positive response rate.

And Dr. Dean Ornish has done it again. It took over 20 years to convince his colleagues and the insurance companies that an eat-all-you-want vegan diet with lifestyle improvements could reverse heart disease. Now he has shown that it works for prostate cancer too. The meat eaters in the trial saw their PSA continue to rise and several had to undergo invasive therapy. Some 80% of the cancer patients on the vegan diet saw positive results during the trial period, including drops in their PSA cancer test and/or a huge rise of anti-cancer defenses in the blood. (See our News page, for more information.)

Drs Gar Hildenbrand of the Gerson Research Institute and Susan Cavin of UCSD published a study of the five-year survival rates for 145 melanoma patients comparing the results for conventional therapy VS results of a comprehensive nutritional therapy. For localized melanoma, conventional results were 79% survival compared to nutritional results of 100%. For regionally metastasized melanoma, conventional results were 39% compared to nutritional results of 82%. (See our News page for more information.)

Results like these helped to justify our personal decisions to try nutritional cancer therapy before trying conventional therapy.)

Beware of invasive conventional medicine dressed up like INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE with niceties such massage and music. They are certainly helpful, but seem to have little to do with improving survival time statistics. If invasive therapy is done first instead of last, it might take longer to get well. This creates the additional problem of healing the damage of invasive therapy while trying to restore the immune system and reverse the cancer, all at the same time.

We believe that invasive therapy can be made much more successful by employing non-invasive therapy first to strengthen the patient's immune system and weaken the cancer. So patients should be entitled to start logically with the less invasive treatments, if they want to, and if time permits. Even if these treatments don't reverse cancer all the time, they could be used with careful monitoring to suppress metastasis and to make the patient's own anti-cancer systems much stronger. As the patient's defenses grow, they may make the tumor shrink away from critical tissue. This would make the invasive therapies safer and easier on patient and doctor if they have to be used.

5. Anti-Cancer Diet Therapy

As patients, we have been amazed to learn the power of food to cure or to cause cancer. What may make it so powerful is that it can restore the anti-cancer defense systems to more youthful levels. According to clinical tests, it can double some components of a weak immune system in a few weeks. So nutrition is really a big first step in immunotherapy.

According to the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine, (www.PCRM.org) wrong diets may cause a major amount of human cancer, just like tobacco. The National Cancer Institute has estimated that over 30% of cancers are associated with tobacco and up to 60% of cancer is associated with diet. That suggests that wrong diets might be almost twice as dangerous as smoking!

If wrong diet is such a major factor in causing cancer, it seems only logical that right diet would be a major factor in preventing and curing cancer. For example, a study by the University of Heidelberg in Germany found that raw vegetables equivalent to a good-sized salad a day may prevent breast cancer by a whopping 49%. (Nutr Cancer. 2003;46(2):131-7). Our NEWS web page announces a recent book, THE CHINA STUDY, that cites scientific studies in Europe, Asia and America demonstrating that cancer can be turned on and off by diet!

Remember that NUTRITION built your cancer defenses in the first place. No other cancer treatment is that powerful.

5 REASONS NUTRITION MAY BE

THE MOST POWERFUL CANCER THERAPY KNOWN

1. Nutritional medicine can fight cancer in many more ways than chemotherapy and radiation put together.

2. Nutrition helps to restore the body's own anti-cancer armies to fight cancer in an even wider variety of ways.

3. Nutrition appears to be the main source of our EPIGENETICS – the internal environment that can turn cancer genes off and turn anti-cancer genes on ( or vice versa! ).

4. Nutrition can also be the critical first step of IMMUNOTHERAPY – supercharging our immune system to kill cancer cells faster.

5. Nutrition was instrumental in curing our cancers even when surgery, chemotherapy and radiation couldn’t, and conventional doctors considered us “terminal”. (Fortunately our conventional doctors had the courage and integrity to tell us when their treatments wouldn’t do any more good. They didn’t keep treating us just for something to do. So we were able to find another kind of doctor before our immune system was damaged beyond repair.)

Many of us agreed that anti-cancer diet therapy was the most powerful treatment we received. To the chagrin of patients and doctors alike, medicine in America is now driven by profit. The price of chemotherapy is measured in thousands of dollars, while fruits and vegetables cost only a few dollars. This makes it difficult to find economic support for a champion to promote diet therapy. It may be up to patients to help each other.

Learning a new diet can be much harder than it looks, resulting in dangerous imbalances over a long period. A couple weeks staying at a clinic to learn how to do a special cancer diet at home enables a patient to have an effective anti-cancer diet from day 1, without the serious risks of a lengthy learning curve. Experienced consultants or home care can be used. Regular telephone support can be very helpful. We do not recommend that a patient who already has cancer should risk major changes learned from a book. We urge you to consider professional help from someone already experienced in diet therapy for cancer. Which ever way you go, be sure to pencil out daily calories, protein and fats once in a while to make sure you are on target. You will probably be very surprised.

6. Getting Help

Some of us were declared terminal, yet we eventually found the successful treatments we share on this website. For most of us, a very important asset that made it possible was a dedicated partner or ombudsman. Our partners helped us when we were too tired, depressed, nervous, helped us ask questions and take notes, helped us to resist recommendations that sounded too good to be true, or too damaging to our own anti-cancer systems.

Both doctors and patents are very upset over the dive to bottom line profits that has made health-care in America the third leading cause of death! One can find tragic cost-cutting along side some of the world's best care. HMO's have a campaign in California to lower the ratio of nurses to patients even more. So someone has to constantly double check that the patient is receiving the correct care. This life-saving roll of a partner or ombudsman is discussed in the PATIENTS' PROTOCOL step, Build a Winning Team.

Even though nutrition may be the most important weapon in the battle against cancer, that does not make it a do-it-yourself project. We believe that it is essential for most people to have a Medical Doctor on their team who supports their decision to try nutritional therapy first. They order and interpret tests, they handle the unexpected, and very importantly, they can reassure you when old-time doctors try to scare you back to their old ways. The RESOURCE section of the INTRODUCTION lists directories of doctors, hospitals and other resources to help get started. Meanwhile use our beginning "Cancer Graduates" section to ask questions of recovered patients.

7. Seven Very Important Steps For Success

Whether the patient decides to use conventional or alternative therapy, these first seven steps of the PATIENTS' PROTOCOL kept coming up because over the years they seemed to be especially valuable for the success of either. They were used by our doctors. And they worked for us. We call the 7 steps Phase I. For a small or slow growing cancer, such as prostate cancer, they have been all it took to get well. For large, metastasized cancer our doctors simultaneously added the Phase II non-invasive treatments too.

Depending on a patient’s situation (previous chemo and radiation or not), we believe our own experiences and the clinical studies discussed on this home page suggest that there is a 30% – 80% chance this may be all that other patients will need to get well, too.

For the remaining 20% who may go on to Phase III conventional therapy, results should be dramatically superior to usual. The heightened immune system from Phase I can help compensate for the serious immune suppression problems caused by the invasive treatments. And as we will document in the future section on conventional therapy, some Phase II remedies have already been shown in clinical tests to double the success rates of certain conventional treatments.

So whether the patient chooses conventional or alternative cancer therapy, we believe these first Phase I steps for cancer suppression, patient health and much greater immune power create superior chances of success. It is a win-win solution to begin with better health from nutritional therapy.

Each of these seven steps will be covered in detail in the treatments section called the PATIENTS' PROTOCOL, Phase I. The 7 steps are:

STEP 1. Build a winning health care team, hopefully with a partner to help, and with an MD trained in Integrative Medicine. But they are new to America so you may have to find a mix of conventional professionals and alternative therapy professionals. Just because the therapy is easy to do at home, don’t fool yourself into thinking it is a do-it-yourself project. Get an MD. Your family physician could probably learn how to do it, perhaps in consultation with this website and someone who is already experienced.

STEP 2. Improve health work-up and testing, not only to set baseline numbers and images of the cancer, but also to identify other medical and life-style problems that may undermine anti-cancer defenses. Then test values can help to select, adapt and monitor the most effective treatments for each patient. Just as important, frequent testing to monitor progress will give early warning if something has to be changed, and give constant support for patients to resist the attempts of uninformed well-wishers to frighten patients back into the old ways.

STEP 3. Suppress cancer growth and metastasis right away, as soon as baseline tests permit. Then the patient can relax and focus on getting well. Many doctors and patients skip this valuable step in the rush to start the main therapy. The web pages on inhibiting cancer explain how our doctors did it.

STEP 4. Start super nutrition as soon as possible, to stop promoting the cancer with wrong foods, and to restore the anti-cancer defenses to attack the cancer cells. Nutrition can be viewed as the first step of immunotherapy.

STEP 5. Design a healthier lifestyle, free of harmful drugs (Yes it is easier to stop smoking with large doses of vitamin C, B-Complex, etc.), with less stress (Yes, anyone can learn to pray or meditate) and more joy. (Yes, we learned ways to find joy, even during cancer therapy.)

STEP 6. Detoxify the body's defenses from immune-suppressing metals, cholesterol and fats, and other chemicals uncovered by the testing in step 2. Also develop detox techniques so you are ready to eliminate the dead cancer cells as they begin to die more rapidly. Not preparing for this step, so close to victory, can cause a major setback. (See our Detox webpage.)

STEP 7. Supercharge the immune system attack on the cancer. (Patients with autoimmune problems must consult a specialist before this step.) Immunotherapy is the perfect weapon against cancer since it specifically attacks cancer cells instead of the healthy cells beside them. Conventional medicine has had problems trying to activate the immune system. We believe it may be because they ignore Steps 4,5 and 6, which help raise the immune system to the top of the normal range, and above. In so-called terminal cases, we have seen our doctor raise it about 30% above the normal range. Then it becomes a ferocious but selective cancer killer. Your doctor will be alert to the fact that at such high levels, it may have to be slowed down a little if it kills cancer cells faster than the body can eliminate them. Or else detoxification might be speeded up to eliminate them faster.

We believe patients can help to insure their own success by insisting on including these seven steps at the beginning of their cancer recovery plan.

SUMMARY OF HOME PAGE

Overall the PATIENTS' PROTOCOL is a road map of how we got well. It can also serve as a checklist of options to make sure you get all the treatments you need to succeed. It can provide a framework to build bridges of communication among the whole healthcare team. We see many more American and international doctors wanting to work together to use INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE for the best interests of their patients. And also important, it provides a powerful foundation to increase the success of conventional treatments should they be needed.

This website currently covers INTEGRATIVE THERAPY from Phase I including the seven steps from diet to immunotherapy, Phase II including healthier and less-invasive ways to attack cancer, and just the beginning of Phase III, MINI-CONVENTIONAL THERAPY.

Full invasive therapy is well covered on the government's NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE website, so we have left those topics for last as we build this website. We will complement the government's site with some patient-sparing techniques, and ways our doctors used alternative therapy to make it more effective, in the future web pages on invasive treatments.

A major purpose of this website is to show that there is seldom any need for a lone cancer freshman to gamble on re-inventing the wheel with some “amazing breakthrough” website or book, when so many patients have already found these cancer cures that work.

It may be too early for cancer freshmen to appreciate what has happened to many of us cancer graduates. We became grateful to this cancer adventure for leading us (actually, pushing us) through a doorway to a healthier life - much happier for us and for our loved ones.

NOTICE - NOT FINISHED YET

Cancer freshmen have asked us to build this site on-line so they can have access to the information as fast as our graduates can pull it together. Realize this is only the first draft of the 2009 edition and should be viewed with caution.

Initially we are summarizing some 20 years of our volunteers own experiences and anecdotal information from our doctors about thousands of recovered patients just like us. In each edition of this website we add more scientific journal references to help patients, doctors and researchers.

You can help us develop this site to meet your needs. As this is being published, we try to incorporate your comments, questions and suggestions or add them to the next edition. So please email us when you think of them:

Webmaster@PatientsNCI.org

Thanks for helping.

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