Defeat Cancer (12 page)

Friends and family can support their loved ones by just doing that; loving and supporting them, and not being critical of their choices. Whether they choose to visit my office or Sloan-Kettering, the job of friends and family is to support the decision of the person with cancer. The last thing that people who are fighting death need, for example, is eight cousins whom they haven’t seen in twenty years suddenly giving them advice about what they should do. But a strange thing happens. When people get cancer, suddenly, everyone around them becomes an expert: the mailman, the health food store owner, and the cousin from Topeka that they haven’t spoken to in ten years. All of a sudden, they know what the person with cancer should do, even though they have no idea and should really keep their mouths shut. Their job, if they really want to be helpful, should be to answer any questions that the person with cancer has, but otherwise, they should keep their opinions to themselves. If they want them to go to Sloan-Kettering or another clinic, it doesn’t matter. The patient is the boss of his or her treatment. Friends and family must learn to say to their loved ones, “That (treatment) wouldn’t be my choice but I will love and support you, no matter what you choose to do.” This is their disease and their body. The
single most important piece of advice that I could give to friends and family of the sick would be, “Don’t be critical. Keep your opinions to yourself, and just support the patient in his or her decision.” When people are fighting cancer, the last thing that they need is to fight half a dozen family members. I have had patients who have literally had to ask their so-called friends to stop calling them because they were hostile about their choice to see me. I tell patients to cut friends and family off if they aren’t going to be supportive of them. They don’t need extra stress; they need love and support. So sometimes, the patients have cut them off and it is the best thing that they could have done. Discussions with family members over treatments can lead to battles and control issues in relationships, and people with cancer need to be supported.

There are ways to treat even the worst of cancers successfully, such as through what we do here. When you, the patient, make a decision out of fear, you make the wrong decision. So first, take a deep breath and relax, and realize that you can get well. Make decisions out of relaxation and faith. Decisions that are made out of fear and anxiety are always panic-driven and are usually bad decisions. You don’t need to be afraid. You can get over this. Just get rid of the background noise; leave it behind, and you can do well!

Nicholas J. Gonzalez, MD PC

36A East 36th Street

Suite 204

New York, N.Y. 10016

Phone: (212) 213-3337

Fax: (212) 213-3414

www.dr-gonzalez.com

Robert J. Zieve, MD, is one of the most experienced and well-trained physicians in integrative medicine in the United States. He is the director of the Pine Tree Clinic for Comprehensive Medicine in Prescott, AZ (
www.pinetreeclinic.com
) and is supervising physician at the EuroMed Foundation integrative cancer clinic in Phoenix, AZ (
www.euro-med.us
).

Dr. Zieve graduated from the Ohio State University College of Medicine. He has practiced holistic and integrative medicine for over thirty-five years, and worked for over twenty years as a Board Certified specialist in emergency medicine and as the director of an emergency department at a small hospital. He has lectured to groups in both orthodox clinical and holistic medicine, both locally and nationally, for over twenty years. He has taught classes at the university level as well as at physician education forums. One of his teaching assignments was at the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, AZ. Additionally, he was President of the Arizona Homeopathic and Integrative Medical Association for two
terms, from 1998 to 2000, and during 1999-2001, he was Medical Director of Paracelsus Fox Hollow Clinic, which was the United States affiliate of Paracelsus Klinik in Lustmühle, Switzerland, near Louisville, Kentucky.

Dr. Zieve is trained in many different medical disciplines, including homeopathy, nutrition, herbal, anthroposophical, and European biological medicine, as well as conventional allopathic and energy medicine. He is able to practice medicine in these diverse areas due to the extensive training he has received over the past twenty years. Examples of his extensive training include: a graduate course in homeopathy, a two-year physician course in anthroposophical medicine, training in nutritional medicine, ten years of ongoing study with Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, MD, of the American Academy of Neural Therapy; a two-year course with The Biological Medicine Foundation that included training with Dr. Rau at Paracelsus Klinik in Switzerland; a two-year course with Lee Cowden, MD, in Bioenergetic Medicine; extensive training with Gerard Geunoit, MD, the well-known French homeopathic physician; a two-year course called Clinical Herbal Medicine Training in Cancer Therapy with Donald J. Yance, CN, MH (AHG); a one-year course in Hellinger Family Constellation Therapy with Mark Wolynn at the Hellinger Institute of PA, and a year of training in Recall Healing with Gilbert Renaud of Canada.

Dr. Zieve is the author of the 2005 book,
Healthy Medicine: A Guide to the Emergence of Sensible Comprehensive Care
, as well as the 2006 book,
Beyond the Medical Meltdown: Working Together for Sustainable Health Care
(Bell Pond Press). He has also been interviewed by the Huffington Post’s health and wellness expert. That interview can be found on the Internet at the following address:
www.huffingtonpost.com/nalini-chilkov/healthy-medicine-a-new-mo_b_809753.html

Dr. Zieve is the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Medicine (
www.healthymedicine.org
), a non-profit organization that has developed a plan for the transformation of health care in
the United States, which includes strategies for developing effective and affordable care for all Americans.

Dr. Zieve is also Chief Medical Consultant to the Healthy Medicine Academy (
www.healthymedicineacademy.com
), and host of the weekly radio show, Healthy Medicine, which can be downloaded online from the Healthy Medicine Academy website. Many national cancer physicians have interviewed on this show, including Bernie Siegel, MD, and Donald Abrams, MD, Director of the Osher Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco, as well as others.

As an integrative medicine doctor who focuses on cancer, Dr. Zieve takes on different roles with his patients. Sometimes, he’s their primary care physician who treats their cancers, and at other times, he’s their primary care physician who works in collaboration with their oncologists. At other times, he is the consulting physician to their primary care doctors.

There are many different ways of looking at what cancer is. To me, cancer is the illness of our times, and has really taken off in the 20
^th
century. Physician reports from one hundred years ago show that doctors could work their entire careers without ever seeing a cancer patient. So it’s really a disease of the 20
^th
century, even though it’s occurred throughout history, and it’s especially an illness of Western civilization. As other cultures have taken on various illness-generating elements of Western civilization, the incidence of cancer in these cultures has increased, too. So when I describe what cancer is, I think it’s important to set the stage, not only in terms of what happens on a physical level in the body, but also what happens in our lives today. Some of the key elements which are associated with cancer and why it’s an illness of our time can be compared in many ways to Western civilization itself; in fact, we are all part of a cancer-like social and economic milieu.

Cancer is uncontrolled or unlimited cell growth. The body has a natural way of killing or putting to death cells that are preprogrammed to die. This is called apoptosis. For instance, red blood cells are destined to die every 120 days. Those rhythms exist in every type of cell, organ, and tissue line in the body. When natural cell death, or apoptosis, is disrupted, there’s uncontrolled growth of a particular type of cells in the body, and this is what constitutes cancer. This ideology of uncontrolled growth parallels what has happened in Western civilization over the past 50 years: our house values have grown, our bank accounts have grown, our debt has grown—everything has grown exponentially. There isn’t a sustained rhythm of birth, adolescence, growth, maturation, decline, and death; the natural rhythm that has always been a part of civilization (until recently) has been disrupted. Instead, we have developed a civilization of uncontrolled growth without boundaries. Similarly, the loss of natural cell death, or apoptosis, which occurs in cancer cells, can be compared to the growing fear of death in our civilization and to a glorification of the physical world.

When there is strong, healthy cell-to-cell communication, and normal apoptosis, then people are less likely to develop cancer. The body’s cells are constantly communicating with each other, on a biochemical and photonic (light) level. These communications go on instantaneously and continuously, and hundreds of thousands of them happen throughout the body, every second. The body operates on the basis of community. It doesn’t operate on the basis of egotism and individualism. When it does, what results is the same thing that happens in a civilization when individual interests become more important than those of the community: there is chaos and destruction. When it occurs in the body, it is cancer.

Another element that’s associated with cancer development is a loss of rhythm in a person’s life and body. There’s a tremendous loss of rhythm in people’s lives today. We see this on a societal level, as well. This is evidenced by the conditions that many suffer from, such as insomnia, digestive difficulties, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In addition, millions of people have a deficiency of rhythm in their
daily activities. That loss of rhythm contributes to and sets the stage for uncontrolled growth, a lack of communication and of any sense of community, both in their bodies and in their lives. In such an environment, the various triggers that are traditionally thought to cause cancer become activated.

So the development of cancer isn’t just about environmental contaminants, but also the way that we live and think. I dialogue with my patients about this, because it’s important to put cancer into the context of the greater milieu, and examine it in terms of the terrain in which we live. It’s also important to examine cancer in terms of the internal terrain, or milieu, of the individual patient, as we examine the factors in his or her life which may have triggered the cancer to develop in the first place.

I will often spend fifteen to twenty minutes talking to my patients about the lifestyle aspect of disease alone. During this discussion, I may ask them, for instance, what happened in their lives in the two years leading up to their cancer diagnoses. I often find that there has been some significant life event: a loss of money in the stock market, the death of a spouse, or another traumatic event, which probably triggered the sudden growth of their cancers, which in reality, had been developing slowly in their bodies over a period of ten or more years. Other practitioners who ask their patients this question notice a correlation between their patients’ life events and their development of cancer, as well. Even though it takes five to fifteen years for a microscopic cancer to develop into a detectable cancer, it has generally been observed that most people with cancer have had a significant event happen in their lives within the two years prior to their cancers becoming detectable, which accelerated the development of those cancers so that they eventually became detectable.

It’s also important to understand what cancer is on a physical level. Basically, what happens, regardless of the factors that stimulate its growth, is that somewhere in the body, microscopically, there has been a loss of natural programmed cell death, so certain cells in an
organ or tissue start to grow, initially without nerves or a blood supply. This is called the first stage of cancer, also referred to as cancer in-situ. At this stage, the cancer can grow from a single cell to many cells, as it obtains its food locally, at the site of its manifestation. It can remain that way for many years, and people can live with it for the rest of their lives and never have it progress beyond that stage if they have a strong immune system that effectively carries out its surveillance. This process of carcinoma development in-situ goes on in everyone’s bodies all of the time. For example, many people have carcinoma in-situ in their breasts or colons, which never develop into full-blown cancers, because they have strong tumor suppressor genes. This initial stage of cancer is often not detected by any known diagnostic method, unless the patient has a Pap smear, biopsy of a polyp (an abnormal growth of tissue projecting from a mucous membrane), or a suspicious appearance on a mammogram.

Sometimes, though, cancer can change from the in-situ phase and move into what’s called the locally invasive phase. In this phase, the cancer basically says to the organism (or the body), “I need more food to grow.” It will then invade locally through tissues to get that food. Even then, it may not be visible on a scan or blood test. At some point, though, it will start to invasively grow, and depending on the type of cancer, it will start to be palpable and/or visible and detectable in the body. It may remain as a small, localized growth, which can be managed, or it may become metastatic.