Defeat Cancer (25 page)

Often, after patients have been treated with chemotherapy and radiation, they will suffer from a recurrence of their cancers. The recurrence is usually assumed to be a reappearance of the original cancer. However, due to ongoing immune suppression as a result of chemotherapy and radiation, it’s more likely that they have developed a fungal infection. Chemotherapy has a devastating effect upon the gastrointestinal tract. It destroys it and hampers its ability to stop fungal overgrowths, so fungi and yeast are able to easily grow. This destruction of the gut is often referred to as “Leaky Gut Syndrome.” In this syndrome, a damaged GI tract allows fungi and yeast to leak into the bloodstream. After the fungi leak into the bloodstream, they find some warm and cozy tissue where they can “set up shop.” They thrive particularly well in areas of weakened tissue, and once they begin to grow, they invade the surrounding normal cells and create inflammation, lactic acid, toxins, and hypoxia, as they alter the tissues’ pH. This is the perfect environment for cancer to originate in.

Oncologists, however, assume that such fungal overgrowths are a return of the original cancer. And because they don’t want to subject their patients to more needless biopsies, they don’t do further tests to determine whether or not these “recurrences” are really cancer. It’s not hard to see how this mistake can be made. Tragically, in some cases, the cancer may be successfully treated and yet the patient ends up passing away from an easily treatable fungal infection. Recently, I (Steve) had dinner with a pathologist to discuss the staining/testing of cancer and fungal tissue. I asked him what percentage of tumors he stains to determine whether fungi are also present. He said that in over thirty years of working
as a pathologist, he has never tested a suspected cancerous mass for the presence of fungi. That’s very telling.

It is important to note that cancer and fungi thrive on the same fuel: glucose. So if people eat lots of sugar, they can make both their cancers and/or fungal infections grow. Cancer and fungi play well together. In summary, cancer and fungi most often co-exist together, so at our clinic, we treat them simultaneously, because fungal infections often kill people much faster than cancer.

We utilize anti-coagulant therapy such as subcutaneous heparin, and enzyme products such as Nattokinase, Serrapeptase, and Lumbrokinase to thin patients’ blood and break down debris and fibrin. Thick blood doesn’t flow well through capillaries, and when blood flow to tissues is blocked, the body sends a signal to the brain to create more blood vessels, which cancer patients don’t need because more blood vessels means more cancer growth. This signaling protein that does this is called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). It’s produced as a result of cellular hypoxia (oxygen deprivation) and stimulates the growth of new blood vessels. Heparin has a two-fold benefit: in addition to breaking up fibrin and thinning the blood, it also stops VEGF production.

Years of genetic testing have taught us that the majority of cancer cells develop the ability to defensively pump out and eliminate threats, including toxins such as chemotherapy, using what is called the MDR-1 pump. This pumping mechanism is over-expressed in most cancers, and so must be addressed. If it isn’t, then no treatment, conventional or naturopathic, will be effective.

We use natural substances as well as conventional drugs such as Celebrex (an anti-inflammatory drug) to inhibit this pump. Anti-inflammatory drugs are also helpful in blocking the Cox-2 inflammatory
pathways, which is important because inflammation creates an ideal environment for cancer to thrive in.

There are certain out-of-clinic, or outpatient, treatments that we sometimes recommend to our patients which enhance what we do, such as stem cell therapy and dendritic cell vaccines. Dendrites are immune system cells that, when presented with a cancer cell antigen, “spread the word” to the rest of the immune cells. It’s as if they put up a “wanted” poster so that everyone (the other immune cells) knows what the bad guy (the cancer) looks like. So dendritic cell vaccines improve the body’s ability to recognize cancer. We don’t do these vaccines at our clinic, but we can refer our patients to people who do.

Another out-of-clinic treatment that we sometimes recommend is stem cell therapy. Stem cell therapies are expensive and not all patients can afford them, but we have seen some impressive results when they are used together with a small amount of well-placed chemotherapy and CyberKnife, a therapy which delivers high doses of radiation to tumors with extreme accuracy. This latter therapy requires a trip to our sister clinic in Seoul, Korea.

We generally recommend that our patients avoid grains and nightshade vegetables (tomatoes, potatoes, chili peppers, eggplant, tobacco, and paprika) because they cause inflammation. We also encourage them to consume low-glycemic foods, because this helps to starve their cancer and fungi, which thrive on sugar. Low-glycemic foods are also essential for bringing the body’s blood sugar levels back to normal, and for reducing inflammation, which is the body’s greatest enemy. A low-glycemic diet void of the aforementioned foods is the best possible anti-inflammatory diet.

Furthermore, we recommend that our patients take aloe vera extracts, which contain a type of “communicatory sugar” that’s
essential for maintaining effective cellular communications in the body. Mushroom extracts also work well for this purpose: Shitake, Maitake, Ganoderma and Reishi, to name a few. In China, mushrooms are always part of patients’ cancer regimens. We recom-recommend green drinks that contain lots of phytochemicals, and smoothies with coconut milk, predigested rice bran extract (to stabilize blood sugar), and lots of botanical extracts like ashwagandha and milk thistle, to regulate cortisol production in the body, among other purposes. Substances that support the immune system such as colostrum, Saccharomyces boulardii, and pharmaceutical grade probiotics are also a standard part of our protocols.

We routinely recommend that our patients do coffee enemas every morning. Enemas stimulate the release of bile from the gall bladder and the excretion of waste from the lower bowels. We also recommend that they do colonics, whenever these are available. In addition, we prescribe very high amounts of pancreatic enzymes to help stop inflammation, break down circulating immune complexes in the blood, and inhibit the formation of fibrin, which contributes to thick blood and angiogenesis.

Balancing the body’s hormones is essential, no matter the disease condition. We give our patients pharmaceutical and botanical aromatase inhibitors, which block the synthesis of estrogen and thereby lower estrogen levels and slow cancer growth. We also prescribe bio-identical progesterone to some to prevent estrogen dominance. Additionally, we give them 5-alpha reductase inhibitors (5-alpha reductase is an enzyme involved in steroid metabolism) to lower levels of dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Lowering the body’s levels of estrogen and DHT is important because both hormones encourage the growth of certain cancers. We use adaptogenic herbs, phosphatidyl-serine, and DHEA to bring down elevated cortisol levels and enhance energy production.

We assess our patients’ brain biochemistry and normalize it with the proper amino acids, which are the building blocks of neurotransmitters. Hormone and neurotransmitter levels have everything to do with patients’ mood and attitude. As we like to say, “attitude determines altitude!” A happy patient tends to get well more quickly than a sad, stressed, and depressed patient.

Overall, we have observed an improvement rate of about 70 percent at our clinic. This doesn’t necessarily mean that our patients no longer have cancer. What it means is that they either go into total remission, or have symptomatic improvement and a better quality of life, diminished pain, and a disease process that has stabilized, instead of progressed.

Some of our patients recover completely. We have patients who have fully recovered from end stage breast, lung, liver, brain, and prostate cancers, and who are still alive ten to twelve years following their treatments with us. We also have plenty of patients whose tumors have either stopped growing or shrunken to some degree, and who have been stable for many years. These people, even though they still have tumors, feel fine. Sometimes, their tumors are just scar tissue. We find that most people seem to be fine living for a long time with a lump in their bodies, as long as that lump isn’t harming them. Increasing our patients’ length and quality of life is our main priority.

Still, it’s important to note that we also see many people who don’t make a full recovery. The more conventional treatment that they have received, the harder it is for them to get well. Our treatment outcomes depend substantially upon this factor. Furthermore, people who have very advanced cancers are more difficult cases. We tend to take impossible cases, which many other clinics refuse, because it doesn’t make a clinic’s success statistics look very good when their patients don’t survive, and it’s also very stressful to work with such patients—but we take on this challenge. When you start with patients who are near death and have already failed every
conventional treatment, saving even twenty percent of them (which we do) is heroic. Our consciences are more important to us than our statistics, which is why we accept such patients.

Our typical patients, if they haven’t already been in hospice, are on their way there by the time they come to see us. Most of them have only weeks or months to live and are usually on morphine or codeine (strong narcotic drugs) for pain. Our goal for these people, first and foremost, is to improve their quality of life. This means helping to alleviate their pain and increasing their energy and cognition. We are mostly very successful in this area, and are also generally able to significantly extend their lifespan. For many of the terminally ill, we are even able to double or triple it.

Often, cancer patients die not from cancer, but from malnourishment or infections that are totally ignored by mainstream oncology. Many patients are in agonizing pain not because of their cancers, but because of an infection or, more commonly, constipation due to morphine or other pain medications.

In all cases, we treat our patients as if they were going to live, instead of expecting them to die. Conventional oncology treats advanced stage patients in a palliative manner, which means “keeping them comfortable” by giving them OxyContin (oxycodone) and morphine. We have never been successful in remitting our patients’ cancers without getting them off these drugs. Opiate drugs are terribly immune-suppressive. Ironically, cancer itself isn’t generally painful unless it’s encroaching upon major blood vessels or is in the bone. We are generally very successful at alleviating our patients’ pain with other methods, and are often able to get them off the painkillers that they were taking when they first came to our clinic.

Finally, patients’ physical condition helps us to determine which treatments to use and enables us to predict the outcomes that may be attained with those treatments. If their kidneys are compromised, for example, then we may have to work on healing those
before we can work on their cancers. If they are diabetic, we have to treat their diabetes first, because high blood sugar causes hormonal imbalances in the body and allows cancer to thrive.

Emotional wellbeing is critical for healing. We have an incredible pastoral counselor on staff at our clinic named Marco who helps our patients with this aspect of their healing. We have seen many who were mean, angry, and miserable, go into his office and come out smiling, happy, and content. He’s truly a tremendous blessing to them.

Over the years, we have noticed an amazing correlation between the incidence of cancer and emotional and/or physical trauma; for example, the death of a loved one, a divorce, or just outright, inescapable stress. Grief, depression, and anxiety have all been scientifically proven to cause immune suppression. Hans Selye (1907-1982) was a scientist who understood this. He developed the General Adaptation Syndrome model in 1936, which demonstrates, in three phases, the effects that stress has upon the body. He theorized that stress is a major cause of disease and proved that chronic stress causes long-term chemical changes to the body. He also observed that the body would respond to any external biological source of stress with a predictable biological pattern in an attempt to restore its internal homeostasis. The General Adaptation Syndrome and the classic “fight or flight” response, which he also described, have been studied extensively in medicine.

We can’t tell you the number of times that we have had a breast cancer patient report a lump in her breast within two years of getting a divorce or losing a child. Fortunately, our pastoral counselor, Marco, has given us many tools to help these patients. Without his emotional support, we would be much less effective in our work.

We are a Christ-centered clinic and staff that treat patients of all religious backgrounds. We are a staff of “huggers.” Like it or not, if you come to our clinic, you will be hugged and told that we love
you! We have had so many patients say that out greatest asset is our clinical environment, but some patients might be uncomfortable if they don’t like to be “loved on.”

Lack of sleep, which many cancer patients struggle with, can affect recovery. So we do everything possible to help our patients get a good night’s sleep. Sometimes, we can accomplish this by weaning them off their medications, especially pain killers. Such medications cause anxiety and constipation, and if patients are constipated, they won’t be able to sleep, due to toxicity. We prescribe natural transdermal sleep aids like melatonin, including our own topical formula, as well as valerian, passion flower, 5-HTP, and pharmaceutical drugs like Lunesta and Ambien. Basically, we will do whatever it takes to get them to sleep.