Defeat Cancer (29 page)

The later the stage of cancer that patients are in, the more difficult it is to treat them. Fortunately, we have patients with late stage cancers who have survived for years past their initial diagnoses. Recently, we had a patient who came to us with breast cancer and metastases masses in her lungs. She decided that she didn’t want to receive chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery. Instead, she spent ten thousand dollars on treatments for her teeth, and her family wasn’t happy because she was 95 years old! We also treated her five days a week for three months. We gave her herbs and high dose Vitamin C, and did detoxification treatments on her, as well. No detectable cancer remained in her body after we completed those treatments. She died at age 99, but not from cancer. Our treatments appeared to help her, but more importantly, she had a great attitude, which probably put her over the top so that she could overcome her cancer. She also repaired her bad teeth prior to initiating cancer treatments, which may have been significantly helpful. You wouldn’t think that a 95 year-old lady could survive all these treatments and go into remission. It’s interesting how things like this occur.

Then there are people who seem to do everything right, but who go downhill anyway. It’s sometimes difficult to predict who is going to do well, although I think attitude has a lot to do with it. People who are angry and who refuse to stop being angry, have the worst
prognoses. Those who seem to be grateful for life and who want to share with others, seem to do better. In any case, people with metastatic disease, even the angry ones, do better if they utilize a holistic approach to healing.

Unresolved emotional problems can be a roadblock to healing. We try to do everything that we can to keep our patients’ spirits up, so that they are able to follow our treatment program. It’s important that they reduce as many negative influences upon their lives as possible. When their insurance companies don’t pay for their treatments, for instance, this can be a major source of stress for them. Some insurance companies cover IPT treatments and some of our tests, but not all of them do.

Also, when patients don’t understand their treatment options, this can be a block to their healing. Oncologists use vague words with their patients when referring to the outcomes that they can expect from different treatments. For example, they will often say, “the tumor will respond to this treatment.” People think “response” means remission. But it can also mean that their tumors will grow less quickly, partially shrink, or disappear, as a result of treatment. Reducing the tumor’s size may or may not have any relevance to how long patients live. So it’s important for them to understand what their treatment options are.

Finally, it’s really dangerous when doctors give their patients death sentences, and tell them how long they have left to live. The power of suggestion can really screw up the immune system, especially when doctors say, “There’s nothing else that can be done for you.” They forget to add that very important phrase, “...by me!”

For patients that don’t have a lot of money for treatments, low-dose naltrexone can be helpful. I had a patient with B-cell lymphoma who came into my office yesterday who was told that she had a year
and a half to live. She was no longer responding to conventional medication, so I sat down with her, and told her about the older patient that I had treated who had been in hospice, but who had gotten well with low-dose naltrexone. I also told her about another woman who had refused conventional treatments at the Mayo clinic and to whom I had also prescribed naltrexone. This other woman, like my current patient, also had B-cell lymphoma. After a few years on naltrexone, she called the other B-cell lymphoma patients that she had met at the Mayo clinic a few years prior, only to discover that they had all died. She was still alive and working, thanks to the low-dose naltrexone, but she still had her tumors. Unfortunately, after awhile, she ran out of naltrexone and for some unknown reason didn’t call me for a refill. Three months later, she was back in my office in a wheelchair. A lymphoma had grown in her spine, so she went to a hospital to receive radiation.

There are people who don’t have a lot of money for treatments and who will volunteer to participate in clinical trials, because some of the costs of treatment are covered under such trials. I have seen some people “hit home runs” with these clinical trial treatments, but unfortunately, most aren’t aimed at making patients better. Rather, they are only done to test patient response and tolerance to new treatments. People don’t usually do very well on them, but they may be an alternative for those who don’t have a lot of money for treatments.

One of the best things that family and friends of the sick can do is create intimacy with their loved ones and provide reasons for them to “hang out” instead of “check out.” Helping them to experience pleasurable things in life, assisting them with a proper diet, getting them to where they need to go in a timely fashion, providing them with loving guidance in other areas, and creating an atmosphere which motivates them to want to hang around, are beneficial for their healing.

Studying the National Cancer Institute website (
www.cancer.gov
) can provide helpful insights into “in vogue” cancer treatments in conventional medicine. It can also give outcome-based results on conventional treatments for different types of cancers. I recommend this site because people with cancer should start treatments with their eyes wide open and with a strong knowledge of their options.

Cancer websites that advocate conventional medicine don’t recognize the benefits of holistic alternative and complementary medicine, though, even though many studies have been published which support such care. For example, the benefits of taking antioxidants, along with chemotherapy, is well-supported by published research, but most oncologists don’t advocate their use. Patients should be aware of this when researching treatments.

Burton Goldberg, one of the world’s foremost experts in alternative medicine, has a patient advocacy site,
www.burtongoldberg.com
, which contains a lot of information for people with cancer. Another website,
www.cancertutor.com
, offers a “smorgasbord” of alternative cancer treatment ideas. Patients should have a competent coach to help them navigate the options presented on such sites.

Life and health are too dear to be left to chance alone. Take charge of them for the sake of those you love, including yourself. Love and accept yourself.

Strive to supply what is needed for your physical and emotional well-being and remove anything that may impair it. Embrace goals that make life rewarding. Experience the joys of life in the form of intimacy, spontaneity, and appreciation of the beauty in the world that surrounds you. Do these things and you will enjoy stellar and prolonged survival during your time on earth.

18600 Collins Avenue

Sunny Isles Beach, Florida 33160

Telephone: (305) 931-8484

Fax: (305) 936-1849

E-mail:
[email protected]

www.daytonmedical.com

Robert Eslinger, DO, HMD, or Dr. Bob, as those in his practice fondly call him, finished his formal medical training in 1978. He has been in clinical practice for over thirty years. He is certified in Family Practice, Osteopathic Manipulation and Homeopathy. In November, 2008, he was appointed by the governor of Nevada to sit on the Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners for the state of Nevada; a board that supervises not just homeopathic practice, but all of alternative medicine. Dr. Eslinger currently practices at the Reno Integrative Medical Center in Reno, NV.

For thirteen years prior to coming to Reno, Dr. Eslinger was the Medical Director of Cascade Medical Center in Cascade, Idaho. Before concentrating in the area of alternative/integrative medicine, Dr. Eslinger developed a broad background in traditional medical disciplines. His work involved everything from being stationed on a remote Indian reservation in the Public Health Service to establishing a private practice and spending years working in clinics and emergency rooms. He has been on a lifelong quest
to find the treatments that work best for his patients. He has many hours of training in homeopathic and alternative medicine and is a compassionate physician who takes time to listen to his patients’ needs. He brings an abundance of life and professional experience to his practice.

He presently focuses on a specialty known as biological medicine, which combines older and more natural traditional treatments with modern technology and uses therapeutic measures to strengthen and balance the body. The primary goal of biological medicine is to support or restore the body’s systems to promote maximum self-healing. It involves methods of diagnosis and therapy that are guided by the principles of maintenance and furtherance of the human bio-system and its regulatory mechanisms. Biological medicine is holistic because it’s based upon the supposition that the body is a matrix of interconnectedness; physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

I don’t believe that cancer is some alien life form that invades the body with the sole purpose of trying to kill it. The body has infinite wisdom, which sometimes surpasses our conscious minds, but things can run “amok” in it at times. So in many ways, cancers are really just adaptations to different stressors that people experience in their lives, either early on or within approximately two years prior to their developing a tumor. So cancer is driven by the subconscious mind, and it’s the body’s attempt to adapt to something. Of course, it can also be triggered by various toxins, genetic abnormalities, and infectious organisms.

I don’t accept any theory 100 percent, but in my experience of treating cancer patients, I have witnessed what Douglas Brodie, MD (the founder of this clinic and a renowned cancer treatment physician) calls “cancer personalities.” There are basically two kinds of personalities that he observed to be preponderant in those with cancer. In over half a century of medical practice, Dr. Brodie saw that cancer tended to happen either to people who had long-suppressed
bitterness and anger deep within themselves, or to those who were martyrs—the kind of people who would do things for everyone but themselves.

Another doctor, Ryke Geerd Hamer, MD, who was an oncologist from Germany and the head of the main chemotherapy program in Munich in the 1980s, had a son who was shot and killed. Dr. Hamer subsequently developed testicular cancer, which caused him to wonder if there was a connection between his son’s death and the development of his cancer, because he had never been sick a day in his life. So he started asking his cancer patients questions, and learned that the vast majority of them had specific stressors—conflict shocks, he called them—which were blows to their psychological, mental, and emotional wellbeing, and which had happened to them within two years prior to their diagnoses. His findings were so specific that he was able to develop a map which correlated particular types of cancer with specific stressors.

For example, he believed that a particular type of lung cancer called adenocarcinoma resulted from people experiencing a threat to their lives. He thought that this death threat triggered the subconscious mind to want to grow more lung tissue to help to prevent death in the future, because breathing is the most basal reflex in the body. Humans have a strong drive to breathe, and if something impinges on that, then Dr. Hamer believed that the subconscious mind would trigger more lung tissue to grow in order to avoid strangulation; hence, the cancer.

I have observed a strong correlation between specific emotional traumas and the development of specific cancers in many of my patients. Once, I was explaining to a liver cancer patient the connection between the body, mind and psyche, and Dr. Hamer’s theories. I said to him, “Take pancreatic cancer, for example. Dr. Hamer believes that pancreatic cancer develops from conflicts surrounding family inheritances, or frustrated entitlements.” And the man almost fell out of his chair, He said, “My sister just died of pancreatic cancer!” Then he proceeded to tell me that his mother
had died, and that he wanted to keep his mom’s wedding ring, and had told his sister that he wanted the wedding ring but that she could have their mother’s engagement rings. She said to him, “No I want both rings!” and she fought him, even up until a court battle, which she lost. Six months later, she developed pancreatic cancer.

I notice that these kinds of specific associations happen often. I’m not ready to say that cancer is caused purely by psychological factors, but they play a large role in its development. What is interesting about Dr. Hamer’s work is that if you ask any oncologist where cancer most commonly spreads to in the body, from any other organ and no matter the cancer, they will always say that it’s the lungs. Lung metastases are the most common type of metastases. So Dr. Hamer would say that lung metastases are due to doctors delivering cancer diagnoses to their patients, which causes immediate death fright in the patients and in turn triggers tumor growth in their lungs. These little associations have made me wonder. Another interesting theory of Dr. Hamer’s is that cancer doesn’t spread through the blood. Instead, every new location where it shows up in the body is an entirely new cancer.