Over the Counter Natural Cures (20 page)

Whatever you choose in your avoidance or fight against cancer, make sure it's done with logic, not emotion. The wrong choice can be the difference between life and death. While every cancer differs in type, stage, and required treatment (natural or otherwise), some “universal cancer truths” can arm you with the logic needed to make the right choice—whatever your situation. But first, you need to learn the truth about cancer, rather than blindly fear it.

CANCER UNCOVERED

You started out as a single cell. It contained all the information and instructions required to make you who you are today. This “how-to guide” was stored as DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), a tightly coiled strand—measuring up to 3 feet in length—jammed into the microscopic cell. When you divided into two cells, this information was passed on to ensure the proper function and health of the newly formed cell.

Cells can divide at a rate of up to 2 million times per second and, as a full grown adult, you are about 100 trillion cells in total. While some serve as bone, blood, hair, or skin, all cells contain the how-to guide that teaches them how to collaborate and make you the person you are today. And they're always working, dividing (you make 30,000 new skin cells
every minute), and fulfilling a specific role in accordance with this guide. But sometimes a page gets torn from it.

DNA isn't invincible. In fact, it's consistently bombarded with something that threatens its function. Whether that is cigarette smoke, a lack of essential micronutrients like selenium or B vitamins, a rogue virus, industrial toxins, or prescription drugs, the information and instructions can get damaged. DNA—or the cellular components that help it replicate—becomes unable to control cellular division. When this occurs, cancer can develop, which simply means that a healthy cell has turned into a rogue one, dividing and replicating wildly.

Rather than carry out their roles and collaborate with nearby cells as bone, blood, or skin builders, cancer cells are slackers. They replicate without performing their vital purpose and eventually form a mass of slacker cells that we know as “tumors.”

Cancerous tumors go unhindered and can invade other regions of the body, while at the same time disrupting organ function. To gain such seemingly invisible, superhero powers, they secrete various chemicals that help them flourish while making them invisible to the immune system. Adding to the onslaught, they quickly and methodically produce blood vessels to help satisfy their greedy thirst for oxygen and nutrients. This eventually “starves out” the rest of the body, causing us to die prematurely. Where these rogue cells develop determines which kind of cancer arises. If in the pancreas, it's pancreatic cancer; if in the breast, breast cancer; if among white blood cells, leukemia, and so on.

CELL SUICIDE

Cancer
rarely
occurs when cells go rogue because when DNA is damaged, every cell has specialized proteins that can repair it. If irreparable damage occurs, cells “commit suicide” before they become wildly dividing cancer
cells. And if cell suicide doesn't do the job, they are attacked by a robust immune system before they become invisible.

Cell suicide is cancer's worst enemy and explains why it is not invincible. It's a programmed, survival response to inevitable damage, and every cell is born with this weapon of mass cancer destruction. When cellular DNA is compromised, our body helps itself by simply eradicating the cell before it grows into a potentially dangerous rogue. Without this, we would all die prematurely from cancer—probably before we even reached adulthood. You'll want to remember this over everything else.

This introduces my first universal cancer truth:
All cancer is a normal
cellular process that only leads to death when cells fail to commit suicide in response to some type of DNA damage. Ensuring proper cell suicide is ensuring that you don't suffer from cancer
.

SHOULD YOU CHOOSE CONVENTIONAL CANCER TREATMENTS?

The war on cancer began in 1971. In the wake of massive cancer fears, President Richard Nixon appropriated $100 million to find a cure. Big Pharma got the lion's share of the cash since the use of conventional chemotherapy got the boost they wanted. “The war on cancer” became nothing more than a profitable catchphrase for Big Pharma to win big. But America lost big time.

Chemotherapy has been an abysmal failure. Twenty-three years of waging war led to an 8 percent increase in deaths from cancer. Cancer experts were quoted in the
New York Times
as telling Congress that “the war against cancer has stalled and that without major changes, including a cabinet-level director and universal access to treatment, it will become the nation's top killer.” That prediction in 1994 came true in 2005. The American Cancer Society announced, “For the first time, cancer has
surpassed heart disease as the top killer of Americans under [age] eighty-five.”
¹¹⁰
This introduces my second universal cancer truth:
The shotgun
approach of destroying cancer cells with conventional chemotherapy isn't as effective as you've been told by the media and doctors.

CHEMOTHERAPY SECRECY

The overt failure of chemotherapy is shrouded in secrecy. In pushing chemotherapy on cancer patients, most physicians regurgitate the pharmaceutical cure rate as being as high as 60 percent. Pharmaceutical statistics are skewed, but most patients blindly accept these figures without knowing how chemo is supposed to work or how effective it really is.

Chemotherapy
is a general term describing any treatment that involves
the use of a “chemical” agent (drug) to stop cancer cells from proliferating. Believe it or not, the first agent used in chemotherapy was the biochemical warfare agent known as mustard gas.

Within about twenty-four hours of being exposed, mustard gas begins to elicit a whirlwind of deadly effects. Victims experience intense itching. Skin irritations turn into the unsightly and humiliating outcome of enormous blisters. Depending on the dose, slow death can ensue, which is why it's great for killing your enemy. The odiferous chemical attacks the cellular DNA of all cells, healthy or cancerous, and damages their ability to replicate.

The U.S. Department of Defense thought mustard gas would be great at eradicating cancer cells and started administering it to unsuspecting cancer patients in the 1940s. These clinicians conveniently overlooked the fact that the gas was also killing healthy cells. Cured from cancer, patients were demoralized and faced premature death, courtesy of the side effects, just like when mustard gas was used in warfare.

Mustard gas is no longer used, but its concept still exists today. The
toxic mix of chemotherapy drugs usually fall into one of three classes—anthracyclines, taxanes, or platinum-based drugs. In one way or another, these drugs attempt to target and quickly destroy dividing cancer cells. But the drugs' overt failure to make a dent in the war on cancer elucidates their flaws, as do their biological actions.

The anthracyclines are technically antibiotics, but they are so toxic that they were never approved for that use. They work by overloading the cells with oxygen-free radicals, thereby damaging DNA and future replication. But they also attack healthy cells, especially those within the heart. Doctors contributing to the
New England Journal of Medicine
showed that up to 57 percent of children receiving anthracyclines suffered from cardiotoxicity, sometimes resulting in heart failure later in life.
¹¹¹
The researchers stated that “avoiding anthracyclines would be an option” for avoiding the toxic outcome. Research by Dennis Slamon, MD, PhD, chief of oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has led him to insist that these drugs no longer be used in the fight against cancer.
¹¹²
In most treatment protocols for childhood cancer, anthracyclines are still being introduced without data from randomized, controlled trials that would support their use. The same is true for the use of the drugs on adults.

Taxanes destroy the structural component of cells that are responsible for dividing. These components are known technically as microtubules. Since all cells—cancer or otherwise—have these, taxane destruction is unselective. Just as cancer cells are destroyed by the drugs, so are healthy ones.

Platinum-based drugs like cisplatin chop DNA into tiny pieces, preventing cellular information from being passed to the next generation of cells. Like mustard gas, the drugs attack healthy cells as well as cancerous ones, causing humiliating and deadly side effects. For instance, cisplatin
acts as a cog in the wheel of our DNA repair system. That causes our genetic information to be split, leading to cell death. This would be great if it occurred only among cancerous cells. But it doesn't. The chemical cog goes after anything that contains DNA, and that means healthy cells get the monkey wrench, too.

But even more ghastly than being nonselective, today's chemotherapy drugs can elicit cancer among healthy cells not yet affected by a patient's cancer. Leukemia and other forms of cancer show up years or even decades after chemo treatments. This is hard to swallow, but even harder when you're a drug chemist learning that the same is true for today's bestselling chemotherapy drug, tamoxifen.

TAMOXIFEN SECRETS UNCOVERED

Long white lab coat, giant safety goggles, rubber gloves, and face mask were my usual chemist attire when I worked for Big Pharma. I rarely got to sport my baggy jeans, tight T-shirt and black leather wristband. The chemicals I was dealing with were simply too hazardous and required that I wear as much protection as possible. Having them penetrate my protective layers could mean bad news internally. I was designing and making chemical cousins of tamoxifen.

Tamoxifen is known commercially as Nolvadex. It's the gold standard in chemotherapy for breast cancer. But what a drug does biologically and what a drug does according to pharmaceutical advertising are often two distinctly different things.

To my surprise, I learned that the tamoxifen cash cow wasn't performing like the industry wanted. Patients who took it were dying from cancer at a much faster rate than without it. As a medicinal chemist, my job was to fix the “little cancer problem of tamoxifen.”

Initially, tamoxifen was thought to stop cancer by displacing estrogen,
one of the hormones that helped it grow. As time progressed, though, researchers learned that tamoxifen acted just like the cancer fertilizer by mimicking estrogen. The end result was a biochemical environment favorable to cancer growth among users of tamoxifen. My task was made clear: design “knockoffs” that are effective (at blocking estrogen) without causing cancer.

My attempt to design safer tamoxifen alternatives was unsuccessful. And after one year, the project was ended. However, access to tamoxifen wasn't. It remained on the market. Even today, it's advertised and pushed by doctors as a first line of defense against breast cancer. But science and anyone who's been unfortunate enough to take tamoxifen can tell you that this isn't something you want to swallow in an attempt to beat cancer.

The National Cancer Institute has recently begun to warn that “tamoxifen increases the risk of two types of cancer that can develop in the uterus: endometrial cancer, which arises in the lining of the uterus, and uterine sarcoma, which arises in the muscular wall of the uterus. Like all cancers, endometrial cancer and uterine sarcoma are potentially life-threatening.”
¹¹³
The risk of these types of cancers triples with the use of tamoxifen, while other types—such as liver and breast cancer—are just as likely.

Tamoxifen is so potent that it has been listed as a cancer-causing substance in the Department of Health and Human Services'
Report on
Carcinogens.
This report is a scientific and public health document first
ordered by Congress in 1978 to educate the public and health professionals about the many cancers induced by chemicals in the home, workplace, general environment, and from the use of certain drugs!
¹¹⁴

This brings me to my third universal cancer truth:
tamoxifen is not
a safe option for women battling breast cancer.
But don't expect this
failing drug—or any other chemotherapy agents—to be pulled from the market. Despite their mustard gas–like toxicity, chemotherapy drugs
will continue to be pushed on vulnerable patients, thanks to what I call “chemotherapy life support.”

CHEMOTHERAPY LIFE SUPPORT

Big Pharma isn't letting the chemotherapy cash cow get away because she's worth about 50 billion bucks annually worldwide. To protect obscene profits earned from dead chemo drugs (those with overwhelming evidence of risk and ineffectiveness), Big Pharma has designed an ingenious “chemotherapy life-support” system. This system deceitfully uses a five-year survival rate as a cure rate, pays doctors handsomely to enlist cancer patients into the whirlwind of chemotherapy drudgery, and finally, encourages early diagnosis to get people ensnared in the expensive chemotherapy web as soon as possible. In the end, dead drugs survive while patients die slowly and miserably.

As taught by Joel Kauffman, PhD, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and author of
Malignant
Medical Myths
, a five-year survival rate is not a cure rate. And using it
as such gives false hope to patients who don't know otherwise, while putting them at risk for negative side effects. Doctors writing for the
New
England Journal of Medicine
illustrated this by highlighting the rarely
acknowledged risk of using anthracycline chemo agents on children. They warned that “more than 70 percent of children who are treated for childhood cancer can be cured. For long-term survivors [past five years], possible late effects of treatment and their consequences for the quality of life are a major concern.”
¹¹⁵

The five-year survival rate refers to the percentage of patients who live at least five years after their cancer is diagnosed. A cure rate refers to how many cancer patients overcome cancer and live a full, healthy life. The difference is stark.