Over the Counter Natural Cures (21 page)

Since chemotherapy kills cancer cells—and healthy ones—so quickly, a five-year survival rate gives the illusion of eradicating cancer. It does not account for cancer cells that rebound or even for cancer caused by the drugs after that period. Moreover, chemotherapy side effects are slow and arduous, and therefore don't show up within the five years of follow-up. After this time, Big Pharma looks away while the whirlwind of side effects are just beginning. In other words, the effectiveness of chemo drugs is inflated, and side effects are hidden by the five-year survival rates being used as “cure rates.”

The second life support system put into place is simply paying doctors to prescribe chemotherapy drugs. Unlike in all other areas of medicine, cancer doctors are allowed to profit from the sale of chemotherapy drugs. To me, this explained why doctors were totally unaware of the studies showing that chemotherapy agents like tamoxifen are deadly: they were being paid to ignore them!

In 2006, NBC News introduced the world to the shady and unethical practice of corporate drug dealing. “Doctors in other specialties simply write prescriptions. But oncologists make most of their income by buying drugs wholesale and selling them to patients at marked-up prices,” according to the NBC report.
¹¹⁶
No chemo, no money. In an unspeakable confession from a corporate drug dealer, Peter Eisenberg, MD, a private physician who specializes in cancer treatment, said, “The significant amount of our revenue comes from the profit, if you will, that we make from selling the drugs.”

Spreading the notion that “early cancer detection saves lives” is the final part of the chemotherapy life-support system. With millions of people being scanned for cancer via questionable testing methods, nobody is being saved. Rather, more people are being put on chemo drugs faster, thereby increasing negative side effects. Under a regime that provides
ineffective and dangerous drugs, the only point in early detection is to get into your wallet.

Few people realize that chemotherapy sales are the result of a successful life-support system rather than the use of successful drugs. This lack of understanding gets most patients ensnared in the deadly chemotherapy web. Sometimes, it's coupled with risky radiation treatment.

RISKY RADIATION

Pat has been one of my best friends for more than fifteen years. We met in college while wrestling. And during that time, we shared not only the same weight class, but also the same majors: biology and chemistry. Like it or not, we saw a lot of each other during our college days. Fortunately, being his friend is easy.

Pat is fairly laid back—so much so that he's probably the only person in history to go dancing in Vegas wearing flip-flops. He's always ready for adventure. Whether that means losing fifteen pounds of water to make weight, participating in a twelve-hour adventure race, or mountain bike racing at 2:00 a.m. among the cacti in Tucson, he's game. He doesn't talk much, which means I'm never forced to take part in idle chitchat or some sappy conversation dripping with emotions and feelings. And most importantly, he's got a brain and knows how to use it.

Top in his class, Pat took learning very seriously. Good thing, because today he has an extremely risky job as a radiation safety officer for a global pharmaceutical company. They specialize in making and distributing radiation meds for cancer patients. Supervising the handling of these drugs requires extreme focus and knowledge. Radiation is risky business. A single mistake could mean serious tragedy. And nobody knows this better than Pat.

As a safety officer, his main priority is to teach new employees the risk associated with radiation. Learning direct from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the U.S. Department of Energy, he teaches that radiation is simply the emission of energy from any source—like the sun or even heat from our body. Of course, these types of radiation can be harmless. But others can sabotage human cells.

Danger arises when we are exposed to high-frequency ionizing radiation known as gamma rays, which are the type used in Pat's lab and being aimed at cancer patients. Unlike the energy emitted from the sun, gamma rays penetrate the cell membrane and cause a slurry of free radicals, which accelerate aging by destroying our internal how-to book, DNA. This can result in cancer among previously healthy cells. The official statement from the ACS is that “ionizing radiation has been shown to cause cancer in many different species of animals and in almost all parts of the body. It is one of the few scientifically proven carcinogens (cancer-causing agents) in human beings.” In cancer treatment, the use of gamma rays is rationalized by the fact that only cancer cells are targeted. But like a child using a bow and arrow for the first time, radiation treatment rarely hits the cancer bull's-eye. Pat insists that he would never recommend radiation therapy because it's not “selective.” “While cancer cells might be eradicated by radiation, there's no guarantee that it won't also attack healthy cells and elicit radical damage at the same time.”

His warning was borne out by research by Dutch scientists and reported in the
Washington Post
. Amanda Gardner wrote in the
Post
that “young women receiving radiation after having surgery for breast cancer are at increased risk of developing a new tumor in the opposite—or contralateral—breast.” According to the study, published in the
Journal
of Clinical Oncology
, women have three to four times the risk of developing new cancer in the other breast.
¹¹⁷

This introduces my fourth universal cancer truth:
the shotgun
approach of destroying cancer cells with radiation isn't as effective as you've been told by the media and doctors.
It's time to stop all
the nonsense.

The mass use of chemotherapy and radiation is nothing more than the result of fear and obscene profits. If logic and health were the driving force behind cancer treatments, much of this fear would be eradicated with the understanding that “nutritional chemo-prevention” with nutrient logic is a viable option for beating cancer. Such steps to prevent cancer would cause profits to plummet. Without a hint of toxicity or even expense, nutritional chemotherapy can give cancer cells the biological smackdown they deserve, as shown by history and science. (Note: Any and all approaches to beating cancer should be performed under the care of a health-care practitioner who supports and respects your decisions.)

NUTRITIONAL CHEMOTHERAPY

Right now, millions of your cells are committing suicide. Once done, they are cleaned and eliminated from the body courtesy of the immune system, leaving behind only healthy cells. This is a good thing. Your survival depends on this, and it was 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. Rather than “fight” cancer, you simply need to cooperate with your body to ensure that this vital protection mechanism is intact. And the best way to do this is with nutritional chemotherapy.

While the body produces healthy cells, individual cells must possess the ability to self-destruct when they become cancerous. This critical process is termed “programmed cell death,” or
apoptosis
, and it's induced by nutrient logic—select nutrients found in nature.

Commenting on the importance of programmed cell death to protect us, Jon Christensen wrote in the
New York Times
:

 

Apoptosis plays a crucial role in developing and maintaining healthy organisms by eliminating unnecessary, old, and unhealthy cells. In contrast to the more familiar and messy death known as necrosis, which is caused by an injury or attack that results in the hemorrhaging of cells and inflammation, apoptosis is a neat way to eliminate cells without leaving any evidence behind.
¹¹⁸

 

John Reed, MD, PhD, president of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, has shown that a healthy human body replaces more than 1 million cells every second and that it's quite possible to replace the entire body every year with fresh cells.
¹¹⁹

Just as your body can't activate metabolism without sufficient water, your cells cannot protect you from cancer, courtesy of programmed cell death, without nutritional chemotherapy. In short, nutrient logic “helps your body help itself.” Over the last two decades or so, several nutrients have been identified that help cancer cells activate this survival mechanism when needed. That's why I call it nutritional chemotherapy: these nontoxic compounds work directly with the body, not against it, to stop cancer cells from proliferating.

Such discoveries include elderberry, rich in the natural compounds anthocyanidins; cloudberry, stacked with ellagic acid; green tea, loaded with natural compounds EGCG; broccoli, saturated with the natural compound sulphorane; and skullcap (I recommend New Chapter brand), jam-packed with the natural compound baicalein. Without these, our body becomes a playground for rogue cancer cells and ultimately invasive tumors. Each nutrient works selectively on cancer cells to help them know when to induce cell suicide.

These discoveries have given rise to the identification of Mother Nature's most potent weapon against cancer: turmeric. Not only does the commonly used spice give cancer cells a biological smack-down, but it also can prevent unruly and invasive cancer tumors from spreading.
¹²⁰
This makes it distinct, compared to other nutritional chemotherapy options.

Turmeric, otherwise known as “Indian gold,” has been used as an immunity booster in the Far East for thousands of years, probably tens of thousands. Only in the last two decades has it received attention from major universities for its ability to fight cancer.

Early in the 1990s, the University of Texas's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, found the anticancer effects of turmeric to be “staggering.” After sprinkling a pinch of the spice on cancer cells in the lab, they found that it blocked a crucial pathway required for the development of skin cancer and other types, including prostate tumors.
¹²¹

Epidemiology has further increased the turmeric excitement with population studies showing that India, the country whose residents consume most of the world's turmeric, has the world's lowest prostate cancer rate—twenty-five times less than that of men within the United States.
¹²²

Further studies by the University of Wisconsin and others reported that turmeric blocks a type of cancer fertilizer known as VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor). Without this growth factor, cancer cells are unable to thrive and eventually commit cell suicide. In 2001, scientists also discovered that turmeric dampens the inflammation cascade within the body, thereby stopping the proliferation of cancer in its tracks.
¹²³

Unlike conventional treatments, turmeric strengthens healthy cells, while removing cancerous ones with laserlike precision In 2002, scientists began unraveling how turmeric selectively gave cancer cells a biological smack-down. They found that cancer cells produce “transcription
factors” that turn off the survival mechanism of cell suicide. Turmeric's active ingredients include a host of compounds known as curcuminoids. Collectively, they attack the cancer's transcription factor. Doing so restores the cells' ability to commit suicide and, therefore, frees us from cancer's wanton destruction without harming healthy cells.
¹²⁴

In 2008, the medical journal
Endocrinology,
together with the Medical College of Wisconsin, studied the curcuminoids extensively. Their positive results led them to this recommendation: “We propose developing curcumin as a novel therapeutic tool.” Following this lead, Big Pharma is hell-bent on creating a synthetic, turmeric copycat.
¹²⁵

Rather than adhere to nutrient logic and promote turmeric as a nutritional chemotherapy substance, Big Pharma is working rigorously to design drugs that mimic the active ingredients in turmeric—the curcuminoids. To date they have failed miserably. This is business as usual. Rather than promote the naturally occurring substance, they like to stick to their greedy business model, which demands that patients trade health for wealth. Turmeric is simply too inexpensive to sustain the billion-dollar cancer industry. And since nobody wants to take pay cuts, nobody is being prescribed turmeric.

Interestingly, doctors have even tried to patent turmeric to profit from later prescribing it. They were shot down after the Indian government filed complaints that “you can't patent something we've known for thousands of years.” That would be as silly as trying to patent the sun for its beneficial effect on vitamin D production within the human body.

This brings me to my fifth universal cancer truth:
nutritional chemotherapy will never be advocated by Big Pharma because it doesn't fit into the business model of putting wealth before health.
Fortunately,
you can get turmeric anywhere.

THE OVER-THE-COUNTER NATURAL CURE

Jarrow Formula brand provides a nicely designed turmeric supplement—Curcumin 95—for about $8.00 per month—a far cry from the economic pillaging that accompanies conventional chemotherapy. Not only does Jarrow use whole-herb turmeric, but as an added measure to ensure vast amounts of curcumin and other beneficial compounds, they use an 18 to 1 concentrate, which means you get way more than what you pay for!

Manufactured under FDA-approved good manufacturing practices, Curcumin 95 has no adulterants or excess fillers, based on my independent lab analysis. Due to the importance of having the phytochemical curcumin in turmeric and Jarrow's aim of having a large amount in the supplement, I also tested for “total curcuminoids.” Jarrow Turmeric is loaded with the cancer fighters! This can be verified with the certificate of analysis found at my website, www.overthecounternaturalcures.com.

The best way to take turmeric is the same way it's been done for thousands of years—with food. A review of turmeric studies shows that the best maintenance dose is 400 to 600 milligrams daily. For aggressive use, doses as high as 0.05 milligrams per kilogram—or 4, 6, or 8 grams daily—are fine. No toxicity has ever been shown from using too much turmeric, even at the dose of 12 grams daily.