Is America Really Waging A War on Cancer?
By: Cynthia Drasler, MBA
According to the American Cancer Society the cancer rate in America is predicted to be 1 in 1 by the year 2020. Lance Armstrong, a well known cancer survivor, recently wrote, “Cancer now affects the life of every single person in this country. Who among us hasn't either personally battled this disease or supported a loved one through their fight? Cancer will take nearly 600,000 American lives in 2008, and 1.4 million will get the dreaded diagnosis from their doctor.”
The American Medical Association (AMA) should be part of a central command to plan the strategy for the war on cancer. Instead the AMA is cemented in perpetuating and promoting the archaic chemotherapy/radiation therapies of the 1950s as the solution to cancer for the 21st century. The AMA has been a part of the problem more than a part of the solution. They have forced innovative cancer researchers out of the country. They work to silence doctors who disagree with the chemotherapy/radiation approaches to the treatment of cancer no matter how few people they cure. We have a dysfunctional FDA that now works at the direction of the pharmaceutical industry to drive nutrition and supplement based companies out of business with meritless law suits. There isn’t a medical doctor in America today that will talk about viable alternatives to chemotherapy in public or above a whisper. Doctors are threatened with loosing their license if they start even looking for nutritional therapies to support their cancer patients who are going through chemotherapy and radiation. Why is nutritional analysis of each patient not part of cancer treatment? People don’t get cancer because they have a chemotherapy deficiency, but they might get cancer from a nutritional deficiency. Isn’t a possible nutritional component of cancer at least worth researching with the same vigor they give to new toxic drugs? The answer for cancer is deeper than just pouring poisons in patient’s veins until they reach the brink of death, leaving them there as long as possible then pulling them back before they die. The answer for cancer is not burning patients with radiation until the area of the body treated will never heal again, so lets look deeper. Maybe a comprehensive nutritional and emotional analysis of each patient should be part of designing each patient’s treatment if we have any hope of increasing cure rates. Why not consider looking at the treatment of the whole person- body, mind and spirit instead of just bits and peices of the person– what we are doing now clearly isn’t working.
I believe that one of the main reasons for our failure in curing cancer along with many other chronic diseases is our addiction to Western Medicine to the exclusion of all others. While Western medicine is wonderful for the treatment of sudden acute illnesses or catastrophic accidents, if fails miserably for the treatment of chronic diseases. Eastern Medicine is much more effective at treating chronic illnesses, and cancer is a chronic illness, think about it. While Western Medicine focuses on survival at all costs, Eastern Medicine focuses on preserving a person's health. The focus is very different and we need them both. Western Medicine treats chronic illnesses as if they were an immediate threat to survival and as a result over treats one area of the body with commando surgery, drugs or radiation that ends up harming other areas of the body in the process. The examples are limitless. Non-steroidal anti inflammatory drugs used to treat mild, moderate and severe arthritis have destroyed perfectly healthy kidneys and caused heart attacks of many people who have taken them. Even ibuprofen, used to treat mild aches and pains and bring down fevers of children and adults has caused permanent kidney and liver damage in people who had perfectly healthy kidneys and livers before taking it.
Eastern medicine techniques work far better in treating chronic diseases. The whole philosophy of eastern medicine treatments including Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture, homeopathy, and nutritional medicine is to keep basically healthy people with a chronic condition healthy. American’s would be helped enormously by embracing a blend of both eastern and western medicine in managing their health and the health of their families.
We keep identifying different environmental and genetic factors that cause cancer, but this new information has really not made inroads into cure rates. Many people are living longer with cancer, but few are completely cured enduring second and third malignancies years later. Doctor’s blame these second and third malignancies on the compromised immune system which is partly true. While cancer patients do have compromised immune systems, doctors usually fail to tell the patient about the known long term toxicity of the chemotherapy and radiation on the immune system including second and third malignancies 10 to 15 years later. Researchers at the University of Southern California recently reported that something as simple as fasting can prevent some of the dangerous and difficult side effect of chemotherapy. They reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that in their study on mice who were given chemotherapy after fasting, had a much higher survival rate than well-fed mice. They need to do more research on people before they will start recommending it to cancer patients. They have even theorized that maybe fasting triggers a “starvation response” in cells and that response might be a way to differentiate healthy cells from cancer cells.
Let's really get serious about solving cancer by involving many treatment modalities that focus on how the immune breakdown occured in the cancer patient and how it needs to be solved for each patient. The treatment of cancer, like the treatment of almost every disease, will not be solved by a one size fits all approach.
It’s time to re-examine our war on cancer. We need a central command that will look at the disease of cancer in it’s totality not just focus on new chemotherapy poisons designed to kill a very specific cancer cells while ignoring the rest of the body. The National Cancer Institute could be that central command, but isn’t playing that role now. With one in two people now being diagnosed with cancer in the US, it’s time to re-evaluate what we are doing to prevent and treat cancer.
Copyright 2008 by Cynthia Drasler, MBA. If you would like to use any part or all of this newsletter to send to your own email list, please reference Cynthia Drasler and www.HealthyLivingIsEasy.com as the source of this information.
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