“Could the quest for a cancer cure be as destructive as the disease itself? The tragic loss of my best friend, Greg, to fast-replicating prostate cancer, leaves me pondering. Was it the disease, the treatment, or both that ultimately claimed his life? His five-year post-diagnosis survival could be seen as a triumph, but at what cost?”
He was a national champion water skier. He held the record for holding a national record longer than anyone else in the sport. But after radiation treatment, his oncologist told him his pelvis was so weakened that if he fell while skiing he would likely die from complications of a broken hip. So that ended his water ski career.
His chemo made him feel like he would rather die than suffer through the agony of treatment. But I don’t have to tell you about that. You see it every day with your patients.
The last time I saw him we attended a major water ski event at a site where he won a National Championship. He seemed in good spirits and we enjoyed our time together. Six months later he died, wasting away to nothingness.
His last days were so bad that he was bedridden and needed help to walk to the car to get to the hospital. He was hospitalized just so to get IV nutrition. He couldn’t eat for the pain.
This is not a sob story to complain about his death. People get sick and die. Everyone dies. That’s life.
This is an examination of the state of cancer care today and the medical community as a whole.
People suffer through illness. Again, sad but that’s life. Medical treatment has eased the suffering and saved many lives with its advances. Since the War on Cancer was launched the rate of death has decreased by one-third. A major win.
But the rate of people getting cancer is increasing and younger people are getting cancer more than ever. But still, the agony of treatment is devastating. Again that is life. If there were no better option, it is still better than it was. Progress is what we hope for.
We’ve come a long way from using leeches to draw out bad blood.
Unfortunately for the cancer patient that is not the whole story.
The story of my friend is typical of the standard of care protocol for cancer treatment. Doctors cannot deviate from that protocol or run the risk of having their medical license revoked. And they cannot risk what they have worked so hard for.
I took another route.
I was diagnosed with head and neck cancer. I kept telling Greg he had to hang on for five more years and they would probably have something to help him. Unfortunately, I was wrong. It took a couple of more years after his death.
My oncologist wanted to start me on five days a week for seven weeks of radiation therapy. And get me started on some mild chemo. He said I would have minimal side effects, but would probably have a dry mouth and have to carry a water bottle with me all the time. Plus I would probably have trouble swallowing.
Knowing what Greg went through from radiation scared me. My spine is next to my throat. If my throat was going to be affected, it seemed likely my spine would also be affected.
I had just gotten addicted to pickleball and could picture snapping my head around chasing a ball. That was a scary thought.
The radiation may not have affected my spine, but the possibility was real to me.
Fortunately for me about 2 years after Greg’s passing a friend started a company, WorldHealthSource.com Thankfully he asked me to join the company.
A friend of his spent five years in the wilds of China searching for natural, traditional health practices.
This is not the story of some mystical herbal remedy used by natives for centuries. But more on that later.
What he came back with was Artemisinin.
Most people, doctors included, in the USA have never heard of artemisinin. It is a primary drug according to the World Health Organization to combat malaria. The Chinese researcher, Tu Youyou, won a Nobel Prize for her work on Artemisinin for combating malaria.
As an interesting side note, the founder of World Health Source, Mike, was a combat Marine, fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. Most of the Marines got malaria, but the Viet Cong seemingly never did. They discovered the Veit Cong carried little bags of chopped leaves. Much later Mike discovered those chopped-up leaves were sweet wormwood, the basis of artemisinin.
Many scientific studies have been done proving the efficacy of artemisinin for malaria.
Recently studies show that artemisinin has great benefits for cancer.
Here are four examples:
- “Improvement of quality of life and survival of cancer patients will be greatly enhanced by the development of highly effective drugs to selectively kill malignant cells. Artemisinin and its analogs are naturally occurring antimalarials which have shown potent anticancer activity.” NIH
- “Naturally occurring anti-cancer compounds: shining from Chinese herbal medicine.” NIH
- “Anticancer Activity of Artemisinin and its Derivatives.” NIH
- “Artemisinin and Its Derivatives as a Repurposing Anticancer Agent: What Else Do We Need to Do?” NIH
When my oncologist came back with the diagnosis of head and neck cancer I almost smiled. Just looking at my neck it was obvious something was wrong and most likely cancer. So the oncologist wasn’t telling me something I didn’t already think.
But my first thought was, great now I can have a real testimonial of how well artemisinin works for cancer. So I refused the many suggestions to get started right away with radiation.
I started on artemisinin and after about a couple months the big bulge on my neck was almost gone. My pickleball friends were concerned for me. One was an oncology nurse who said she was proud of me for making the quality-of-life choice and forgoing the debilitating treatment she saw every day with her patients.
I did let the oncologist talk me into trying immune therapy. I qualified for a trial, did 5 infusions and then quit. I didn’t feel as if it did anything, but I may have helped. But it sapped my energy so much it greatly affected my ability to feed my addiiction to pickleball. So I quit immune therapy and continued to improve.
Three years later, there is still a little residual lump in my neck. It doesn’t affect me in any way. I am still taking a preventive level of artemisinin. None of my scans ever showed any cancer anywhere other than my neck,
So in my mind, I am cured. I didn’t have to live through any side effects of treatment. Just the pain of the cancer itself, which was not fun but only lasted a couple of months. And I have no lifelong side effects like the oncologist described.
So to get back to the point of this video. The State of the Art on the War on Cancer.
Two cancer patients. Two medical protocols. Two different results. One agonizing pain and death. The other continues a high quality of life. Standard of care medical treatment – pain and death. Prohibited protocol – quality of life.
There is something wrong with that picture.
I brought my first oncologist a study showing the benefits of high-dose vitamin C for cancer. He quickly brushed it off. That was when I was doing the immune therapy infusions, so it would seem to me easy to just add to the infusion mix. He just said we couldn’t do it.
My last oncologist was appreciative of what I was doing and said that doctors should be more open to alternative treatments. But she still suggested radiation even though she could see the results of my shrinking tumor.
So what’s the answer?
Medical science is a great thing. But there are also answers outside of big medical. Allow doctors more leeway in using alternative solutions, at least those based on scientific evidence. Get the medical community and insurance companies more involved in alternative treatment options.
There are indeed no clinical studies proving artemisinin helps cancer. It, like most alternative treatments, comes from a natural source that cannot be patented. There is no way to recover the cost of expensive clinical trials, so there will never be clinical proof it works. However, there is much scientific evidence based on studies. Plus it has years of use with malaria to prove its safety.
So with something with a proven safety record and scientific evidence that says it works, the public is denied access through medical sources. It would seem to me that doctors would be seen even more as heroes by their patients if treatment was less invasive and free of side effects.
As an additional note, my total cost for artemisinin was less than half of the co-pay of one chemo treatment. That means everybody wins, except for Big Pharma and the hospitals.
Our customers have had great success with many different cancers. A few, after success with artemisinin, stopped taking it and later the cancer came back. They listened to their doctor this time and used standard-of-care treatment with bad results and sometimes death.
Doctors receive enormous trust from their patients. They have worked hard to build that trust. But the doctors’ hands are tied. Even if they know and believe in a non-standard of care treatment they will not acknowledge it to their patient. They cannot risk their license. You can’t blame them.
We even had a little girl at the end stages of cancer. She was bedridden, confined to her hospital bed. The pain was so bad she couldn’t find a smile and was waiting to die. We helped her with our products and eased her pain. She was able to get out of bed and walk the floors of the hospital. And she even found her smile again.
She was so far along that she didn’t make it. But the horror of her last few weeks of life changed to bring her a bit of quality of life.
How is that not worth everyone else getting the same chance?