Family Council on Cancer
On Sunday evening when our family gathered to talk about treatment options for Dad's colon cancer, we prayed, talked, listened, rolled our eyes, peered at pathology reports and interior anatomy pictures, and laughed by turns--with some real-time overlap. This subject lends itself to some really good--or bad--puns (accidental and intentional), double entendres, and ruminations. (See what I mean? Ruminations. That's one of the less visually disturbing images suggested by our word choices the other evening.) Semi-colons, bottom lines, and hindsight--oh my! Don't ask. Even Doctors' names can sound like bad words when inserted strategically with just the right tone of voice.
Some of us are biased in favor of conventional treatments and some are biased in favor of alternative measures. For me, several things gradually became clear before, during, and after our meeting.
1. Killing cancer is a good thing. Sometimes acting directly on the cancer by cutting, burning, or poisoning is necessary. More refined terms for these processes are surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Conventional medicine shines here. The refined terms do not render the processes any less innocuous. Doing only this is like trying to grow a garden solely by destroying the weeds that grow there naturally.
2. Building up the body's natural ability to fight cancer is a necessary part of the treatment approach. This involves minimizing exposure to stress and toxins, while ingesting stellar nutrition and perhaps herbal or other natural, non-pharmaceutical products. This is the forte of alternative approaches to health. I think both eating nutritious food and taking broad-spectrum food supplements are important--the supplements mostly because I think it's almost impossible to pay for, prepare, and eat enough good food to cover the necessary bases. So far, I've suspended judgement on whether certain foods actually "feed" cancer or interfere with apoptosis (normal and desirable cell death--of cancer cells, in this case).
3. An integrative treatment approach has value. I think of it as combining the best of conventional and alternative treatments. Gaining access to credible advice and effective treatment with integrative approaches can be a real challenge in the legal, business, and medical environment in America--a situation I feel like raging against. Europe is far ahead of us in this field. In recent years, this situation has improved here slightly.
4. Natural factors no one understands can influence how a person responds to any given measures. The most recent issue of Time carries a feature article on genetic decoding with reference to what it reveals about predispositions to diseases, including certain types of cancer. This is an example of a little-understood, but very significant part of the picture. This explains a lot about why results of both alternative and conventional treatments are often highly variable. This picture will likely become much clearer in the future.
5. Getting rid of a tumor is not the ultimate goal of cancer treatment. Getting rid of all abnormal cells, and equipping the body to create new healthy cells is a more basic and useful focus than getting rid of a tumor. Correcting whatever was wrong that allowed tumor growth in the body in the first place is important.
6. How early detection affects cure rates for cancer involves some semantic shenanigans, but is not limited to this. Basically, what's being measured here is the length of life between diagnosis and death. If a cancer tumor is small or the number of cancer cells is limited, killing them off can be simpler than if tumors are large or the number of cancer cells is large. In this respect, early detection may, in fact, improve treatment outcomes. On the other hand, this may simply mean that the outcome looks better statistically. If the patient eventually dies, the time of death may, in fact, not have been affected by discovery of cancer in its early stages. The main difference may be that the person died with a long awareness of their cancer rather than a short awareness. The intervening treatment or lack of it may have had no effect on the duration or progress of the disease.
7. Divine healing is possible without expending efforts focused on killing cancer or improving the body's condition. Asking humbly for this can be exactly the right thing to do. Demanding it is probably always the wrong thing to do because of our limited view of the big picture. Dad is asking for anointing in obedience to the Scripture that tells what to do in case of illness. For him, I'm sure this is also an act of faith and submission.
8. In the final analysis, education, time expenditure, or sheer force of will are insufficient for discerning rightly among the available treatment options, or outsmarting the cancer. Personal commitment in all of these areas can be helpful, but what is ultimately required is openness to the guiding Holy Spirit. He can show us who to trust and what to do.
9. Of the whole-body cancer killing treatments, hyperthermia therapy is far less damaging to normal cells than chemotherapy and radiation. Granted, in our time, radiation is carefully targeted, and chemotherapy is more so than it used to be, but both of these methods destroy many good cells along with the bad. Hyperthermia involves raising body temperature several degrees, at which temperature, cancer cells reportedly die off. This treatment has been used in Germany and perhaps elsewhere, and is now available in a very few places in the US.
10. I have a deep and abiding distrust of much of what goes on between drug manufacturers and their regulating agencies. The employment history of numerous individuals ("foxes") reveals a pattern of spending a lot of time "working" both in the fox den and the hen house. Such flagrant conflicts of interest are not in the best interests of anyone except drug companies who heavily influence regulations to their own advantage. Even the most skilled and principled doctors cannot completely compensate for regulations so restrictive that only very high-priced and sometimes toxic drugs can legitimately be prescribed by a medical practitioner. Doctors who base their recommendations on scientific investigation performed according to the highest standards can be criminally prosecuted for recommending a natural product--not because it's harmful or it doesn't work, but because it isn't a drug. Don't even think about suggesting a natural product as a treatment for anything if you're not a doctor--especially if you've used or sold any such product.
**********************
Our family has not reached a final decision about what to do, but it will likely be an integrative approach of some kind. We are exploring what might be offered at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA). Tulsa, OK has such a facility. That's three and one-half hours or 230 miles from here. We were delighted to learn that some of the treatments formerly available only in places like Germany and Mexico are offered in these centers, along with state-of-the-art conventional equipment and strategies. Having an integrative approach professionally coordinated looks a lot better to us than what seems like the next best alternative: Trying to figure out such an approach ourselves. We would hope that any ongoing, oft-repeated treatments could either be done at home or be administered locally.
To our surprise, the person on the Tulsa website who talks about his experience of being treated for colon cancer at the CTCA in Philadelphia is Tom Reese. Tom is my sister Dorcas' brother-in-law (sister-in-law's husband, technically).
Our family would appreciate your prayers, for wisdom for all of us, and for faith and courage for Mom and Dad. Cancer isn't a picnic at any age, but at age 85, the vigor of youth can not be applied to the fight, and prayer support is very much desired.
Some of us are biased in favor of conventional treatments and some are biased in favor of alternative measures. For me, several things gradually became clear before, during, and after our meeting.
1. Killing cancer is a good thing. Sometimes acting directly on the cancer by cutting, burning, or poisoning is necessary. More refined terms for these processes are surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Conventional medicine shines here. The refined terms do not render the processes any less innocuous. Doing only this is like trying to grow a garden solely by destroying the weeds that grow there naturally.
2. Building up the body's natural ability to fight cancer is a necessary part of the treatment approach. This involves minimizing exposure to stress and toxins, while ingesting stellar nutrition and perhaps herbal or other natural, non-pharmaceutical products. This is the forte of alternative approaches to health. I think both eating nutritious food and taking broad-spectrum food supplements are important--the supplements mostly because I think it's almost impossible to pay for, prepare, and eat enough good food to cover the necessary bases. So far, I've suspended judgement on whether certain foods actually "feed" cancer or interfere with apoptosis (normal and desirable cell death--of cancer cells, in this case).
3. An integrative treatment approach has value. I think of it as combining the best of conventional and alternative treatments. Gaining access to credible advice and effective treatment with integrative approaches can be a real challenge in the legal, business, and medical environment in America--a situation I feel like raging against. Europe is far ahead of us in this field. In recent years, this situation has improved here slightly.
4. Natural factors no one understands can influence how a person responds to any given measures. The most recent issue of Time carries a feature article on genetic decoding with reference to what it reveals about predispositions to diseases, including certain types of cancer. This is an example of a little-understood, but very significant part of the picture. This explains a lot about why results of both alternative and conventional treatments are often highly variable. This picture will likely become much clearer in the future.
5. Getting rid of a tumor is not the ultimate goal of cancer treatment. Getting rid of all abnormal cells, and equipping the body to create new healthy cells is a more basic and useful focus than getting rid of a tumor. Correcting whatever was wrong that allowed tumor growth in the body in the first place is important.
6. How early detection affects cure rates for cancer involves some semantic shenanigans, but is not limited to this. Basically, what's being measured here is the length of life between diagnosis and death. If a cancer tumor is small or the number of cancer cells is limited, killing them off can be simpler than if tumors are large or the number of cancer cells is large. In this respect, early detection may, in fact, improve treatment outcomes. On the other hand, this may simply mean that the outcome looks better statistically. If the patient eventually dies, the time of death may, in fact, not have been affected by discovery of cancer in its early stages. The main difference may be that the person died with a long awareness of their cancer rather than a short awareness. The intervening treatment or lack of it may have had no effect on the duration or progress of the disease.
7. Divine healing is possible without expending efforts focused on killing cancer or improving the body's condition. Asking humbly for this can be exactly the right thing to do. Demanding it is probably always the wrong thing to do because of our limited view of the big picture. Dad is asking for anointing in obedience to the Scripture that tells what to do in case of illness. For him, I'm sure this is also an act of faith and submission.
8. In the final analysis, education, time expenditure, or sheer force of will are insufficient for discerning rightly among the available treatment options, or outsmarting the cancer. Personal commitment in all of these areas can be helpful, but what is ultimately required is openness to the guiding Holy Spirit. He can show us who to trust and what to do.
9. Of the whole-body cancer killing treatments, hyperthermia therapy is far less damaging to normal cells than chemotherapy and radiation. Granted, in our time, radiation is carefully targeted, and chemotherapy is more so than it used to be, but both of these methods destroy many good cells along with the bad. Hyperthermia involves raising body temperature several degrees, at which temperature, cancer cells reportedly die off. This treatment has been used in Germany and perhaps elsewhere, and is now available in a very few places in the US.
10. I have a deep and abiding distrust of much of what goes on between drug manufacturers and their regulating agencies. The employment history of numerous individuals ("foxes") reveals a pattern of spending a lot of time "working" both in the fox den and the hen house. Such flagrant conflicts of interest are not in the best interests of anyone except drug companies who heavily influence regulations to their own advantage. Even the most skilled and principled doctors cannot completely compensate for regulations so restrictive that only very high-priced and sometimes toxic drugs can legitimately be prescribed by a medical practitioner. Doctors who base their recommendations on scientific investigation performed according to the highest standards can be criminally prosecuted for recommending a natural product--not because it's harmful or it doesn't work, but because it isn't a drug. Don't even think about suggesting a natural product as a treatment for anything if you're not a doctor--especially if you've used or sold any such product.
**********************
Our family has not reached a final decision about what to do, but it will likely be an integrative approach of some kind. We are exploring what might be offered at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA). Tulsa, OK has such a facility. That's three and one-half hours or 230 miles from here. We were delighted to learn that some of the treatments formerly available only in places like Germany and Mexico are offered in these centers, along with state-of-the-art conventional equipment and strategies. Having an integrative approach professionally coordinated looks a lot better to us than what seems like the next best alternative: Trying to figure out such an approach ourselves. We would hope that any ongoing, oft-repeated treatments could either be done at home or be administered locally.
To our surprise, the person on the Tulsa website who talks about his experience of being treated for colon cancer at the CTCA in Philadelphia is Tom Reese. Tom is my sister Dorcas' brother-in-law (sister-in-law's husband, technically).
Our family would appreciate your prayers, for wisdom for all of us, and for faith and courage for Mom and Dad. Cancer isn't a picnic at any age, but at age 85, the vigor of youth can not be applied to the fight, and prayer support is very much desired.
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
6:56 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home