I have just read "being fat promotes angiogenesis" and mushrooms, greens, onions, berries help fight

laurettas said:

John
Did I see a gauntlet flying through the air?! Thought I saw one and decided to take up the challenge. I am going to explain my position and I have to warn you, it is going to be a long post. You might want to take a nap and then fill up on something high caffeine because I have a lot to say.

First, I want it to be known that I HATE chemo--and I mean hate. Chemotherapy took all but one of my children from me and my life's dream was to have a large family. I wanted children from the time I was a small child and chemo robbed me of that. Not to mention the difficulties that our marriage went through because of the infertility--I hate chemo for that as well.

Jake had cancer, Hodgkin's disease, 34 years ago when I was pregnant with our only child. He was 24 and I was 22. They staged him at IV because he had some spots in his lungs that they were not sure about. They gave him massive amounts of chemo--nitrogen mustard, adriamycin, vincristine and a few others--because he was so young and healthy, and they really wanted to save him. I watched him puke his guts out, first food, then blood, then bile because they had nothing to counteract the nausea. I saw his veins being destroyed by the chemo because they didn't use ports in those days wondering if his heart and liver and other organs were being destroyed at the same time. Our GP gave him his drugs because we had no oncologist in the area at that time. Jake worked almost full time through ten months of this hell and by the time it was over he could barely do anything he was so weak. We didn't live near family and had no close friends at the time. We were each other's best friends. I shouldered this by myself while pregnant except for a month after our daughter was born when our mothers came up to help. Again I was 22.

Obviously he was cured of the cancer. Am I grateful to the chemo for that? No, because the chemo had nothing to do with it. Many won't believe me about this but I don't care. I was there. I saw it happen and heard the amazement of the doctors. Jake was still in the hospital while they were trying to figure out what kind of treatment to give him. One evening after I left to go back to my aunt's house, he called me in shock. He had had a phenomenal occurrence while lying in his hospital bed. He was having deep anxiety about all that was taking place, so frightened of all that we were learning. While lying there, he saw a cloud come over his bed, a hand come out of the cloud and touch his shoulder. He was immediately calm and at peace and when he called I knew that SOMETHING had happened because of the tone of his voice. Now you must understand, we were not religious freaks--I had barely come to accept that a being as God may possibly exist by that time and Jake was not a pious person by any means even though he had gone to a Catholic school. How do we know it was God? Well, the one thing that Jake got besides the peace was a huge desire to read the Bible--he would read it at work when no one was looking and could not get enough of it. Scripture became his passion--a secret one because he certainly didn't want anyone to think that he was a religious nut!

Now fast forward two months to his first checkup after two months of chemo. They did an X-ray and were shocked. His fist sized tumors were gone--no where to be seen. The doctors couldn't believe it. They said that chemo doesn't work that way. That tumors DO NOT go away that quickly. One of them even threw out the term miracle. Did we understand what had happened? No, we were too stupid to equate the disappearance of his tumors with his vision in the hospital. We didn't realize for years that his cancer was cured by God. So, eight more months of hell were endured. We made a pact that if we had to decide about whether or not to take chemo again we would make sure that the statistics were on our side or we would not go through that horror ever again.

Did it affect us and how we thought? Most definitely. One always wonders why a person gets cancer and we were no exceptions. We came up with two possibilities. First, Jake's mom was an X-ray technician in the early 1950's. She continued her job while she was pregnant, exposing Jake to radiation all the time she was pregnant because no shields or anything were used and she stood in the room while the X-rays were done. Second, we bought a new trailer house to live in a year an a half before Jake got cancer. The formaldehyde in it was so strong that our eyes would water every time our furnace came on--which was a lot in Montana winters. We would have the same problem every time we came back to our house after being away for a few hours. It was horrible. Those two possibilities did not endear me to the medical profession or to the use of unsafe chemicals.

We determined that we were going to live as cancer-free as we possibly could and we delved into it wholeheartedly. We grew our own food--meat, vegetables, milk, eggs, we did it all except for fruit. Never got too far with that. We gardened organically, using the manure from our cows that ate the hay that we grew on our farm. The only non-organic things we did were to put a small amount of commercial fertilizer on our field and buy grain for our milk cow that was not organic. I even bought organic wheat and ground the flour and made our bread.

I grew up with the knowledge of organic farming because of my mother. Her father had mental problems when she was young and he determined that it was the chemicals (DDT, etc) that he was spraying on farmers' crops that were causing his problems(don't know whether that was true or not). This was in the 1930's so my family's commitment to healthy food goes back a long way.

A few years after Jake's cancer we built a house. We used knotty pine throughout the entire house. There were almost no sheets of plywood to be found in it. Jake and my dad cut the trees from my parents' property, sawed the lumber on my dad's mill and we built it with our own hands. A cancer free home.

We lived in that house for over 25 years but sold it in order to move closer to our daughter and her family. We were in heaven because we were able to buy a larger property in the heart of grain-growing country so I could foresee the possibility of fulfilling my dream of growing pretty much all of our food, and our animals', on our farm. The only negative was that we bought a modular home to put on the property so had to deal with the chemicals in the home again. Not nearly as severe as our trailer had been but we can still smell them when we shut up the house and leave for a few days.

A couple of years ago, the granddaughter of some friends of ours was diagnosed with neuroblastoma. I read about it on the internet. The statistics were horrible--something like a 10% chance of living over five years with her stage IV diagnosis. I remembered my commitment to making decisions on the statistics. We watched her go through horrible treatments but the cancer kept coming back and coming back. It was horrible. She just died a couple of weeks ago. She was six years old.

Oh, yes, one of Jake's cousins also had a daughter with neuroblastoma about 25 years ago. They had even less success with it then than today. They chose no treatment. She died in two months.

Now we are up to Jake's new diagnosis of cancer. I again remembered our commitment to statistics. I read the statistics and passed them on to Jake--his were worse than normal stage IV colon cancer because of his signet ring cell diagnosis. I was devastated but remembered our commitment. However, I did have the additional knowledge of the chemo that my dad went through for colon cancer and it was nothing like Jake's had been so I knew that not all chemo was as horrific as that which Jake and the little girl endured.

I knew that this was not my decision to make. I gave my thoughts on it but the decision was Jake's. He decided to take the chemo. I began a vast search on the internet for all things concerning cancer, chemotherapy, alternatives, etc. And of course you get a lot of people's input as well. People sending us bottles of pills, calling with information about this alternative treatment, that non-mainstream doctor, etc. etc. We would get excited and then I would research. Never could find the one thing that seemed to have evidence to back up the claims. I wanted to desperately because I HATE chemo. But I haven't found it. The best I have found is the people on these sites who have taken chemo and out-lived the statistics. I asked one person who juices and does all of that if she could share with me twelve people that she knows about with active cancer who used her methods and had their cancer cease growing or disappear. Haven't gotten those names from her yet.

So, John, I am going to make the same request of you. Can you tell me of twelve people who have had active cancer and used only TCM to make their cancer go away? I read the sites you gave links to previously but I did not see stories of people with active cancer who had it cured by TCM. Most of the sites stated that TCM was not to be used alone but in conjunction with conventional treatment to temper the side effects. In China they use conventional treatments as well--have seen studies from there in my research. You see, I HATE chemo, I know what it can do to individuals and families and I want desperately to find something else that works better, but I can't go on one or two examples. I have read that many accounts of people who did nothing and their cancer went away. So, John, if you have that information, please share it with us. We would love an alternative to this chemo that we hate.

Annabelle41415 said:

Ummmmm
I've been thin all my life and always ate mushrooms, onions salads, tomatoes everyday and still got cancer. Sometimes I've got a really hard time believing in what people claim but if it works for you or them then I say go for it.

Kim