Needed: Collective Indignation?

In response to Claudia's post on a really bad book--and her request for a list of the BEST books we've read--I refer us to Dr. Russell Blaylock's outrage, in his book Natural Strategies for Cancer Patients, about the typical "nutrition" doled out to cancer patients.

Claudia, you might enjoy his diatribes about the "cookies, candies and sodas" often offered adjacent to chemo suites--not to mention the sweet packaged drinks cancer patients are exhorted to consume to "keep their weight up." (As if fat corpses are the goal!)

It's a wonder I even survived my hysterectomy when I recall four days of JELLO, canned corn, white toast with jelly, sweet canned fruit juices--a litany of horrors at the very time that stray cancer cells released during surgery are swimming around looking for food to help them form new colonies.

Likewise, a resident at my prestigious treatment center recently informed me that "we have a few patients with your kind of tumor who are doing really well." "What do you mean by really well? Do you mean surviving more than five years?" "Oh, yes, far longer than five years," he said cryptically.

When I asked him if they had tried to assess what these patients might be doing that had so prolonged their survival ("Have you asked what they are eating or how they are exercising?"), he smiled condescendingly:: "Those things have nothing to do with it."

I left a bit outraged that here were a few patients surviving well beyond the usual "prognosis" for an aggressive uterine cancer and yet nothing had been done to try to determine any variables that might account for their protracted survival--which could be communicated to others with the same diagnosis.

Ladies, these and similar outrages persuade me
to start to writE about this entire experience, which, for nearly a year now--despite some fine nursing here and there--has revealed deep SYSTEMIC flaws in the entire treatment system. Nor do I have the hubris to assume that my experiences are in any way unique; it's precisely because they are typical of what many must unnecessariy endure that I'd like to write about them.

For any who would like a taste of Dr. Blaylock's outraged incredulity--or revelations from alternative oncologists about how even the delivery of anesthesia can affect the likelihood of metastasis down the line, and hence, our prognosis--I'm pastng in below my response to Claudia's rquest for a review of the best books I've read so far.

So Claudia, any "hournal" of what I'm eating and how I'm supplementing may have to be subsumed in the chapters of a book that, on behalf of ALL of us, I am how angry enough to start writing.

Cheers,
Rosey

BEST BOOKS READ TO DATE:

Natural Strategies for Cancer Patients

Author Dr. Russell Blaylock,for decades a neurosurgeon, eventually left practice to devote time to his growing interest in the nutritional dimensions of cancer. His book offers very detailed explanations of what supplements may protect us during chemo and radiation and even improve the efficacy of those treatments. His discussions of certain supplements such as glutamine are so nuanced that they might initially confuse us--but illustrate his ability to see "the yes and no without which there is no true intelligence." In short, he refuses to oversimplify, showing both the benefits and occasional hazards of certain supplements. My heart sinks at his stringent position on dairy foods (as i hate to give up cheese entirely!) but he explains the rationales for his positions. Unlike James Quillen's book on nutrition and cancer, which is provocative--and worth reading--but often quirky, overly anecdotal, and unevenly footnoted, most of Blaylock's positions are footnoted, lending it, for me, more academic substance.

Life Over Cancer

Author Dr. Keith Block is highly respected as founder of the Block Clinic for Integrative Medicine. His book is clearly organized, addressing the nutritional, physical and emotional dimensions of cancer. Particularly valuable is his advice on how to recognize and improve our individual 'terrain"--the comprehensive body chemisty, including blood glucose levels, inflammation levels, iron stores, and so on, that affect the prognosis of cancer.
(He also shows what tests to ask for to measure each condition.) A chapter I found truly eye-opening was "Blood Thickness and Cancer." (Apparently we cancer patients tend to exhibit thicker, more viscous blood than non-cancer patients, encouraging cancer as well as metastasis, but what we eat and how we supplement can, according to Block, definitely change it!

Explaining the connection between platelet counts and blood viscosity, Block illuminates why my platelets had recently been so low, causing postponements of treatment. (It was not merely that chemo had depressed my platelet counts, which it had. It was also, I now realize, that I had been following a strict anti-cancer diet for eight months that--unbeknownst to me--was thinning my blood. Green tea, fish oil, vitamin E (and even, to a lesser extent, curcumin) are ALL blood thinners, platelet reducers. So in order to have chemo again, I needed to reduce these supplements temporarily. (I have reduced them all except for curcumin--which, while we're on Taxol, is a MUST according to MD Anderson's Aggarwal.

Block's bookd is a must-read for cancer patients!

How to Prevent and Treat Cancer

Author Michael Murray is not an M.D. but an N.D. yet has played an instrumental role in heading the nutritional programs for CTCA (Cancer Treatment Centers of America). He prescribes a clear plan of supplementation during chemo and radiation (in a bit more organized way than Blaylock's book) as well as a plan for post-treatment, and he offers the best discussions of immune-boosting mushroom products I've come across, evaluating the relative merits of AHCC, Maitake D and MD Fraction, Polyerga, PSK and PSP.

Knock-Out!

Often passing this book with disdain (as its author, Suzanne Somers, I'd long dismissed as a mere Hollywood hussy!), I finally skimmed it in a used-book store and was amazed at how well researched it was. A series of interviews with a dozen or so prominent doctors who are treating cancer--with notable success--in unorthodox ways, I found the interviews riveting. The doctors interviewed are practicing differing alternative approaches to cancer--from gene therapy to enzyme therapy--but even if one emerges untempted to seek out their treatments, one gains, in the course of each interview, fascinating insights into some mechanisms of cancer; the interview with Dr. Gonzalez alone makes the book worth reading. And optimism is the result of this reading, persuading us that IF conventional treatments are failing us, there ARE other approaches worth pursuing that are more than mere eccentricities.

Anti-Cancer

Although author David S. Schreiber, a psychiatrist and researcher, recently died, he DID orchestrate long remissions from an aggressive brain tumor via a combination of traditional treatment and research on which foods--around the world--best fortify us against cancer. Very readable, concrete, and upbeat, with colorful food charts illustrating what foods and spices are "good," "OK," and disastrous for cancer patients.

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Will be eager to hear about the books that have most impressed others!

Best,
Rosey

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