Alternative cancer cervical colon

For most of the past 15 years, I have worked along with Nicholas Gonzalez, MD, offering a nutritionally-based therapy to patients with cancer and other degenerative diseases.

We realized very quickly that patients who had not thought through their treatment choice rarely stuck with their program long enough to see if it worked. Thus we tried to understand the motivations of each new patient as she decided to pursue this treatment. Their thought processes determined their compliance with the therapy and affected their interactions with us, their physicians. In addition, we have strived always to steadily accumulate data on the method we use to demonstrate its merit -- and if patients do not follow a therapy, it is impossible to tell if it would have worked. So in order to best help the patients, and to make any progress in researching this method, we needed to be as sure as possible that our patients had made clear decisions and would follow through with them.

In writing this article I drew not only upon my own experience but also on the results of a survey I sent to 50 of our long-term patients. They were kind enough to share with me some information about how they learned about our treatment, how they made the decision to pursue this protocol, how they motivated themselves to persevere and how they handle inquiries that they receive from others about their treatment choice.

If you have been diagnosed with cancer, this is most likely a frightening time for you, bringing about radical changes in your life. Decisions about therapy may have to be made very quickly after the news is delivered. Your physicians may have forceful opinions about what steps need to be taken but friends and family may present other information to you, leaving you bewildered among treatment options.

The first and most important step in your decision-making process is to learn about the disease that you have. For some patients this seems natural while to others it may be frightening or confusing. But learning about your disease, and the options that you have for treatment, is the first step toward choosing which of those options you pursue. Leaving the decision to your physician or to your family may place you into a treatment protocol that you are unable or unwilling to put into practice or that you will subsequently regret.

A good place to start gathering information is with the physician who made the diagnosis and perhaps also with an oncologist (a physician who specializes in the treatment of cancer). Before your appointment you might consider making a list of questions to ask. It is usually helpful to take along a family member or friend to listen with you, since they may pick up information you miss.

Go into your appointment with an open mind. Some cancers can be cured with orthodox treatment such as surgery in early stage colon or cervical cancer, or chemotherapy for Hodgkin's disease. With other cancers the picture may not be as rosy. Cancer treatment is loosely classified as either "curative" or "palliative." Palliative therapy is meant to alleviate symptoms, shrink tumors or prolong life but is not anticipated to cure disease. Many times, if palliative care is all that is available, physicians are hesitant to say so clearly because they do not want to take hope from the patient. Some patients may not ask questions in this situation because they do not want to hear the answer. Our experience is that many of our best patients have come to us because orthodox therapy had no cure for them and after hearing that, they began to search for another answer. They did the research, faced the unpalatable facts and refused to believe that there was no hope.

If you find the terminology your doctor uses confusing, ask questions. Sometimes words may mean something different than what you might assume. For example, "complete remission" does not mean the same thing as "cure." "Complete remission" describes disappearance of tumor and "partial remission" describes shrinkage of tumor. For some studies, patients are counted as complete or partial responders if this remission lasts for a month, even if disease subsequently recurs or worsens.

It is important to ask about the typical duration of the response that is achieved. Remission does not always mean that patients will have improved survival. In some clinical trials patients who achieved a complete remission with a treatment would subsequently relapse and their survival was no better than other patients. Even the word "cure" may not mean what you think it does -- it often means no evidence of cancer is found for a five year period but some cancers can recur later than that. By asking specific questions about the outcomes that matter to you, you can better decide whether a particular palliative treatment is what you want to do.

A patient who does not ask questions may think that a treatment provides much more benefit than it actually does. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled "Discrepancies Between Patient and Physician Estimates for the Success of Stem Cell Transplantation," examined the estimates of patients and their physicians of the likelihood of various outcomes (including cure) with stem cell transplantation (JAMA Vol.285 pp.10348, February 28, 2001.) Patients were significantly more optimistic than their physicians in all cases. The discrepancy between the expectations of the physicians and patients was greatest when the likelihood of a cure with the procedure was lower. The study was not designed to explain why the discrepancy described came about -- whether the physicians were not clearly communicating or whether the patients were choosing not to believe the information they were given. My own opinion is that most oncologists are not being deliberately deceptive but are motiva ted to emphasize the possibility of success for what they believe is the good of the patient. Many oncologists will encourage patients to follow through with the treatment that makes the most sense to the oncologist, even if the likelihood of long-term success is documented to be slim.

Different individuals can look at the same information and make very different choices. For example, physicians are highly trained in reading the medical literature and when they get cancer, they become highly motivated to do research. We have patients who are physicians who opted very early in their disease not to pursue orthodox therapy because the chances of success were not good. We have been contacted by other physicians who informed us that they would pursue this approach only after they had finished working their way down a list of chemotherapeutic treatments that made sense to them but had no documentation of working for their disease.

The drug gemcitabine, has been approved for the treatment of pancreatic cancer because it offers an improvement in survival -- of a few weeks. Many physicians think this is highly significant and they will strongly encourage or even pressure their patients to proceed with it. Some patients look at the data for gemcitabine with pancreatic cancer, decide against it and look for other options. Some go ahead with gemcitabine, possibly hoping that they will be the one who gets a miraculous cure, possibly hoping that they will get a little extra time during which some major chemotherapeutic breakthrough will happen. This is an individual decision but if you do not get the statistics about your treatment, someone else will make this decision for you.

After speaking with your doctor you may wish to do further research on the Internet or in the medical literature. The National Cancer Institute's CancerNet (http://cancernet.nci.nih.gov) is a site many patients find helpful. It can help you search the medical literature directly. Original research papers can be somewhat dense to read, even for medical professionals, but most motivated lay people can make sense of them.

After you've done your research, what next? If a curative treatment exists for your disease, go ahead with it. If the only treatments available are palliative, then you may wish to consider complementary and/or alternative therapies. Complementary therapies are therapies that are used along with orthodox therapies such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Many patients use them and if you choose to, it is important that your orthodox physicians know that you are doing so because it may interact with the therapy that they are providing. In case of side effects, it may be difficult to know whether the orthodox or complementary therapy is causing the problem.