It's been a great three day weekend after an initially rough start to the holiday. Since then, aside from a minor setback (re-broke the left T6 rib after major coughing spell, but doesn't hurt as bad as first time), managed to squeeze in some daily stationary biking and light weightlifting. Pushing hard to get back to work and back to a sense of normality in my life.
I wanted to touch on a subject that as a stage IV cancer patient, most people going through this kind of illness can relate to. When you are hit with this diagnosis, the obvious hope is that somehow, some way it is treatable with conventional medicine. When you are told that you are likely not going to have a significant life span, many people including myself begin to look for alternative treatments and the "miracle cure." There are certainly a number of people out there, peddling miracles from all types of sources.
I bring this topic up today because after a couple of weeks of looking at a variety of alternative treatments, I have run afoul of a number of scam and con artists, but some legitimate providers as well. Most brazen among the scam artists were a pair of San Antonio men claiming to have cured 250,000 people of cancer since 1973, yet not being able to introduce me to even one of those survivors. They also claimed to be seeing the sister of Ted Turner the same time they were seeing me, to treat her cancer. One problem: Ted Turner's sole sister, Mary Jane Turner, died 52 years ago at age 17 of complications of lupus. What was originally promised to be free treatment to me (for which I would gladly pay large sums of money if legitimate) then turned to "if you could donate $10,000 to my charity 501 foundation in Romania" now, then another $15,000 in two weeks regardless of the outcome of the "treatment," of course raised my suspicion. An inability to provide any information on the specific content and nature of the treatments also raised my suspicion and ire.
Unfortunately, these types of subhuman vultures abound in the world, preying on those whose desperation will allow them to throw away all of their resources for treatments that have no evidence or testimonial support to back them. Again, all I asked was for one person to talk to me about how they were cured with the evidence to back it up (scans, lab work, etc.). After 250,000 successes, you would figure it would be an easy situation, yet somehow not a single person could be found to tout the benefit of these treatments.
Conversely, I have met/talked with several physicians, oriental medicine doctors, and other alternative providers who have given realistic expectations of their treatments and have emphasized the need to consider their treatments as complementary to conventional therapy or as treatment of last resort should all else fail. I have met a pulmonologist in Denton, Texas who decided to try alternative treatments for his mother who has stage IV renal cell cancer and who had been sent home to expire peacefully at home. He decided to try alternative medications (largely high concentrations of multiple vitamins) with substances that have been shown to be toxic to cancer cells in small trials, but which have minimal side effect/toxicity profiles for humans and now more than six months later, her cancer volume has reduced by over half since he started his treatments on her and she has returned to almost normal in her activities of daily living at age 79. With his medical mind, he is keeping track of her treatments and responses to multiple dosages of his treatments and hopes to begin studies to prove this is not an aberration. I hope to be able to help him begin to organize and publish the results of these case by case situations.
I believe these types of COMPLEMENTARY treatments have a strong future in the treatment of cancer or at the very least, in the amelioration of symptoms and side effects of cancer and its treatment. I am starting these vitamin infusions as well to see what benefits I may derive from them. I am NOT suggesting everyone with cancer start beating down their doctors' doors asking for high dose vitamin infusions, but instead, I am using my situation to filter through the variety of treatments we never hear about outside of conventional treatment. After all, what have I got to lose and if all I get from the infusions is that wonderfully luminescent yellowing of my pee, then at least I get to say I produced such a pretty color each day.
As always, I welcome suggestions for treatments and as stated, I will try to filter through all that I can to provide suggestions for those who may follow in my unfortunate footsteps in this journey to heal my body.
Work hard, take pride in your work, stay safe, balance your needs with those of your family and your responsibilities, KEEP YOUR FAITH STRONG, and may you all have and enjoy many blessed days to come.
I wanted to touch on a subject that as a stage IV cancer patient, most people going through this kind of illness can relate to. When you are hit with this diagnosis, the obvious hope is that somehow, some way it is treatable with conventional medicine. When you are told that you are likely not going to have a significant life span, many people including myself begin to look for alternative treatments and the "miracle cure." There are certainly a number of people out there, peddling miracles from all types of sources.
I bring this topic up today because after a couple of weeks of looking at a variety of alternative treatments, I have run afoul of a number of scam and con artists, but some legitimate providers as well. Most brazen among the scam artists were a pair of San Antonio men claiming to have cured 250,000 people of cancer since 1973, yet not being able to introduce me to even one of those survivors. They also claimed to be seeing the sister of Ted Turner the same time they were seeing me, to treat her cancer. One problem: Ted Turner's sole sister, Mary Jane Turner, died 52 years ago at age 17 of complications of lupus. What was originally promised to be free treatment to me (for which I would gladly pay large sums of money if legitimate) then turned to "if you could donate $10,000 to my charity 501 foundation in Romania" now, then another $15,000 in two weeks regardless of the outcome of the "treatment," of course raised my suspicion. An inability to provide any information on the specific content and nature of the treatments also raised my suspicion and ire.
Unfortunately, these types of subhuman vultures abound in the world, preying on those whose desperation will allow them to throw away all of their resources for treatments that have no evidence or testimonial support to back them. Again, all I asked was for one person to talk to me about how they were cured with the evidence to back it up (scans, lab work, etc.). After 250,000 successes, you would figure it would be an easy situation, yet somehow not a single person could be found to tout the benefit of these treatments.
Conversely, I have met/talked with several physicians, oriental medicine doctors, and other alternative providers who have given realistic expectations of their treatments and have emphasized the need to consider their treatments as complementary to conventional therapy or as treatment of last resort should all else fail. I have met a pulmonologist in Denton, Texas who decided to try alternative treatments for his mother who has stage IV renal cell cancer and who had been sent home to expire peacefully at home. He decided to try alternative medications (largely high concentrations of multiple vitamins) with substances that have been shown to be toxic to cancer cells in small trials, but which have minimal side effect/toxicity profiles for humans and now more than six months later, her cancer volume has reduced by over half since he started his treatments on her and she has returned to almost normal in her activities of daily living at age 79. With his medical mind, he is keeping track of her treatments and responses to multiple dosages of his treatments and hopes to begin studies to prove this is not an aberration. I hope to be able to help him begin to organize and publish the results of these case by case situations.
I believe these types of COMPLEMENTARY treatments have a strong future in the treatment of cancer or at the very least, in the amelioration of symptoms and side effects of cancer and its treatment. I am starting these vitamin infusions as well to see what benefits I may derive from them. I am NOT suggesting everyone with cancer start beating down their doctors' doors asking for high dose vitamin infusions, but instead, I am using my situation to filter through the variety of treatments we never hear about outside of conventional treatment. After all, what have I got to lose and if all I get from the infusions is that wonderfully luminescent yellowing of my pee, then at least I get to say I produced such a pretty color each day.
As always, I welcome suggestions for treatments and as stated, I will try to filter through all that I can to provide suggestions for those who may follow in my unfortunate footsteps in this journey to heal my body.
Work hard, take pride in your work, stay safe, balance your needs with those of your family and your responsibilities, KEEP YOUR FAITH STRONG, and may you all have and enjoy many blessed days to come.
The vitamin therapy sounds interesting; I'd never heard of it before.
ReplyDeleteI heard a rumor of a researcher at my institution (or a neighboring institution?) who had taken the concept of a "cancer vaccine" and put it to use. I don't remember the type of cancer that was involved - supposedly it was a late-stage cancer and conventional therapies would not work. The researcher was said to have cultured some of his tumor with some of his isolated dendritic cells, and then injected them back into his body. This is a concept that's still being worked out, and I'm not sure if there are any clinical trials under way yet. According to what I heard, it was keeping his cancer under control, but he was giving himself regular injections of DCs cultured with tumors.
As an immunology graduate student entering medicine I can say that the idea certainly has merit, but I don't know what technicalities are preventing it from being more widely used. Even if an immune response can be mounted, suppression at the tumor sites is likely to be an issue. But if it can really control the tumor, at the very least, then that's something valuable.
Keep moving forward, Dr. Wu - you're truly an inspiration to many of us in the medical field.
There are actually many trials underway especially for colon cancer. The future is in this area. Some of the trials involve common antigens of cancer cells bound to a central compound designed to stimulate immune response. The results are promising.
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