The Man Who Questions Chemotherapy

[Guest guest]

The Man Who Questions Chemotherapy : Dr. Ralph Moss

 

http://www.mercola.com/article/cancer/cancer_options.htm

 

*PERSONAL CONSULTATION: Dr. Moss offers written personal consultation/report

for people with cancer, providing detailed information, frequently thirty to

fifty pages or more, on promising alternative treatments and their sources.

The fee is $300. Follow-up written questions and answers are included. Call

718-636-4433, 9AM-5PM EST, Monday-Friday.

 

If you are interested in obtaining such a report, which is usually quite

helpful and informative CLICK HERE.

 

Dr. Ralph Moss has written the book, Questioning Chemotherapy, which

documents the ineffectiveness of chemotherapy in treating most cancers. On

November 19, 1977, he was fired for telling the public the truth. At a press

conference on November 18th, he and the Second Opinion working group

released a well-documented 48-page report that stated the top officials of

the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center had lied about the results of a

study performed at the center regarding " Laetrile " -- (a natural,

alternative cancer treatment).

 

Dr. Moss has gained credibility by writing eight books, including his most

recent work, Cancer Therapy: The Independent Consumer's Guide to Non-Toxic

Treatment. He also wrote The Cancer Industry, a documented research work

telling of the enormous financial and political corruption in the " cancer

establishment " . He indicates that the motivating forces in cancer research

and treatment are often power and money, and not the cure of cancer

patients. He also writes, The Cancer Chronicles, a newsletter reporting on

new cancer treatments and preventive measures.

 

Dr. Moss' work documents the ineffectiveness of chemotherapy on most forms

of cancer. However, he is fair in pointing out that there are the following

exceptions: Acute Iymphocytic leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, and

nonseminomatous testicular cancer. Also, a few very rare forms of cancer,

including choriocarcinoma, Wilm's tumor, and retinoblastoma. But all of

these account for only 2% to 4% of all cancers occurring in the United

States. This leaves some 96% to 98% of other cancers, in which chemotherapy

doesn't eliminate the disease. The vast majority of cancers, such as breast,

colon, and lung cancer are barely touched by chemotherapy. However, there is

another category where chemotherapy has a relatively minor effect -- The

most " successful " of these is in Stage 3 ovarian cancer, where chemotherapy

appears to extend life by perhaps eighteen months, and small-cell lung

cancer in which chemotherapy might offer six more months.

 

Effective cancer treatment is a matter of definition. The FDA defines an

" effective " drug as one which achieves a 50% or more reduction in tumor size

for 28 days. In the vast majority of cases there is absolutely no

correlation between shrinking tumors for 28 days and the cure of the cancer

or extension of life.

 

When the cancer patient hears the doctor say " effective, " he or she thinks,

and logically so, that " effective " means it cures cancer. But all it means

is temporary tumor shrinkage.

 

Chemotherapy usually doesn't cure cancer or extend life, and it really does

not improve the quality of the life either. Doctors frequently make this

claim though. There are thousands of studies that were reviewed by Dr. Moss

as part of the research for his book -- and there is not one single good

study documenting this claim.

 

What patients consider " good quality of life " seems to differ from what the

doctors consider. To most it is just common sense that a drug that makes you

throw up, and lose your hair, and wrecks your immune system is not improving

your quality of life. Chemotherapy can give you life-threatening mouth

sores. People can slough the entire lining of the intestines! One

longer-term effect is particularly tragic: people who've had chemotherapy no

longer respond to nutritional or immunologically-based approaches to their

cancers. And since chemotherapy doesn't cure 96% to 98% of all cancers

anyway...People who take chemotherapy have sadly lost their chance of

finding another sort of cure.

 

It's especially telling that in a number of surveys most chemotherapists

have said they would not take chemotherapy themselves or recommend it for

their families. Chemotherapy drugs are the most toxic substances ever put

deliberately into the human body. They are known poisons, they are designed

poisons. The whole thing began with experiments with " mustard gas, " the

horrible chemical-warfare agents from World War I.

 

Dr. Moss' position on chemotherapy is supported by many major students of

the study of cancer treatment. Following are some examples: Dr. John Bailar

is the chief of epidemiology at McGill University in Montreal and was

formerly the editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. In 1986

the New England Journal of Medicine published an article by Dr. Bailer and

Dr. Elaine Smith, a colleague from the University of Iowa. Bailer and Smith

wrote: " Some 35 years of intense and growing efforts to improve the

treatment of cancer have not had much overall effect on the most fundamental

measure of clinical outcome - death. The effort to control cancer has failed

so far to obtain its objectives.

 

Dr. John Cairns, a professor of microbiology at Harvard, published his view

in Scientific American in 1985, " that basically the war on cancer was a

failure and that chemotherapy was not getting very far with the vast

majority of cancers. "

 

As far back as 1975, Nobel Laureate James Watson of DNA fame was quoted in

the New York Times saying that the American public had been " sold a nasty

bill of goods about cancer. "

 

In 1991, Dr. Albert Braverman, Professor of Hematology and Oncology at the

State University of New York, Brooklyn, published an article in Lancet

titled " Medical Oncology in the 1990s, " in which he wrote: " The time has

come to cut back on the clinical investigation of new chemotherapeutic

regimens for cancer and to cast a critical eye on the way chemotherapeutic

treatment is now being administered. "

 

Dr. Braverman says that there is no solid tumor incurable in 1976 that is

curable today. Dr. Moss confirms this and claims that the greatest

breakthrough in the objective study of chemotherapy came from a

biostatistician at the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Ulrich Abel. His

critique focused on whether chemotherapy effectively prolonged survival in

advanced epithelial cancer. His answer was that it is not effective. He

summarized and extended his findings and concluded that chemotherapy overall

is ineffective. A recent search turned up exactly zero reviews of his work

in American journals, even though it was published in 1990. The belief is

that this is not because his work was unimportant -- but because it's

irrefutable.

 

With the extensive documentation in Dr. Moss' book, and all the statistics

developed by the experts, why is chemotherapy still pushed by the large

majority of oncologists? Dr. Moss feels that " there's a tremendous conflict

going on in the minds of honest, sensitive, caring oncologists. " They're in

a very difficult position because they've been trained to give these drugs.

And they've devoted many years to reaching a very high level of expertise in

the knowledge of poisonous, deadly compounds. They're really in a bind,

because they went into oncology to help the cancer patient, yet the tools

they've been given don't work. And they see what happens to physicians who

" step out of line " and treat cancer with alternative means.

 

Armed raids, loss of licensure, professional smearing and ostracism are some

of the consequences. These could all be related to the quotation in the book

made by Dr. Lundberg, editor of the Journal of the American Medical

Association. At a recent National Institute of Health meeting, he said of

chemotherapy: " [it's] a marvelous opportunity for rampant deceit. So much

money is there to be made that ethical principles can be overrun sometimes

in a stampede to get at physicians and prescribers. " You never heard that on

the evening news.

 

The economics of cancer treatment are astounding. Cancer treatment is close

to $100 billion annually ($100,000,000,000). The chemotherapy part of that

by 1995 will be up to $8.5 billion. Looking from another angle: the Bristol

Myers company owns patents on twelve of the nearly forty " FDA-approved "

chemotherapeutic drugs. The president, past president, chairman of the

board, and a couple of the directors of Bristol Myers all hold positions on

the board at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

 

Dr. Moss' book details the failures (and very few successes) for

chemotherapy with more than fifty types of cancer, includes a complete

description of the major chemotherapy drugs, and has a section about

questions to ask your doctor. All of Dr. Moss' books and Cancer Chronicles

newsletters are available from Equinox Press, 1-800-929-WELL or

718-636-4433.

 

We are obviously losing ground with conventional cancer treatment, because

the death rates keep going up. The reason for this is because conventional

treatment is based on a faulty standard: That the body must be purged of

cancer by aggressive and toxic methods such as surgery chemotherapy and

radiation therapy. This, of course, seemed reasonable back in 1894 when

William Halsted, M.D. did the first radical mastectomy, but it has proven to

be so wrong over the last 50 years that continuing to adhere to it

constitutes more fraud than honest mistake. However, this standard still

dominates conventional cancer therapy, and until that changes, we will

continue to lose ground with cancer.

 

Dr. Whitaker, a firm believer in Dr. Moss' work and alternative cancer

therapy goes on to give some of his personal views:

 

Statistics Don't Tell the Real Story

 

What is lost in the unemotional statistic of 500,000 cancer deaths per year

is how those people died. Dr. Whitaker goes on to say more about the

treatment of cancer: In my opinion, conventional cancer therapy is so toxic

and dehumanizing that I fear it far more than I fear death from cancer. We

know that conventional therapy doesn't work -- if it did, you would not fear

cancer any more than you fear pneumonia. It is the utter lack of certainty

as to the outcome of conventional treatment that virtually screams for more

freedom of choice in the area of cancer therapy. Yet most so-called

alternative therapies regardless of potential or proven benefit, are

outlawed, which forces patients to submit to the failures that we know don't

work, because there's no other choice.

 

Personal Belief Systems Determine the Choices You Make

 

Because cancer treatment is such a sensitive issue, I need to set some

ground rules before I tell you what I would do if I had cancer. What follows

is what I personally would do. It is not a recommendation for you, and

should not be considered as such. It is not even what my wife would do(that

would be her decision), nor is it what my young son would do (that would be

the joint decision of my wife and myself). The choices to be made in

treating cancer are not easy ones, because there is so little certainty of

cure in any of them. The course that someone chooses to take is very

personal, and reflects not only that person's knowledge of the options, but

also his/her beliefs.

 

Yet, because we are strongly influenced by our natural fear of death, we

lineup for conventional cancer therapy, not so much believing that it will

work, but hoping that it will not fail. If expensive, debilitating

procedures to eliminate acne scars had the same failure rate as cancer

treatment, they would be abandoned. It is only because cancer is so often

fatal that conventional approaches were not abandoned long ago. We continue

to use them not because they work, but because those who perform them have

so vigorously eliminated any other choice.

 

My Imaginary Cancer Scenario

 

(by Dr. Whitaker)

 

Though I would approach my own dilemma with hopes of total cure, I would be

the first to admit that, regardless of the course I took, the chances of

that are small. Consequently, my choices of cancer therapy are a mix of

science and philosophy. They are as much a reflection of how I would

struggle for survival as of how I would wish to die if the struggle failed.

For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that I have just been

diagnosed with cancer of the lung, and a particularly virulent one. (Please

understand that I do not have cancer, nor do I smoke.) Before going into

what I would do and why, let me say what I wouldn't do, and why.

 

I Wouldn't Take A Passive Role

 

If I am going to fight for my life, I want to do just that. I am always

perplexed by the news stories of some celebrity, doped to the gills with

heinous poison, " courageously battling for his life. " What does this mean?

The celebrity, who simply accepts conventional cancer therapy, is no more

" courageous " than a laboratory mouse. This is not to say that what the

celebrity is doing is wrong, only that it is the very opposite of a willful

act of courage.

 

Taking a passive role with today's conventional therapy is terribly

dangerous. Recently Jackie Kennedy, after a " courageous fight, " succumbed to

non-Hodgkin's lymphoma - or did she? Her early demise, attributed to the

cancer, was a shock to cancer specialists worldwide, and brought into

question the real cause of her death. She had been given an unproved

protocol of very high-dose chemotherapy. The drugs alone could easily have

caused her death - and this would not be unusual. There are numerous cases

of iatrogenic (doctor-induced) deaths from chemotherapy.

 

I'd Actively Fight For My Life

 

On the other hand, the cancer patient who says, " no, thanks " to chemotherapy

recommended by large cancer treatment centers, and takes off to Grand

Bahamas Island to receive Immuno-Augmentative Therapy (IAT); or to Houston,

Texas, to receive antineoplastons from Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski; or who heads

to the public library to make a battle plan, has begun fighting and is

acting courageously.

 

Whether I win or lose, that is the course I would take. What have I got to

lose? Conventional treatment is toxic and simply doesn't work, so I would

throw my lot with something safe that might work, and folks, a lot of

approaches fit that description. I also believe patients who seek

alternative therapies are more optimistic. They have only one worry - the

cancer- not the cancer and the therapy!

 

And Now. Here's What I Would Do

 

(by Dr. Whitaker)

 

I'd turn my back on 50 years of institutionalized expertise, because it

follows the wrong paradigm. Everything that is done in medicine or in any

other discipline fits some paradigm. The paradigm I use for cancer is that

it is a systemic problem in which the normal control mechanisms of your body

are altered. Your immune system likely bears the largest burden for this

control; thus, all techniques that enhance it are promising. Those that

damage it are not.

 

Also, cancer cells are different from normal cells in many ways, including

their metabolic profile. At least one non-toxic therapy, hydrazine sulfate,

takes advantage of this difference. It has been shown in double-blind trials

published in respectable journals to significantly reduce the severe weight

loss (cachexia) of advanced cancer, and markedly improve the patient's

emotional state, almost to the point of euphoria. It is also inexpensive.

Even though hydrazine sulfate has been shown to be effective and non-toxic,

and it makes the patient feel better, it is ignored by every major cancer

center. Yet I would take it immediately. (For more on hydrazine sulfate, see

Ralph Moss' book, The Cancer Industry.)

 

First, I would Change My Diet

 

I would switch to a mostly vegetarian diet. I'd also take the Nutritional

Supplements " Green foods, " such as GREENS+ (800/643-1210) or Green Magma

(from Healthy Directions; 800/722-8008, ext. 572). These supplements include

the phyto-chemicals, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals required for

optimal health.. I would enhance that basic program with the following:

 

Vitamin C - 10,000 mg per day in divided doses. Ewan Cameron, a Scottish

physician, did a study in which 100 cancer patients were given 10,000 mg of

vitamin C for the rest of their lives, while control patients were not. The

patients on vitamin C lived much longer than the age-matched controls. The

Mayo Clinic did two studies on vitamin C, and in both studies found that

vitamin C did not help. However, both studies were set up in a manner that

almost guaranteed failure. Frankly, I think that this was done intentionally

to generate negative publicity for this non-toxic approach.

 

Cartilage - A three- to four-month trial of bovine or shark cartilage. The

mucopolysaccharides in cartilage stimulate the immune system and normalize

malignant cells. Ninety percent of patients with a variety of cancers

responded to a clinical trial of bovine cartilage; shark cartilage has

demonstrated success rates of 25 to 50%. VitaCarte bovine cartilage is

available from Phoenix BioLabs, 800/947-8482 (suggested dose is 9 g a day).

Shark cartilage can be obtained from MHP 800-647-0074 (suggested dose is 1 g

per 3 pounds of body weight).

 

Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) - Used as an effective therapy in congestive heart

failure, CoQ10 has only recently been studied as a cancer treatment. Cancer

patients have been found to have deficiencies of CoQ10. Clinical trials in

breast cancer have resulted in no further metastases, improved quality of

life (no weight loss and less pain), and partial remission in six of 32

patients. Vitaline makes a chewable CoQ10 with vitamin E (800/648-4755;

503/482-9231, in Canada).

 

Essiac Tea - 2 ounces 3 times a day. This blend of four herbs -burdock root,

sheep's sorrel, slippery elm and Indian rhubarb root- has its genesis in

Native American medicinal folklore. Since it was " discovered " by Canadian

nurse Rene Caisse in the 1920s, thousands have claimed to have had their

cancers cured by this tea. I'd keep on searching. We have the formula if you

are interested in purchasing the individual herbs in bulk.

 

Finally, you should know that if I were battling cancer - or any serious

disease, for that matter- I would be in a constant search for effective,

non-toxic therapies. One place to begin that search is with Ralph Moss,

Ph.D. He is probably the most knowledgeable writer in the world on

alternative therapies for cancer, and has recently published a 530-page

book, Cancer Therapy, The Independent Consumer's Guide to Nontoxic Treatment

and Prevention. (Equinox Press, New York, NY, 1995). In addition, Dr. Moss

offers a report service called Healing Choices, which ascertains, through a

questionnaire, the type and severity of cancer, and suggests alternatives.

This costs $250, and it is well worth it. If I had cancer, I would start

here for more information. You can get more information by sending a large

SASE to The Cancer Chronicles, 2 Lincoln Square, Suite 31A, New York, NY

10023, or by calling Melissa Wolf at 718/636-4433.

 

Another source of information is People Against Cancer, which provides a

comprehensive counseling service called the Alternative Therapy Program. It

includes a review of your medical records by a network of doctors using

alternative therapies. It also costs $250. People Against Cancer can be

reached at 515/972-4444. Their Internet address is:

http://www.dodgenet.com/nocancer.

 

This is certainly not my final say on cancer treatment, because it changes

as new research is done. I want to say again that what I would do is not a

recommendation for you. However, it is not a reasonable belief to think that

conventional cancer experts offer the best approaches for most cancers.

There is just too much evidence to the contrary. One of these days there may

not be a need for ''alternative' approaches to cancer. Until then, look for

the answers to the cancer riddle in the growing field of alternatives,

because they are obviously not present in our armamentarium of conventional

therapies.

 

_______________

Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!

http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/