[onlooker]

Great documentary. About Cancer its possible treatments , the healthcare profit industry and how it failing to stem the Cancer onslaught and how natural alternative offers a better alternative
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR8SQzCJK0Q

[onlooker]

Here is another documentary expounding on how natural remedies especially proper diet can help against Cancer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YPpNW_kezg

[SeaGypsy]

Ever heard of the book 'A Cure For All Cancers'? It's not so much about being able to defeat diagnosed cancer (though the author implies there is significant chance of doing so by applying her ideas) more about how riddled with carcinogenic substances our homes have become- with lists of chemicals, commonly found in household cleaning products, foods, furnishings etc. Of course most of us these days are continually exposed nomatter how careful we are, through the air we breath.

Aside from all that, we now have unrealistic expectations that everyone should be healthy for decades longer than most people expected to live 60 years ago.

[Cog]

Dr Gerson is a quack and if you follow his advice you are going to end up deader than he is. Your first stop when a diagnosis of cancer is made, ought to be a visit to an oncologist that specializes in the treatment of said cancer. Coffee enemas, fruit juices, and raw liver milkshakes are not part of their protocols.

People get desperate when a diagnosis of cancer is made especially when the diagnosis is terminal and are willing to try anything. Your best shot at beating cancer is early diagnosis and prompt treatment by an oncologist. Diet does come into play in prevention of certain types of cancer but that is not what Dr Gerson was up to. People died following his bad science instead of seeking out established protocols for treatment.

More about this quackery at the link:

https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRe ... ancer.html

[onlooker]

Sorry. but with the 2.2% or 2.1% effectiveness rate of Chemotherapy, I do not think one is risking much in trying something else

[Cog]

One could argue that with certain types of cancer in their more advanced stages that no treatment or natural herbal treatment is better than chemotherapy or radiation. I won't argue that point as the oncologist will tell you the percentage chance to have to survive it based on the stage of where you are at. Some people choose to do nothing if the end result is just being sick from conventional treatment their last few months or years on earth. That is a logical approach particularly for advanced pancreatic or lung cancer.

But early detection gives you a great shot of surgery, chemo, or radiation affecting a good outcome. My wife just went through this with a melanoma. She caught it early, had the surgery both for the melanoma and a sentinel lymph node biopsy to see if it had spread. It had not spread and her 5 year survival rate is now at 95% which ain't bad.

[Cog]

Sorry. but with the 2.2% or 2.1% effectiveness rate of Chemotherapy, I do not think one is risking much in trying something else

2.2% rate for what type of cancer and at what stage? You can't just throw a number out like that and not give any context.

[Cog]

Another account of a person who followed the Gerson treatment right into her grave.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-ge ... ainscough/

[onlooker]

The study was done by the an Australian University over 5 years and tested many types of cancers. I am unclear at what stage the cancer of the patients was when the study began. Undeniably, early treatment whether orthodox or not has a better chance of success. Congratulations, on the recovery of your wife

[Subjectivist]

While I try to avoid quackery in medicine there is such a thing as the Cancer Diet that seems to work very well for things like Brain Tumors. By eliminating all starches and sugars the diet starves the cancer cells, and the body naturally shifts to making ketones to feed your brain in the absense of high blood sugar levels.

[jesus_of_suburbia]

Possibly. Brain tumor, namely gliomas, have demonstrated the ability to metabolize fat. Pancreatric cancer can use amino acids for energy.

The unpleasant truth is that cancer is just a horrible disease, with certain types having no reliable, sustainable treatments. Immunotherapy is really just getting started, but has shown progress. Some of that progress, such as its treatment of metastatic melanoma, has been pretty amazing.

Chemo doesn't cure all or most cancers at late stages. It can prevent the spread after surgery. It can also provide relief of symptoms in palliative care. The statistics for survival are readily available for anyone to view. Also understand that chemotherapy dosing has improved over the past few decades. Previously, the goal was to give the highest doses possible without outright killing the patient. The goal is now is what is the minimum dosage that can be given to provide the best results.

It's also important to understand that CAM is a multi-billion dollar industry. Most of it is untested and unproven as well.

[Subjectivist]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pro ... c550531fe5

A new experimental treatment has achieved what chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants have failed to do: put chronic, relapsing blood cancers into remission.

What’s more, it uses the body’s own natural defense system to attack these cancerous growths.

The treatment involves T cells, a type of immune cell that works as your body’s own personal S.W.A.T. team to detect, surround, and destroy foreign invaders like bacteria or viruses. Historically, cancerous cells have grown too fast for T cells to mount an effective defense, and they can also trick T cells into thinking that they’re a healthy part of the body as opposed to a cancerous growth that needs to be stopped.

But in experimental treatments at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, initial evidence shows Dr. Stanley Riddell has successfully trained these T cells to better recognize and eliminate cancer cells in a short time span, allowing cancer to go into remission.

Specifically, he extracted a person’s T cells in order to prime them to recognize the type of cancer that is affecting the patient, allowing these primed T cells to attack the growth while sparing healthy cells and tissue.

The results

Riddell’s preliminary findings on the success of T cell therapy to cure previously terminal cases of cancer made a stir at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. on Sunday because of his eye-popping results: 93 percent of the small group of 29 participants with previously incurable or constantly relapsing acute lymphoblastic leukemia have gone into complete remission after undergoing Riddell’s immune cell therapy.

An additional 65 percent of 30 participants with non-hodgkin’s lymphoma have also gone into remission. And while it’s too early to report the results of a small test group of 15 patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, Riddell says that they’re also showing “really high” remission rates. In total, Riddell has treated nearly 100 patients with the T cell therapy.

“These were all cases that had failed all conventional therapy, so they relapsed after chemotherapy. Many of them had relapsed after an allogeneic bone marrow transplant or they just weren’t considered candidates for a transplant,” he explained to HuffPost. “To take an experimental therapy and use it in patients that are this advanced, and to get these kinds of results, is really encouraging.”

The T cell treatment is the result of a 10-year collaboration with Dr. Michael Jensen of Seattle Children’s Hospital, who is currently conducting trials in children with leukemia and getting similar results, said Riddell. The effect appears to be long-lasting, and could provide a way forward for developing therapies for the more common and harder to treat diseases like breast, colon and lung cancer.

How it works

Riddell withdraws a patient’s immune cells in what amounts to a simple blood donation. Then he takes a few weeks to link synthetic receptors called chimeric antigen receptors to the T cells, in order to help them identify cancer cells in the body and destroy them. Once they’re re-infused back into the patient, Riddell basically sits back and lets the T cells do their thing. It generally took about 30 to 60 days for cancerous growths to disappear in his patients, he said.

Riddell suspects that his T cell therapy worked so well because the cancers he were treating were blood cancers. Instead of being bound up in solid tumors, the cancer cells are diffuse throughout the body, and also collect in certain sites where T cells also like to hang out: the bone marrow, blood, lymph nodes and spleen.

What’s next

Still, Riddell hopes that his research can be re-purposed to begin attacking the more common cancers, like breast or colon cancer. These types present a special difficulty because solid tumors essentially create their own micro-environments that can turn off an active T cell, suppressing its immune system function.

“We’re going to have to learn to combine T cell therapy with things like check point inhibitors, which is another very effective form of immunotherapy for some patients with solid tumors, or to engineer T cells in ways that will allow them to function in that immunosuppressive microenvironment,” Riddell said.

While his study is still in its earliest stages and has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, he hopes that the technology can become available to the wider public within two to three years.

“This is really another demonstration that [shows] the immune system can be used to treat cancer,” Riddell concluded. “I wouldn’t say yet that this will be applicable to all types of people with all cancers, but I think that the opportunity is there and the research directions now are really apparent.”