My War on Cancer

I am not a doctor; I am a dedicated and passionate layperson. I have written 19 books covering a wide range: the effects of alcoholism on the family, the effects of abuse on the individual, spirituality, the science of weight loss, the remarkable restoration of quality of life with bioidentical hormone replacement, and now, doctors who are curing cancer. I am simply a messenger; my books represent the opinions of hundreds of highly qualified Western doctors, scientists, and professionals.

Knockout: Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer is a wakeup call to the standard of care medical professionals. Knockout is also fuel for we the patients to question and have options.

According to The New York Times, “The War on Cancer is a dismal failure.” Let’s start there.

Look elsewhere. If the medical establishment is too arrogant to look into the great successes being made by alternative doctors, then you need to do this on your own.

In the last 55 years, the death rate from cancer has dropped only 5 percent. What other medical technology would we continue to utilize with such a dismal outcome? Yet after billions of dollars have been poured into research, there is still no cure. For instance, cases of heart disease fell 64 percent during that time.

I keep getting the arguments from, for instance, Dr. Otis Brawley, head of the American Cancer Society that “we are making great strides and we are extending life.”

Let’s examine that statement. Extending life... all right, let’s look at the great “strides” made toward pancreatic cancer. The drug Gemzar is touted as the panacea for this deadly disease. Gemzar has been compared to the previous "best" chemo for pancreatic cancer and the median survival improved from 4.2 months to only 5.7 months. About one extra month of life for this expensive drug? Not one single patient out of 126 in the study survived longer than 19 months. But Gemzar has been considered such an advance that the FDA approved it and now it’s a billion-dollar industry. It’s used all over the world. This is considered a major “advance”?

And coupled with taking this drug is an unbelievably horrible quality of life, resulting in the emaciated state we have come to know as "the end stage cancer patient." Prior to my appearance on Larry King recently, I called Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez (featured in my book, Knockout) and asked him if he could provide me with 10 names of patients with stage IV pancreatic cancer who had been on his nutritional protocol for longer than 10 years. A half hour later, he called me back with 10 names and phone numbers. I called them and they all report enjoying great quality of life and can’t say enough about their good quality of health and of Dr. Gonzalez himself. How many doctors in the oncology world would be able to provide us with this kind of substantiation?

• Gerald Posner: Does Suzanne Somers Cause Cancer?

Really, can the medical oncology profession be proud of this “advance”?

In my book, Knockout: Drs. Gonzalez, Russell Blaylock, and Stanislaw Burzynski all said the following: We in the oncology world know that chemotherapy does nothing whatsoever for pancreatic cancer, which of course begs the question: “then why would it be given”? The answer is palliative… meaning, it makes the patient feel that something is being done, it makes the family feel that something is being done and when that patient dies, everyone feels they have done the best they could. From the point of view of the family and patient, this is true, because neither the family nor the patient knows the questions to ask, as in: “if I take this deadly chemo, and it brings me to my knees, will I be cured?” The answer is of course, no. Because, as The New York Times said, the war on cancer is a dismal failure.

Let’s take another very popular drug for women with breast cancer. I myself was offered this drug nine years ago when diagnosed with breast cancer for the rather large tumor in my right breast. The drug is Adriamyacin. A study was done on this drug at the University of California Los Angeles, which has proven that Adriamyacin is ineffective in up to 92 percent of the women to whom it was given. For the majority of cancers which are ER positive, it doesn’t work. Plus, it has very serious potential cardiac side effects. Dennis Salmon, the doctor heading the Revlon Center at UCLA, took on the whole breast cancer oncology community and said they were giving Adriamyacin for no good reason. Women I’ve interviewed call it the red devil; the effects so harsh that it conjures torture. Yet as we speak this drug is still being administered to unsuspecting, trusting women. Why? Because it is another billion-dollar drug? Follow the money.

I can give example after example of this failed and flawed protocol. If there was a “cure” coming out of Big Pharma and oncology, we would all know about it.

Here’s where there is some light: There has been considerable success with three types of cancer with the use of chemotherapy: testicular cancer such as the type Lance Armstrong has endured; childhood leukemia; and some lymphomas, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After that, zip.

But you say, you know people who have had chemotherapy and are alive 10 or more years later. Let’s examine that, recently with the reported overscreening of breasts and prostates with which they are finding very small cancers, then harshly treating them and these are likely cancers that would have shrunk on their own. But according to Dr. Russell Blaylock, renowned oncologist/brain surgeon and neuroscientist, chemo gets into the DNA of every single cell in the body. It lies there like a smoldering grass fire… if the patient lives a healthy lifestyle and eats properly, avoids chemicals in their food or households, gets significant sleep, manages their stress and balances their hormones, avoids smoking and alcohol, and exercises regularly, then that grass fire might not erupt.

But let’s face it: How many humans take their health that seriously? When the diet and lifestyle habits catch onto that chemo in the DNA, it is like throwing kerosene on a grass fire. Says Dr. Blaylock in Knockout, “we are seeing recurrences in the 10- and 12-year mark and when it returns, it returns with a vengeance. All for a cancer that maybe didn’t need to be treated harshly in the first place, or for a cancer that might have been able to have been treated nutritionally" Or cured with another option such as antineoplastins invented by Dr. Burzynski, or nutritional or integrative approaches by the other doctors who are actually having significant success .

For having the audacity to step out of the “standard of care” box, these doctors have been persecuted. The FDA tried to put Dr. Burzynski in jail for 300 years! Why? Because as a scientist, he had identified that people with cancer always are missing a certain peptide, an amino acid in their livers that controls cell multiplication. He has devoted his life to replicating that peptide and when he puts it back in the patient, their cancer goes away. No harsh drugs, no side effects. Does he have success 100 percent of the time? No. No one in the cancer world, orthodox or alternative or integrative, can make that claim.

But in compliance with the FDA (that same FDA who tried to put Burzynski in jail and out of business), he has now completed Phase II clinical trials with the most virulent type of brain cancers such as medulablastoma, and glioblastoma (the one that killed Ted Kennedy) in 60 percent of his patients! Who in the oncology world can make that claim? Certainly not Dr. Keith Black, who was on the Larry King show with me as an "opposing doc." He is a skilled surgeon, great hands, can delicately remove the tumor, but then the patient has to undergo radiation and chemotherapy to kill off the "escapees" (rogue cells). If his results are consistent with statistics, the outcome for patients is dismal.

Dr. Burzynski fought the U.S. government, and won! Doesn’t that tell us something? Why won’t those in the oncology world look at what he is doing? Why, when I am promoting this book do I get attacked by a morning talk-show host that “several of my doctors have been indicted” and that “I should check out my doctors more thoroughly before I feature them.”

No, the interviewer should do her homework before she interviews on such an important subject and point out that all my doctors have been acquitted. It is no small matter that after that interview of attack, trying to discredit me and my courageous doctors in Knockout, that she told me her father died of prostate cancer and that afterward they thought probably "he shouldn’t have had that chemotherapy." So the party line of her network is to discredit anyone who goes against Big Pharma… because it is pharmaceutical companies that are the main revenue base for most all media and government officials. Pharma runs this country and we the patients are the trusting losers. So much for good journalism.

I have other spectacular doctors featured in Knockout. Dr. Gonzalez is having great success with many cancers: pancreatic, lung, liver, ovarian, anal. His patients are put on individualized diets with constant detoxing of the body and many, many, are alive years after stage IV cancers; healthy, not degraded by harsh chemicals. I have personally spoken with and met many of them, after 11, 17, 21 years away from their diagnosis.

Dr. James Forsythe, a integrative oncologist in Nevada who also has a naturopathic and homeopathic license, was also indicted for prescribing HGH to a government shill who during his trial was proven to have actually had an HGH deficiency. To get to this point, Dr. Forsythe’s business was almost ruined; the FDA arrived at his home at 8:30 a.m. in flack jackets, shoved him to the floor, put a gun to his head, and threw his wife on the floor in the same manner. No wonder doctors who are onto "another way" are afraid to speak up. I am speaking up for them. I don’t have a license to lose and I have the voice of a very large readership. My readers know I have never lied to them.

After all the billions and billions of dollars thrown at cancer research, after all the marches for cancer by well-meaning women raising yet more money for pharmaceutical companies and after all the black-tie fundraisers…. There is no cure! Only more and more money for the pharmaceutical companies to the tune of $200 billion a year! I’ll bet they are having a big laugh over that one in the back room.

People wake up! The cancer industry has failed.

Look elsewhere. If the medical establishment is too arrogant to look into the great successes being made by alternative doctors, then you need to do this on your own. Next year, 2010, cancer will be the biggest killer in the world. It likely could be you or someone you love. Don’t you want to know there is another way?

You can always go conventional afterward if alternatives don’t pan out. But it is much harder to do it in reverse… being conventional, getting all messed up on harsh chemicals and radiation, and then expecting alternatives to be a miracle. That’s what happened to my friend Farrah Fawcett. Alternatives are being blamed for her demise, but could it be that three grueling rounds of chemotherapy and radiation which, when given a "chemo sensitivity test" in Germany, proved to be absolutely ineffective! Couldn’t it be that the treatment was responsible for her demise? We’ll never know. Oh yes, chemo sensitivity tests exist, but not in this country. We just throw this poison at patients like a dart board and keep our fingers crossed that it is going to work.

This is a wakeup call to the medical establishment, but mostly to the people. Protect yourself. Do your homework. Know the realities of treatment. Ask the harsh questions of your oncologist. Will this cure me? Really understand what "shrinking the tumor" or what the "tumor will respond" rap means. Shrinking or responding is not a cure. It means hardly anything. It is the way "success" gets skewed… it's called "surrogate end point," meaning that if the tumor shrinks by 50 percent in four weeks, it's considered a complete response. If that same patient dies in week five, it is still considered a complete response. Factor in quality of life. Factor in that chemo does nothing for pancreatic cancer and that all it will do is make the end of life for your loved one complete torture and then die anyway. These are my doctors speaking.

I am the messenger, the filter for hundreds of doctors of great courage. I will be attacked most likely in this article, but read through the lines. I have no agenda. I don’t sell drugs, or take money from any pharmaceutical company. I am passionate because I have been offered as my "only chance," harsh chemotherapy twice in my life, most recently for a diagnosis of lung cancer that had metastasized throughout my body, confirmed by six doctors, and that my only "hope" was to start harsh chemotherapy treatments. It turned out to be a horrible misdiagnosis. A big mistake. Confirmed over and over, a debilitating week in my life facing the very real possibility that my life was over.

What if I had been another kind of patient? What if I had accepted their wrong prognosis and took their poison.

I doubt then I would be sitting here writing this, and never would have written Knockout. Knockout offers, maybe for the first time, OPTIONS….HOPE! Something there is very little of in the present protocol of cancer.

In a recent Canadian study relative to lung cancer and chemotherapy, when asked, 75 percent of the doctors said they would never take platinum-containing chemotherapy themselves. What does that tell you?

Knockout is a wakeup call for the people. Someone has to speak up and point out the lack of a cure, and that there are doctors out there who are managing cancer and sometimes curing cancer without drugs.

People …it’s your life! You’ve watched your loved ones die over and over. It’s time to admit it… the medical establishment regarding cancer has for the most part failed! They don’t have an answer.

The definition of insanity is continued repetitions of negative behavior. How many times do we have to try their failed protocol before we realize it’s time to look in a whole other direction? There is an answer to cancer and it is possibly much simpler than we have been led to believe. Do the work, read Knockout, and if you ever find yourself in this devastating situation….you will know what you need to do.