Positive Health Online

Any person diagnosed with cancer is entering into a journey of discovery, and needs to be prepared for a particularly steep and fast learning curve. For most people this voyage starts and ends at the hospital with the advice and treatment given by their medical team. However, increasingly patients are taking an active part in their treatment plan. This is acknowledged by many specialists when they give their patients treatment options to discuss and to make decisions about. But in truth, the treatment options are still mostly limited to surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy and hormone therapy. It now turns out, from a recent survey of patients at the Royal Marsden Hospital that around 50 per cent of patients are self-medicating with supplements and by changing diet, and not discussing this with their doctors. Clinicians are waking up to the fact that they need to discuss these issues with their patients because, as is also known, dietary and supplementation can affect treatment progress, both positively and negatively depending on how it is implemented. Some more far-sighted, and better funded, institutions also have complementary centres operating alongside them offering a mind-body approach to healing, but these are few and far between.

But despite all these apparent changes there is still a number of other treatment possibilities that hang around, it has to be said on the fringe of cancer treatment. Treatments such as Dr Stanislaw Burzinski's Antioneoplaston Therapy and Dr Fuad Lechin's Neuroimmunomodulation Therapy have been around for ages and despite numerous published papers have remained on the fringes practising in out-of-the-way clinics. Usually funding has been an issue, sometimes personality issues have come into it (refusing to tow the main-stream line) and often it might have been the right therapy promoted at the wrong time politically speaking (the large pharmaceutical companies hold sway in the US where most research is done and work quite hard lobbying to crowd out any competition). Home-based therapies such as pancreatic enzyme supplementation and colonic cleansing have been practised for an age. Other dietary approaches, such as reducing dairy products and eating organic food, are almost being embraced by the mainstream (I use the term 'almost' advisedly!).

But if someone is diagnosed with cancer and wants to find out about these treatment possibilities and therapies there is only a hotch-potch patchwork of information available. People who want to make intelligent decisions have to scour the internet to find information. Now this book puts together a good deal of the information in a single place.

The book combines descriptions of the treatments, explaining technical terms, going into approximate costings and giving transcripts of conversations with the individuals whose therapy protocols are discussed. This makes it quite understandable for the lay person. The list of therapies run from the easy-to-do-at-home, such as simply drinking more water and choosing organic produce, to therapies that will take more time, effort and money.

Will this book enable you to cure cancer? Who knows? But then who knows when you enter into a treatment programme at hospital if it will work? Yes, there are survival statistics but that doesn't help those who don't make it. At least with this information people can educate themselves about additional choices they can make if they wish to.

My only concern about this book is that it doesn't do enough to steer people back to their medical support team. It definitely states that many of these treatment protocols can run concurrently with orthodox treatment, but this is slightly underplayed. To get medical orthodoxy on board their main fear has to be addressed: this is that people will go off and self-treat and come back for hospital treatment when the cancer has already progressed too far. On the other hand, as the authors point out, no-one has a monopoly or has all the answers regarding cancer treatment and a patient interested in this information has the right to know about these approaches.

This book can be ordered from the Positive Health bookstore. Please click the Bookshop image at the top of the column to your right, then click on Cancer.

Further Information

Readers wishing to purchase this book can log onto Amazon at www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/095443684/qid=110905057 or contactThe London Press on Tel: 0871 218 0214; Fax: 0207 748 4424;sales@thelondonpress.co.uk;www.thelondonpress.co.uk;www.healing-cancer.co.uk