Increasing awareness of the association between nutrition and malignant disease will one day bring sanity to the field of medicine.
Diet is important not just for reducing risk of cancer but in helping people recover from it. The relationship between nutrition and cancer is an area of great concern to the integrative oncologist but unfortunately these kinds of doctors are a rare species.
Few things are more devastating to a person’s peace of mind than a cancer diagnosis.
It brings up fears for families, friends, and loved ones and for good reason. When treated the way it is through slash and burn medical treatments it compares with a voluntary trip to the medical ward of a Nazi concentration camp where doctors would just experiment on men, women and children just as they do today everywhere in the field of oncology.
Oncologists and the medical industry are playing games with cancer patients lives. Many doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers in the United States decline to treat people who can’t pay, or have inadequate insurance, among other reasons.
Cancer Treatment Centers of America has been found to reject certain patients and, even more, culling some of its patients from its survival data lets the company tout in ads and post on its website patient outcomes that look dramatically better than they would if the company treated all comers.
Creating false or rosy survival numbers to attract people should be a crime but no federal or state law requires hospitals to report their cancer outcomes, let alone mandates how to do the calculations.
Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) reports on its website that the percentage of its patients who are alive after six months, a year, 18 months and longer regularly tops national figures.
For instance,
- 60 percent of its non-small-cell lung cancer patients are alive at six months, CTCA says, compared to 38 percent nationally
- 64 percent of its prostate cancer patients are alive at three years, versus 38 percent nationally
CTCA also excludes from its survival calculations thousands of patients it does treat but who did not receive “treatment at CTCA for the duration of their illness.”
CTCA appears to exclude the vast majority of its patients when it calculates survival data.
Once a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, an inevitable fear permeates her body and mind. Despite doctors’ best intentions, which I continue to doubt that they have, they literally scare the wits out of their patients increasing the chance that the cancer will metastasize because of the vastly increased stress.
Studies lead by Dwayne Jackson at the Departments of Medical Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering in 2011 have identified a particular neurotransmitter released in response to stress, that stimulates both cancer cell growth and migration in breast cancer, and other studies confirm this. [1],[2]
Integrative oncology goes only half way to the Promised Land of cancer treatment. They say that this field draws on traditional and contemporary natural health and wellness philosophies in addition to conventional cancer treatment modalities, resulting in a multifaceted approach to supporting the well-being of women with breast cancer.
From the point of view of Natural Allopathic Medicine conventional cancer treatment modalities are barbaric in their ignorance, arrogance and plain old fashioned absurdity and they certainly betray the oath that doctors don’t seem to even bother taking anymore – that oath to first do no harm. That’s impossible once you get out of medical school.
Drs. Edward Bauman and Helayne Waldman, authors of The Whole – Food Guide For Breast Cancer Survivors – A Nutritional Approach to Preventing Recurrence, say,
“Good nutrition is the very foundation of cancer resistance, a vital, life-enhancing component of lifelong tissue growth as well as tissue damage, repair, and recovery. For the woman whose life has been turned upside down by a cancer diagnosis and treatment, optimal nutrition is the key.
Combining optimal bodily nutrition from fresh, whole foods with soul nutrition from kindness and compassion communicates to our genes that we are committed to making the most of life.”
I have been having my own personal lessons in nutrition but in my Breast Cancer and Sexual Medicine books I concentrate on even deeper issues of stress, touch, intimacy love and sex.
That does not mean we should forget the basics in breast cancer prevention and treatment like iodine, selenium, bicarbonate and magnesium deficiencies.
The Breast Cancer-Iodine Connection
According to Dr. David Brownstein (2008), author of Iodine – Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It, knows that iodine is one of the most essential nutrients for breast health.
Iodine works through modulation of gene expression and estrogen containment, while remaining intimately involved in the process of cell division and replication, and apoptosis, the process of normal cell death.
If minerals are deficient gene expressions get messed up badly.
Iodine is the densest mineral that is absolutely necessary for life. One only has to take a look at the importance of the thyroid gland to see how important iodine is as the understanding of tumor suppression genes are further understood in relationship to the importance of iodine.
Iodine is the most overall useful mineral needed to keep tumor suppression genes functioning.
From epidemiological studies, we learn that iodine deficiency is linked to a higher rate of goiter and breast cancer, undoubtedly because iodine exerts the lion’s share of its effect on both thyroid and breast tissue. High levels of iodine intake are associated with reduced goiter and breast cancer rates.
Dr. Brownstein says,
“The chance of a woman having invasive breast cancer sometime during her life is now one in seven. The single most important nutrient to halt this progression is iodine.
Inadequate breast iodine levels have been associated with the development of breast cancer in both animals and humans, while iodine supplementation has been shown to cause cancer cells to shift into apoptosis or programmed cell death.
I have no doubt one of the reasons we are seeing such an epidemic of breast cancer is due to iodine deficiency.”
Brownstein has tested almost five thousand of his patients in his practice, and his results have been remarkably consistent: over 95 percent of his patients are iodine deficient
References
[1] Philip J. Medeiros, Baraa K. Al-Khazraji, Nicole M. Novielli, Lynne M. Postovit, Ann F. Chambers, Dwayne N. Jackson. Neuropeptide Y Stimulates Proliferation and Migration in the 4T1 Breast Cancer Cell Line. International Journal of Cancer, 2011
[2] Vanderbilt University Medical Center (2012, July 17). Stress fuels breast cancer metastasis to bone. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 14, 2013