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| Complementary cancer therapies | |||||||||
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| By Dr Amir Farid Isahak Today I will share with you some of the non-medical therapies being used to treat cancer. Do bear in mind that these methods are not backed by sufficient scientific studies, and therefore are not "evidence-based". I shall continue to write about these "unproven" methods until a satisfactory, safe, and effective "proven" solution for cancer is found. Cancer patients have the right to choose, but they must get the right information to make that choice. It is important that cancer patients get advice from both proponents and opponents of these methods before making their decision. There have been many supposed "cancer cures" that have been debunked. On the other hand, there are also many that show promise but remain unproven (as effective or otherwise) because of the lack of research done on them. Nutritional therapyHere it suffices for me to remind what was said by a nutrition expert: "Medical education has neglected to perform a refined study of nutrition in all of its aspects and has diverted attention away from the most promising means of controlling cancer. That avenue is the nutritional approach, which must encompass the human element of individual susceptibility". - Roger J. Williams, in Nutrition Against Disease. There are many regimented (ie. with strict protocols) nutritional therapy programmes for cancer. One of the most famous is the Gerson Therapy (www.gerson.org). It is a natural therapy programme using organic foods, juicing, coffee enemas, detoxification, and nutritional supplements to activate the body's ability to heal itself. Other programmes stress on different aspects of natural therapy or nutritional therapy as their main therapeutic weapon against cancer. So far, the scientific community has concluded that there is insufficient evidence that these programmes are successful in fighting cancer as claimed. Traditional Chinese MedicineI am aware that in China, cancer patients are encouraged to undergo modern medical treatment (surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, etc) together with Chinese medicinal herbs and qigong. However, there is a dearth of scientific studies to enable us to know if the combination is actually superior to medical treatment alone.Sometime ago, I related the story of how a Chinese surgeon (Prof Jiang), who is also a TCM physician and qigong exponent, correctly predicted that my relative (who was perfectly healthy, with no symptoms whatsoever) would have thyroid cancer six months after he had examined her pulse and tongue. He had offered to treat her to prevent it from occurring, but nobody believed him. Six months later, I was in the operating theatre witnessing her thyroid cancer being removed! I hope studies are done to tell us if TCM herbs (alone or with chemotherapy) are also effective in treating cancer. TXL (Tian Xian Liquid, not to be confused with paclitaxel, an anti-cancer drug, also abbreviated to TXL) is one such TCM herbal formulation that is undergoing extensive proper scientific studies registered with the National Institutes of Health (US). It is made of many plants and herbs, including gouji (wolfberry) and lingzhi (ganoderma). The scientific studies are needed to prove scientifically that it really works. The studies have so far shown that it indeed causes cancer cells to die (apoptosis) and that it inhibits tumour growth. For details please see www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2918619/. | |||||||||
