Let your food be medicine and your medicine be food.
~Hippocrates, the Father of Western Medicine

WHAT IT IS

The Story

What It Is, and
What It's Not

Conventional
Medical Treatments

HOW IT WORKS

The Immune System
and Cancer

Foods & Supplements

HOW TO DO IT

Key Concepts

Forbidden Foods

The Eating Regimen

Toolkit

About Conventional Cancer Treatments

Despite advances in the understanding of cancer biology, conventional treatments have remained fundamentally unchanged for decades. Treatments generally still involve surgery, often preceded or followed by drugs (chemotherapy) and/or radiation--all in an effort to kill the cancer before the cancer or the "therapy" kills the patient. 

The shortcomings of these three approaches, along with those of some new and experimental biological methods, are discussed briefly below.

Surgery
Surgery is the oldest method of cancer treatment. It is most effective when cancers are diagnosed early, before they have spread. Surgery still has serious risks and side effects, including complications of anesthesia, bleeding, damage to blood vessels and internal organs, pain, infections, and blood clots. Intravenous fluids, given during and after surgery, can raise blood pressure, and this can raise the chances of heart attack and stroke, especially among the elderly. Surgery, itself, is also stressful to the body, and stress suppresses the immune system.

Chemotherapy

"It seems that far too often, we physicians are vendors of suffering, infusing toxic chemicals when we know it's not only futile but, in the realm of ethics, wrong." 

  ~ Paul Roussea, MD, Journal of the American Medical Association,  August 8, 2007

The drugs and chemicals used for cancer chemotherapy  typically attack cancer cells when they are reproducing, so they are most effective against fast-growing cancers. The trouble is that the chemo drugs cannot distinguish between cancerous and normal cells. The most vulnerable normal cells are those that multiply rapidly and have a good blood supply--in hair follicles, eyes, lining of the stomach and intestines, bone marrow, liver, kidneys, heart, and lungs. 

The inability of chemotherapy drugs and chemicals to tell the difference between cancer cells and normal cells results in its devastating "side effects": hair loss; dry eyes; mouth sores and ulcers; nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea; stomach or intestinal bleeding; anemia; damage to the heart and other organs; and a severely weakened immune system.

Chemotherapy often destroys the immune system by killing white blood cells as they are manufactured in the bone marrow. These cells are the body's first defense system against bacteria, viruses and, ironically, cancer. Their destruction opens to door to a range of secondary, opportunistic infections that can lead to death.

In addition to immediate side effects, many chemotherapy drugs cause permanent damage that appears and persists long after treatment has ended. These effects, which are well documented in the scientific literature, include damage to organs (weakening of the heart muscle, toxic damage to the liver, kidneys, and bladder), fatigue, "chemobrain" (problems with memory and concentration), infertility, hearing loss, "peripheral neuropathy (a sensation of numbness or burning in the hands and feet), bone loss, and scarring of the lungs. 

Many chemotherapy drugs cause damage to DNA. As a result, chemotherapy actually increases the chance that new cancers will develop in the future, and is a major problem, especially for survivors of childhood and adolescent cancers.

"As a practicing oncologist for the past 20 years, I have seen that chemotherapy has been overused, and many times potential toxic 
effects should have deterred the oncologist from persisting in various "protocols" in the name of killing the last cancer cell. There should be more emphasis on supplemental use of alternative therapies... to improve the quality of life rather than ending up in a total avoidable disaster in many of advanced cancer cases." (April, 2011)

    ~ Arvind Kulkarni, MD, former Medical Director. Integrated Medical Program,
       Allegheny General Hospital, Pittsburgh, PA

Radiation Therapy
Radiation therapy uses high-energy particles, rays, or waves to damage cancer cells, making them die or slowing their reproduction. All the side effects of chemotherapy can also happen with radiation, except the physical damage is usually limited to the areas directly under the radiation beam. Radiation treatment of head and neck cancer, for example, often causes substantial and permanent hearing loss.*  

A 2011 study of women with early-stage breast cancer suggested that surgery followed by radiation decreased cancer recurrence compared to surgery alone;  but when breast cancer did recur after radiation, it was more likely to be invasive.^¥   Also, it is well known that incidental exposure of the heart during radiation therapy can increase the risk of subsequent heart disease.+

Like chemotherapy, radiation therapy also can cause long-term damage to the body. The severity and type of damage depends on the the site of the cancer and how much of the body was exposed. Some common harmful effects are damage to the heart (after breast cancer), anal and rectal problems (after prostate cancer), hearing loss and problems with memory and concentration (after brain cancer), and increased chances of developing other cancers. 

Biological Treatments
Experimental biological therapies for treating cancer, such as anti-tumor vaccines, gene therapy, and monoclonal antibodies recently have come into use, but their success has been limited. Cancer cells mutate regularly, selecting out those that reproduce and spread the best. Biological therapies also can have harmful side effects, and their effectiveness depends the individual patient and type of cancer. More importantly, cancer cells ultimately develop ways to evade or thwart the treatments, so complete cures rarely are achieved.

Why the Cancer-Fighting Diet is Different
Unlike the conventional treatments that kill both cancerous and healthy cells, including those of the immune system, the cancer-fighting diet contains naturally occurring substances that stimulate the immune system's ability to fight cancer. This is the key to its effectiveness:  it enables the immune system to destroy cancer cells without harming normal, healthy cells. This is how it keeps the cancer from spreading to new places in the body. 

In addition the enhancing the immune system, the diet also contains substances that: 1) cut off the food supply to existing tumors by inhibiting the growth of new blood vessels to the tumors (anti-angiogenesis); 2) make cancer cells revert to normal behavior-- they lose their ability to grow out of control into tumors, and they die (apoptosis); prevent the formation of  "free radicals" that can damage cells and lead to cancer; and increase the ability of cells to repair damage that has already occurred. (See The Diet for a detailed discussion of the benefits of this method of treating cancer.)

*  Schultz, C. et al. 2010. Hearing loss and complaint in patients with head and neck cancer
    treated with radiotherapy.  Archives of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery
    136(11):1065-9.
^¥  Janie Weng Grumley, M.D., fellow, breast oncology, University of Southern California Keck
    School of Medicine; presentation, American Society of Breast Surgeons meeting, Washington,
    DC, April 29, 2011.
+  Taylor, C., and Darby, SC. JAMA Internal Medicine. Published online, October 28, 2013.
    doi:10. 1001/ jamainternmed.2013.9131.

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