From
the Townsend Letter for Doctors & Patients
June 2004 |
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Letter
from the Publisher |
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Unlike carpal tunnel syndrome which responds to Vitamin B6 and herpes
simplex eruption which responds to lysine, cancer fails to respond
to any simple treatments. When cancer does respond to treatment, invariably
it has been complicated requiring not only surgery, chemotherapy and/or
radiation, but usually numerous herbal and vitamin supports in addition
to some form of positive mental thinking. Still it is very difficult
to isolate what exactly brings about a remission in a cancer patient.
Even more difficult to understand is why a protocol or recipe which
works so favorably in one patient, fails to elicit a beneficial outcome
in another. Chemotherapy and radiation have dramatic benefit in many
pediatric cancers, in leukemia and in lymphoma, yet both seem to fail
in patients having solid tumors including colon, lung, breast, brain
and most gastrointestinal cancers. For all the trials made with chemotherapy
and radiation, not much progress has been made in the treatment of
cancer over the past 25 years. It appears in hormone-sensitive tumors,
particularly breast and prostate cancer, that outcomes are independent
of whatever cancer treatment is administered. One survey of physicians
conducted a number of years ago demonstrated that most would not opt
to undergo either chemotherapy or radiation treatment unless the treatment
had a very high remission rate. For most tumors, neither chemotherapy
nor radiation offer a likely remission. Hence, the public has a tremendous
interest in exploring alternatives to conventional cancer treatment.
While a number of physicians remain skeptical of alternative treatments,
a burgeoning public armed with access to the Internet is willing to
investigate and undertake alternative treatments rather than willingly
sacrifice themselves. Alternative cancer treatments are not, unfortunately,
without their own risks. Most clinics specializing in alternative cancer
therapy offer protocols which are complicated, difficult to administer,
formidable to comply with, and are frankly overly expensive. Many insurance
companies balk at paying big fees for alternative treatments, so patients
are generally forced to pay exorbitant charges for uncertain treatment
strategies. For the wealthy, such fees are not burdensome, but for
the average patient, families are often challenged economically to
commit to the expenses required for an alternative cancer clinic treatment
stay. Confusion abounds not only for the cancer patient and family
but even among professionals in the alternative cancer field. One clinic
will emphatically demand certain diet, supplements and herbals and
medication; another clinic will contraindicate much of the first clinic's
requirements. A patient is frequently caught in the crossfire of conflicting
clinician orders with physicians swearing that their protocol is correct
and other protocols are ineffective. When a patient improves, staying
the course and following the successful treatment regimen is easy;
when the patient is failing, treatment regimens change like a ship
adrift in a storm. The late stages of malignancy, when the tumor has
metastasized, offers the grim picture of patients too sick to eat and
keep down food much less supplementation, forced to attempt to follow
an alternative cancer clinic regimen despite feeling thoroughly nauseated
and miserable. When the patient's course declines precipitously, some
alternative clinic operators callously claim that the patient and family
did not follow the regimen properly. It is easy to criticize the conventional
cancer treatments; it is not so easy for an alternative practitioner
to caution patients about alternative treatment programs.
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Search
our pre-2001 archives
for further information. Older issues of the printed magazine are also
indexed for your convenience. |
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1983-2004 Townsend Letter for Doctors & Patients
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September 22, 2004 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||