Online reprint from the
archives
This article, authored by Michael Culbert, freelance health journalist,
first appeared
in
The
Choice magazine
(1998; XXIV,[2]) and the Townsend Letter
for Doctors and Patients (January 1999).
On March 25, 1993, Carole Bradford faced two key events in her life:
she was turning a young-looking 53 – and she was to undergo a
lumpectomy to remove what she hoped (indeed, prayed) was a benign cyst.
What else could
it be? Certainly not the feared "C" word.
"I remember thinking what kind of cosmic joke it would be if I, Carole Bradford,
would come down with breast cancer. No way, Jose!" she recalled. Why
should she not think this way? After all, she was the hard-driving CEO of the
California-based American Biologics®, an international biotech and nutritional
supplement company whose origins dated back to the laetrile wars of the 1970s.
She "ate right," took up to 30 vitamin/mineral/enzyme tablets a
day, and was fully aware of the nature of cancer.
Of equal or greater importance, she was the globe-trotting wife of Dr. Robert
W. Bradford, the founder of American Biologics®, the scientific director
and co-founder of the former American Biologics – Mexico SA Medical Center
in Tijuana,* the co-founder of the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer
Therapy (the reason for the nationwide "decriminalization" moves
for laetrile in the 1970s and 1980s), the author or co-author of numerous books
and scores of research monographs on the metabolic management of cancer and
degenerative diseases, the primary author of the "Primordial Thesis of
Cancer," the reason behind the textbook delineating Oxidology as a medical
subspecialty, and, of more recent vintage, the pioneer/developer and worldwide
patent holder of the Bradford Variable Projection Microscopy system (BVPM®)
and the two peripheral blood tests (HLB and HRBM) he developed that assess
morphological changes in the blood as a means of evaluation of balanced body
chemistry (homeostasis).
Carole Bradford had circumnavigated the globe more than once as the "good
right arm" of Robert Bradford and had sat in on as many or more scientific
sessions on cancer, degenerative disease, and microscopy as any licensed
professional. She knew cancer intimately: it was in her family, among her
friends. She knew
what it was, what it could do.
"I had had cysts for several years, so had my mother, and my grandmother
had died of breast cancer. But there was something different about this lump," she
recalled. "I could feel this one easily, since it was growing fast – and
it was associated with a lot of heat." She remembered some "orthodox" miscues
along the way: Three years before, in 1990, she had been at the American Biologics® ("AB")
Hospital for her annual three-day trip for rejuvenation treatment: some live
cells, chelation, blood work, a proprietary stabilized oxygen compound "drips." She
had a breast cyst at the time, and she recalled that a staff surgeon had encouraged
her to have a needle biopsy "just to make sure." "Of course
I can't be sure, but I think that this is what they would call 'the
initial insult.' I don't feel right about biopsies, and I'll
never do one again," she said. Carole Bradford now believes that she was
incubating a malignant process in a minimally active state, at least since
that time (1990), but was keeping it under control with her disciplined diet
and supplements.
By January 1993, this fast-growing cyst had her worried. She did another "orthodox" procedure – an
ultrasound assay of the right breast. The ultrasound spotted an area of inflammation
but the official analysis was that it was just another cyst. Because she was
so busy at the office, she did not feel she could take the time away from her
duties to have the cyst removed then. So she waited two months until her birthday,
March 25, to have the lumpectomy, which she undertook while wide awake and
following the procedure with keen interest. "When I saw the tumor in
the operating room I exclaimed, 'God – that's big!'" The
tumor was 4 cm x 4 1/2 cm x 3.8 cm, plus extra tissue taken – it looked
like a golf ball.
After five days, Carole Bradford went back to her routine: long hours at her
American Biologics office in Chula Vista, California, with endless telephone
calls, constant involvement in the routine operation of a thriving business
and all that went with it, with scant time available to enjoy her beautiful
ranch in East San Diego County. Two weeks later, on April 9, she was sitting
at her desk when Robert Bradford entered her office after having heard from
the University of Minnesota Hospital and Clinic Department of Surgical Pathology,
where the lumpectomy sections had been sent. Carole Bradford, ever unflappable,
remembered it well:
"Bob came in and sat down in front of my desk. His behavior was very calm.
He just said it all at once: it was confirmed that I had breast cancer. It was
a 'high-grade infiltrating ductal-cell carcinoma of the right breast,
Bloom-Richardson grade 3.' So I'm just sitting there trying to
take it all in." Not an easy moment. "But within two minutes, I
was asking Bob to check my blood on the microscope. I wanted to see what my
blood looked like. And I needed to see it for myself. But I never had this
feeling of, 'Why me?'—'Why not me?' I'd
been through this with enough patients to know not to be too negative, even
if the information was tough to take. I do remember one thought, looking
back, that really sank in: considering who I was, and what we were involved
in, how
could I not pull through? I didn't sleep very well that first night,
though. It was really a rude awakening."
Working side-by-side for years with medical maverick Robert Bradford, she
had come to have enormous admiration for him and all that he had done, particularly
in helping to get the AB Hospital functioning. He and the old nucleus group
of the activist Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy Inc., had
formed the first Bradford-oriented medical center in 1975 (Cydel Clinic,
later
called Manner Clinic). "I thought, 'Of course I'll pull through
this. My God, haven't we all been working for this? Don't we have
the best therapies and techniques available? Does anyone know more about
cancer than we do?' I decided then and there that I was going to do everything
to beat this thing. I was lucky. I had access to every conceivable cancer
therapy.
I was well-grounded in the subject matter, and I had a brilliant husband
who would be directing my treatment in every way."
The Bradfords' general belief is that the earlier signs of a possible
malignant process were masked because Carole was nutritionally doing all the
right things. But between her rejuvenation visits and blood analyses several
things had happened. Both were traveling extensively to Europe and China, where
there had been a major effort to market the Bradford Variable Projection Microscope
(BVPM) microscopy system. Additionally, Carole was taking very personally some
personnel upheavals at work.
"I'm not trying to make excuses here," she said. "But I am
saying that I was extremely stressed by these problems. Aside from that, until
the diagnosis came like a proverbial knock on the head, my favorite place was
my desk, and I spent a great deal of time there. In retrospect, I can only
think now that the needle biopsy of 1990 and this personnel problem in late
1992 were what it took to knock over the dominoes and bring my malignancy to
the fore." The "coagulation" blood test (HLB) did in fact
pick up areas of suspicious inflammation, adrenal stress, and bowel flora
imbalances.
The AB Hospital had become a major center for the use of another test – AMAS,
or the test for antimalignin antibody, performed in Boston, and the five-parameter
Augusti test, pioneered in France by Dr. Yves Augusti, a collaborator of the
Bradford Research Institute® (BRI®). Neither has received the full
blessings of the US medical establishment, but the AB Hospital and BRI incorporate
both as useful monitors.
Admitted to the AB Hospital the day before the scheduled lumpectomy, Carole
Bradford's Augusti test had shown a suspicious rise in the "allergic" parameter,
frequent in cancer cases. The AMAS test was slightly "positive." Later,
from medical orthodoxy, a breast cancer "marker," CA 15-3, turned
out to be very high. "Okay, the results were in. It was cancer, no doubt
about that, and it was happening to me, Carole Bradford," she recalled. "So
I decided to take charge of my illness and created with Bob my own injectable
program, which we later came to call the 'Bradford cocktail.' I
had a hospital at my disposal and a collaborating medical staff. I could
have anything done I wanted to."
AB Hospital's primary claim to fame, by 1993, was already in the cancer
department. Since creation of the original AB medical group in 1975 and the
opening of American Biologics Hospital in 1980, the AB team had seen upwards
of 18,000 cancer cases. It was securing some kind of positive responses in
95% of its patients and reaching what American orthodox oncology described
as a "cure" – meaning five years free of symptoms – in
at least 20%, a remarkable feat at a time when metastatic, or "spread" cancer,
was "curable" in the US about nine percent of the time.
Carole Bradford then began her incredible treatment odyssey. But it began
with an attitude change: "I knew I was going to have to spend a long
time away from my desk, resting in one of our recliner treatment chairs at
the AB
Hospital. I was going to have to learn to relax, read books, watch television,
whatever. After the first week of this, I told myself, 'Hey, this isn't
too bad now.' Several weeks later, I began to play tennis on a more regular
basis, to swim. I took Spanish language classes and really began working
on getting de-stressed. This was the beginning of my healing and I have to
add
that, thank God, I was never in pain. I did not have to go through the horrors
of awful pain that I have seen and heard about from so many patients."
Carole Bradford was an "outpatient" at the AB Hospital at least
four times a week, returning to her desk at Chula Vista for only a few hours
each afternoon. "Suddenly, I found I didn't really need to spend
all those hours at the desk. All that paperwork was somehow getting done by
able staff members and it became less all-consuming to me," she remembered.
"I kept a record of my visits to the clinic for my injections, like a score
card, and after 100 injection days, I stopped counting. Now that is a lot of
injections." Her daily program consisted of the following: in the first "drip
bag," she received 9 grams laetrile, 25 grams of vitamin C, 10 cc of
GE-OXY 132 (germanium sesquioxide), 10 cc of reduced glutathione, 5 cc of pangamic
acid, 16 mg of superoxide dismutase (SOD), 10 cc of NAC (N-acetyl-cysteine),
2 cc of thymus extract, 5 cc of licorice extract (Biorizin), 10 cc of taurine,
3 grams of sodium butyrate, and 20 cc of DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide). In her
second "drip bag," she received 100 cc saline with 10 cc of a proprietary
stabilized oxygen compound, the oxidative agent pioneered by the BRI®.
Her oral program, which reached up to 100 tablets or capsules daily during
1993, consisted of around 30 items: liquid vitamin A in the form of A-E emulsion
(200,000 units), between 15 to 20 grams of vitamin C, proteolytic enzymes in
the form of a proprietary systemic enzyme, antioxidant enzymes, and other substances
in the form of proprietary antioxidant enzyme, acidophilus/lactobacillus combinations,
co-enzyme Q10, three different combinations of "omega" fatty acids,
spleen glandular, adrenal glandular, a combination of vitamins/minerals/nutrients,
shark cartilage, selenium, licorice extract, Basic mineral complex, thymus
glandular, GE-132 oral (germanium sesquioxide), laetrile (amygdalin tablets),
benzaldehyde, mammary glandular, beta-carotene, herbal specialty products
called Coleus forskohlu, Ascorfutaruplex, Lapachoplex (from the South American
pau
d'arco therapy), homeopathic burdock root, chitin (crab extract), and
apricot kernels (a natural high source of laetrile and other useful nutrients.)
She also took a combination of homeopathic injectable extracts from the pioneering
Heel Company of Europe, which consisted of 12 separate products including
mistletoe extract (Iscador, from Viscum album). And that was not all. For
90 days daily,
and then once or twice a week for many more months, she utilized treatments
by another Bradford-pioneered breakthrough: Accelerated Charge Normalization® (CAN)
alters the negative tissue potential usually found in breast cancer to the
normal or positive potential characteristic of breast tissue without cancer.
By establishing a positive tissue potential, immune cells, being negatively
charged, are attracted to the malignant site and greatly enhance the body's
immune response against cancer.
In addition to the obvious therapeutic advantage, there is also a diagnostic
or assessment advantage in measuring the tissue potential, which can be related
to tumor activity. In Carole's case, the negative charge exceeded 200
millivolts, which is over 100 thousand times the potential required to repel
the immune system from the breast. In other words, her body did not recognize
that there was an ongoing malignancy. Amazingly, it took over nine months of
integrative therapy for the potential in her breast to normalize.
Also "working" was Carole Bradford's adherence to the anti-cancer
eating program long followed at the AB Hospital and also detailed in the recipe
book she co-authored with Beverly Novak: Cookbook for Healthful Living. "Another
reason we dared not fail," she said. "It would be bad press! If
we couldn't save me, then who could?"
Within a six-month period, most all her blood tests were returning back to
normal.
"
The only orthodox things I ever did in my cancer program were the lumpectomy
and, yes, Tamoxifen. It was suggested that I needed this, particularly against
breast cancer. But I took this for only about 60 days. I just knew that it
was doing something abnormal when I began having daily cervical discharges.
So after two months, I said, 'no more.' I would never do it again.
Some things are just intuitive in nature and you have to listen to your body!
Once again, I was taking charge of my health, not the doctors." (It
would subsequently be learned that however useful Tamoxifen might be in the
short-term
against breast cancer, it increases a woman's risk of both endometriosis
and cervical cancer. It still remains an optional treatment within an integrative
program.)
In May of 1993, she allowed a follow-up mammogram of her left breast since
AB doctors had noticed abnormal tissue and feared that the cancer had spread. "I
have my doubts about mammograms too. I wouldn't want to do them again,
either. Squeezing the breast into a vise can't be any good. And, it seems
barbaric," she assessed. (Some research, particularly in Canada, had
sustained her fears: clamping breasts into a vise for a mammogram can indeed
have the effect of damaging tissue and enhancing an existing malignant process,
at least in some cases.)
"Doctors, including some of our own, kept pestering me about using chemotherapy,
because of a suspicious lesion in the left breast showing up in the mammography.
One doctor insisted I have a needle biopsy of the left breast. Re-thinking
what happened with the initial needle biopsy in 1990, I refused. Weeks later,
the surgeon came to me as I sat in the treatment room and waved his finger
in my face, telling me, 'You have a fast-growing tumor and you're
not taking it seriously. You could die.' He had suggested a double mastectomy
or at least a 'quad.' I rejected all of this.
"I remember saying, 'We're a holistic hospital, we've been
in this business for 20 years now and that's what we're all about.
I believe that's what is best for me, and we must prove that we're
right.' Maybe the big thing is that I never accepted the fact that I
might die of cancer. I said, in essence, 'We're into holistic/integrative
therapy. This is what we're all about."
But she was also aware of the developing doctrine of the true nature of cancer:
it is not a tumor, but a malignant process; it is not "curable" in
the sense that all aspects of it vanish forever; it is susceptible to long-term
control, even for the whole of a lifetime. But you don't "get over" cancer
and follow the same lifestyle as before. The key word is "control" – not "cure."
"I am a very disciplined person. I said on more than one occasion to my
husband when he would forget to take his 'few' vitamins, 'It's
a good thing I'm the one who has cancer – because of the discipline
necessary to stay on the program.' I was able to stick with the program," she
recalled.
Carole Bradford did stick with the program: year in and year out, one blood
test after another, reducing her oral program back to 30 tablets or more,
occasionally taking "drips," even cramming 12,000-gauss magnets
into her brassiere as a daily kind of localized magnetic therapy, in conjunction
with ACN.
Soon, the magic date was looming; March of 1998 – if she had five years
free of symptoms, she would be "cured" by the definition of standard
Western oncology. "Even though we in holistic medicine perhaps laugh
at the premise that, after exactly the fifth year, you're instantly 'cured,' the
mind still plays games with you, and for me, even though I had been completely
healthy for the past, perhaps, three years, I still celebrated the fact," she
remembered.
Carole had another birthday – March 25, 1998 – with a series
of health assessments and blood tests. Her birthday gift that year was the
best
of all: she was certifiably free of cancer!
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