Cancer treatment

My history of treatment is on the about page of this blog.
As of February 2021 I am alive, feeling great and no signs of cancer – now ten years since the last tumour, and no more than a day between doses of vitamin C (and over 99% of the time at least 2 doses of Vit C of at least 6g each per day).

On 15th May 2015 I gave my TedTalk at the Kaikoura Health expo – several sets of evidence presented there.

As at 17 Feb 2011, this was my understanding of what has happened to me in my fight to survive cancer, living here in Kaikoura. As of now I appear to be clear of all traces. Basically it seems you can beat cancer, and believing that you can is most of the battle.

During the last 9 months, much has happened, I have done much reading and much experimentation.
I am still following Mike Anderson’s RAVE diet, with the addition of high dose oral vitamin C (as pure L-Ascorbic acid dissolved in water).

It seems to have worked for me.
Since then I have found others who have beaten their cancer using other regimes, that only contain parts of Mike’s regime.

There are hundreds of different sorts of cancers, and some of them have multiple different mechanisms at work within the same cell line. Some of the influences are genetic, others are cultural.
Cancer is not a simple thing, there are no silver bullets, and there are no guarantees; and you do have a lot of weapons available for your fight.

These weapons seem to me to fall into six general classes:

1/ Boost your immune system
2/ Buy time
3/ Believe in yourself (reduce stress)
4/ Remove sources of cancer
5/ Disrupt the cancer
6/ Support yourself

And there is an overall principle that is as old as medicine – first do no harm.
I added in, that I would only be willing to spend money if there was really strong evidence of outcomes. There are lots of people willing to take your money – not least of all the medical profession.

1/ Boost your immune system.
This has many sub components.

a/ Vitamin C seems to play a variety of pivotal roles in the immune system. A system that is involved in fighting something needs a lot more vitamin C than is required for ongoing health of a healthy person. Quantities of over 20 grams per day seem to be useful, and at worst cause little or no harm.
Several notes here. We build tolerance with use. Start with a low dose (half a level teaspoon dissolved in a glass of water) and build up (1/4 tsp more each couple of days) to bowel tolerance (diarrhoea is too far, back off to a lower dose until things firm up, stay at that for 3 or 4 days, then increase slowly until bowel motions loosen, and repeat).
Your tolerance will vary over time, be prepared to check occasionally, and raise or lower as required.
[Added June 2016 – one powerful way to think about this, is to consider that your immune system needs a certain amount of vitamin C to be able to do it’s normal random search operation at maximum speed. For an average 70 Kg adult, that is about 10g of vit C daily, and that seems to be most powerfully delivered in two roughly 5g doses roughly 12 hours apart. However, once the immune system finds some target, cancer/virus/bacteria/whatever, then the amount of vitamin C required for optimal function can increase substantially. Quantities over 200g per day have been recorded, though personally I never got much over 85g per day. It seems there may be a huge number of factors involved in just how much vit C any particular individual can use at any time. And it does seem to be the case that in most people, most of the time, the amount of available vitamin C is the single greatest limiter of immune system function (and there are lots of other things that can become limiting factors once you have enough vitamin C.)]
In order to use vit C, your body needs some other things to be present, particularly the B group vitamins and zinc. A single multimineral and vitamin supplement with about half the recommended daily allowances should be sufficient to ensure you can use all the C you get. I use the Health House CAA formulation.
Most vitamins are beneficial only within a very narrow range of concentration. Vitamin C is the big exception to this rule. When we are sick, we can use large amounts of vitamin C – upwards of 100g per day if the immune system is seriously engaged in fighting some bacteria or virus or cancer. And in the case of cancer, the immune system has to find it first, before it can attack it, so all the other things below come into play.
[You may have heard of studies by the Mayo Clinic and the Chochrane Institute on vitamin C – both studies seem to me to have serious flaws.]

b/ Get your body to alkaline. Remove acidifying foods (cheeses (particularly hard cheeses) are amongst the worst), and increase alkaline foods in your diet – spinach is one of the most alkaline foods. Looks like Popeye might have been onto something. Buying a pH meter, and testing your urine pH, is one method of getting some solid feedback. You want to aim at about 8.4. Often the starting point is down around 5.

c/ Remove Animal protein. There are mixed views on this. It seems that fragments of animal protein being broken down in the intestine can make their way directly into the blood stream, and can create a high load on the immune system, cleaning them up. Loading the immune system in this way seems to decrease the ability of the immune system to locate and remove cancer cells (something that it can normally do).
The China study is very interesting in this respect.
I have spoken to others who have cured cancer while still eating organic, grass-fed animals (but not grain fed animals).
Overall, I still recommend keeping animal protein to a minimum – for me that means zero. Here is a more recent talk by Dr. Michael Greger at Google. The evidence is overwhelming (2016).

d/ Remove Stress. Our bodies have evolved to respond to stress by preparing the body for “fight or flight”. Part of this mechanism “turns off” much of the immune system, freeing up the energy for other purposes. In our evolutionary past, where stress came from things like bears or big cats, this was very sensible. In today’s world, where stress comes from things like mortgages, job insecurity, recession, the military industrial complex or war; we have no way out. These things cannot easily be escaped from – so stress builds, and our immune systems are progressively compromised.
Learn techniques to remove stress. Many sorts of meditation practice work, as do things like yoga or fishing or gardening or caring for an animal or a person.
Find something that works for you, and do it. I mostly used techniques that I learned from Landmark Education.
Ask around in your community, there will be lots of people willing to help teach you at no cost.
Believing you have terminal cancer is a major stress for most people. Believing you can beat it eases that stress. The placebo effect may be almost that simple.
[The current medical and legal system models, of telling people they are going to die, is little short of criminal.]

e/ Change diet
Whatever your diet is, it is clear that your particular cancer is thriving in the environment that your current diet creates. Change it. Bear in mind the principles above and in the discussion of foods here.

2/ Buy time
Give yourself time for you immune system to find and remove the cancer. This can mean surgery, if tumours are a major problem.

a/ Anti angiogenesis
Preventing the growth of new blood vessels limits the size that tumours can reach. There is a really interesting TED Talk by William Li on the subject.

b/ Reduce stress
As covered above, it slows things down. Buys time. Do whatever it takes to slow your lifestyle down.

c/ Remove sugars
Most cancers seem to have a much higher need of sugar than normal cells. Remove refined sugar from your diet. This alone will take out 90% of what is on the supermarket shelves.

d/ Reduce/remove sodium (salt)
This is part of alkalising the body, and could be in the section above, and it also belongs here. This takes out most of the rest of what is in the supermarket. Most people have high blood pressure, so reducing salt helps lower it. I always had low blood pressure, so eliminating salt had my blood pressure get down to 80/65 – a bit too low – so salt is back in my diet, at moderate levels.

3/ Believe in yourself.

There is a huge amount of information out there on the power of belief. In medical literature it is known as the placebo effect, and it is very real. For most classes of drugs it is at least 70% as effective as drug therapy, and for some classes of drugs, it is over 90% as effective as drug therapy.
So find something you can believe in, and believe in it.
Medical science has tried to eliminate the effect, rather than use it. That is a criminal error in my understanding.
If anything on this page helps, use it.
I used various techniques I had learned from reiki and from the medical side of zen do kai karate. [Not that I believe the explanatory frameworks associated with either system, and the practices do seem to work. This is not the place for an in depth discussion of that – find it elsewhere on this blog.]
It is also powerful to examine your own declarations about yourself, and your value to those around you.   We all have a need to be needed, and to be of value to someone, it is part of our sociality.   Examine any self stories that you have that limit you feeling that connection and value, and change them to stories that empower yourself in some community. [Start small if you need to, and build to ever larger communities. I’ve taken mine to the community of all sapient entities, human and non-human, biological and non-biological.]

4/ Remove sources of cancer
There are many things that can act as triggers for certain cells to lose their cooperative habits and start “selfishly” replicating at cost to the rest of the organism (a fairly good definition of cancer [or the finance industry, or military industrial complex – but I’m getting political – that comes after you recover from cancer]).
These things are generally known as carcinogens.
Avoid them in your diet and in your environment where ever possible.

a/ Fine crystals – things like asbestos, and many of the new generations of nano materials have extremely fine crystal structures which are able to physically penetrate and disrupt cell function. Some few of these disruptions lead to cancerous (uninhibited growth) behaviour by the cell.
Avoid them.

b/ Carcinogenic molecules.
Many different molecules cause cancer by many different mechanisms.
Wikipedia has a good page on carcinogens.
Avoid as many as you can.
It is all about probabilities.
No one can avoid all carcinogens, but avoiding as many as you can reduces your risk.
Become aware.
Make informed choices.
Get your food out of plastic containers and into glass or stainless steel, and avoid cooking in plastics or on teflon non-stick surfaces.

c/ Radiations
Avoid exposure to electromagnetic radiation if at all possible, reduce it if not.
Avoid x-rays and CAT scan unless absolutely necessary.

5/ Disrupt the cancer

Whatever you were doing when you got the cancer – change it.
Change your diet.
Change your exercise pattern.
Change your sleep pattern.
Change your stress levels.
Your cancer was thriving in your old pattern – change it.

6/ Support yourself.

Find people to give you physical and emotional support. Give them all the support you can back.
My wife (Ailsa) has been critical to my survival – she has done, and continues to do, so much – both physically and emotionally.
Find something you love to do, and do it.
Find a purpose for living and live for it.
Seek out all of your self doubts, and face them – they can only hide in the darkness of your fear; they cannot survive in the light of close examination. [Seeking out all the implicit assumptions in language and culture is a job of decades, not days or weeks.]
You are an infinitely creative entity [the science, maths and logic on that subject is beyond any doubt] – start using that creative ability on yourself.
Build your self-esteem. Make conscious cooperative choices.
Hang out with supportive people.
Human beings are fundamentally cooperative social animals, find a way of helping others.

Be prepared to ask for help. Most people are very willing to help, but too afraid to offer.

Quite an interesting discussion of foods here on a guest blog by Laurie Buchanan.

In preparing my vegetable juices, I have found the Champion Juicer to be the most effective tool of the ones I have tried. It is very easy to clean up, most juicers are a real pain to clean.

In buying vitamin C – I have found Sana Direct to have the best price and a good product (2464 Pure Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C) Powder, 1 kg, Bag – $45 + $5 post and pack for the lot I bought in Oct 2010, as of 2013-16 I am buying 2Kg lots for $103 delivered, 2020 $200 for 4Kg delivered).

One side effect of vitamin C is lose bowel movements (often with very little warning and time to get to a loo). In June 2014 I crashed off my mountain bike and broke my collarbone into 4 pieces. During the healing process an injury from 2013 opened up and started hurting with every breath, and I realised that my body was short on calcium, and scavenging it on a last on first off basis. So I started to supplement calcium (with magnesium) heavily (9g first day, and by the end of that day the pain in my chest from the sternum break was gone). I also noticed that I was constipated for the first time in 4 years. I have since found that I can control the firmness of faeces by balancing my calcium intake to vit C. I found that under very high dose calcium I was getting small calcium nodules in my skin. So I backed off until they went away, and then increased dose slowly until I achieved balance. I now have “normal” bowel motions consistently, by having about 1/8th teaspoon of dolomite powder sprinkled on a banana once a day.
I found that using a poultice made of comfrey root had a significant effect on the bone repair – I could feel a high frequency “buzzing” in the area under the poultice, which seemed most likely to indicate increased metabolic activity in the area.

There is now a trust fund set up at Otago University – that is a tax deductable charity:

https://secure-www.otago.ac.nz/donations/alumni-vitamin-c/

Please support Dr Magreet Vissers’ work with a direct donation.
She has a very interesting video on a talk she gave about some of her earlier research.

Some other stuff worth reading:
Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective. World Cancer Research Fund / American Institute for Cancer Research.
Cancer Prevention Recommendations. World Cancer Research Fund.
VITAMIN C: THE NONTOXIC, NONRATE-LIMITED, ANTIOXIDANT FREE RADICAL SCAVENGER Dr. Robert F. Cathcart, M.D., Medical Hypotheses, 18:61-77, 1985.

An interesting article by the author of the China Study –http://nutritionstudies.org/questioning-the-ethics-science-of-a-pure-vegan-diet/

I have blogged on a Critique of the China Study. There is a lot of evidence against dairy products, unfortunately. That aligns with NZs increase in melanoma rates, now the highest in the world, and we also have one of the highest consumptions of dairy products. And it seems that it is all a matter of probabilities, no one single thing a definite cause.

There is a great Radio NZ, Kim Hill, interview on her Saturday Morning show on 27 Nov 2010 with Caldwell Esselstyn: on plant-based diet.
Kim Hill interview as MP3 File (right click link and “save as” to copy to your machine).

“Dr Caldwell Esselstyn is a surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, one of the top four hospitals in the United States, and is the author of “Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease” (Avery, ISBN: 978-1-583-33300-6). He treated former US President Bill Clinton, who has now embarked on a plant-based diet after undergoing a heart procedure early 2010. Dr Esselstyn visited New Zealand in November 2010 to speak at the biennial Coronary Health Improvement Programme summit in Rotorua. Born in 1933, had been on plant based diet since 1984.”

About half an hour into the interview he gives a list of green leafy veges that are good raw:
Bok Choy
Swiss Chard
Kale
Collard greens
Beet greens
mustard greens
turnip greens
nappa cabbage
cabbage
brussel sprouts
brocolli
cauliflower
cilantro
parsley
spinach
arugola (salad rocket)
asparagus
romaine

List of common leaf vegetables.

At 38:50 into the interview he talks of:

Beans and rice;
Put beans on top of rice after they have been cooked;
then on top of the beans you have all this whole panoply of cut up vegetables with cut up tomatoes, corn, peas, peppers, water chesnuts, scallions and you have a light sprinkle of low sodium tomari or salsa.

Can get some wonderful pizza crusts made with wholegrain flour, and make a cheeseless pizza where you just pour on every imaginable vegetable, and it is just delicious.

Can do a stirfry in a wok with couscous, quinoa, or wheatberries, ryeberries or barley.

There are lots of resources out there, and we are all different in many ways.
What works for one person wont necessarily work for others.
Be prepared to give things a try.

Dr Greger recommends his Daily Dozen foods.
Number of servings x food type:
3 x beans
1 x berries
3 x other fruits
1 x cruciferous vegetables
2 x greens
2 x other vegetables
1 x flax seeds
1 x nuts and seeds
1 x herbs and spices
3 x whole grains
5 x beverages
1 x exercise

The two things he particularly stresses for vegans is Omega 3s and Vitamin B12.
Both flax seed and Chia seeds are high in Omega 3s, both being about 6% omega 6 and chia being about 18% omega 3 while flax seed is about 23%.
Most nuts have high levels of omega 6s (10-40%) and are mostly devoid of omega 3s. To balance the ratios, eat about equal quantities of ground flax or chia seed as nuts.

Supplement with B12. The body doesn’t need a lot but it doesn’t absorb well through the gut, so about 100mcg swallowed only gives about 1mcg absorbed. Taking it as a liquid under the tongue gives much better absorption.

Everything else can be handled by a varied diet at least half raw (in most cases). And stay aware of your body – it will usually send subtle signals of what it needs, if you are alert to them.

Some useful links in this discussion new cancer drug delivery system.