AUCA Magazine Online

May 28, 2012

Taking Control of Cancer

In 1994 my grandma Grace died of ovarian cancer. She was 73 at the time, and in the final months of her life I remember asking my mom if I could go and visit her in the hospital. I still remember the look on my mother's face as she told me, "No, we can't go to see grandma now." Her whole faced tightened, trying to keep her composure, but halfway through the sentence my mother let go, and it is the only time in my life that I can recall her doing so.

My mother had protected the image of my grandmother that I had from our summers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and today I am thankful for that. My grandmother had undergone a course of chemotherapy, but there was nothing to be done, and by the time I had asked to see her, I can only imagine the toll she had paid in trying to beat her disease.

Around the same time, my Aunt Bonnie contracted breast cancer. Aunt Bonnie is a woman of small statue and large personality. She has shortly cropped brown hair and a smile that jumps out at you. She is married to my mother's brother Arvid, and has two children, my cousins John and Erica. We used to split Thanksgivings between their house in Valparaiso, Indiana, and our house in Evanston, Illinois, and sometimes still do when there are enough of us around.

Thanksgiving in Indiana was great. Despite having to drive through Gary and by scenic Fox Lake, there was always bound to be a huge table of food, a Lazyboy (a luxury my parents could not afford because my brother would force me, against my will, to wrestle with him, breaking all the furniture), Barry Sanders running for the Detroit Lions, and the best pecan pie in Porter County.

While my grandmother was still alive, she and Aunt Bonnie were able to share their experience. My grandmother recommended a book, Choices in Healing, by Michael Lerner, a summary of alternative and complementary cancer treatments. The interdisciplinary book covers treatments from acupuncture to yoga, and documents the lengths to which American cancer patients are willing to go to survive.

For my Aunt Bonnie this had been her second cancer, and moved by the new information and the encouragement from family, she decided to change. She adopted a macrobiotic diet and lifestyle, and although at the time I really had no idea what that meant, it only took one Thanksgiving to figure out that things were never going to be the same.

In the clinical laboratory at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital Maria Rechkunova-Goodson dedicates her spare time to convince us that things never should be the same. She and her director, Veta Shapkina, are shooting a documentary on effective non-toxic cancer treatments. They met at AUCA in the early 2000s, where Maria studied law, and Veta international politics. When both graduated in 2003, their lives both took unorthodox turns.

Maria is from the Kyrgyz Republic, and in a previous Soviet-life she would have been the most popular science teacher in a public school. She is naturally curious, and when you bring up a fact she has undoubtedly known for years, her face is genuinely surprised, as if you had discovered something together.

After graduating, Maria earned some money doing translation in Bishkek before entering the biology undergraduate program at Valdosta State University, part of the university system of Georgia, right on the Florida border. She says that her interest in Biology came from her volunteering experience at the Cancer Center of Bishkek while she was at AUCA. It was at VSU that Maria met her husband Flynt, now a graduate student in the organic chemistry department at Florida State.

Veta is from Uzbekistan. Her mother is a construction engineer, and like an engineer, Veta wastes no words in getting to the point. After completing her undergraduate work at AUCA, she went on to do her masters in political science at Central European University. However, the only jobs that were coming her way after graduation were connected with NGOs and other international organizations. Veta told me that she spurned these opportunities because she did not want to waste government money having a comfortable life.

Veta moved to Moscow, and took up another degree, this time in cinematography attending the Всероссийский Государственный Университет Кинематографии им. С.А. Герасимова (All-Russian State University of Cinematography). Veta says that she now feels useful. She has shot several commercials, and also worked for Disney in Russia for 3 years, although she has since left that job, saying there was no room for her personal growth.

The documentary has given both Maria and Veta purpose. Long stints as a student can be stifling, and moving outside the classroom can bring color back to the world. Even Veta can be surprisingly eloquent when talking about the film, "The findings are exciting, and it was surprising to me as I learned more about the world of natural treatments. Maria is really the expert, and I trust her judgment on which treatments we choose to cover in the film, but being involved in the process has been great." Maria says that the film is not meant to direct people away from traditional cancer treatment, but to show them that the options do not begin and end at the oncologist.

On the National Cancer Institute website for types of cancer treatments you can find articles on chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, and transplantation, and a section on other methods, which include bone marrow transplantation, gene therapy, hyperthermia, laser treatment, photodynamic therapy, and targeted cancer therapies, which are drugs developed to block the growth and spread of tumors.

The first chemotherapy drugs that date from the early 20th century are based on military experiments conducted on people that had been exposed to mustard gas in both WWI and WWII. Indeed, one of the first drugs to be developed was called mustine, and although there is no Dijon mustine, many of the hundreds of chemotherapy drugs in use today are derivatives of this research.

Radiation therapy came to us at much the same time, and works by killing the cancer cells by damaging their DNA with high-energy X-rays, gamma rays, and other charged particles. Luckily, as patients, we have the choice between getting the radiation beamed into us, or have some radioactive material placed in our body near the cancer cells. Radioactive iodine can even travel in your blood.

These techniques would be more heartening if they only affected the destroying cancer cells, but this is not the case. The following is a selected list of side effects from the treatments listed above: fatigue, nausea, skin irritation, bowel damage, infertility, fibrosis, immune system depression, hair loss, malnutrition, scarring and swelling, and second tumors.

Aside from the last side effect, almost all of us are willing to take on these risks to beat the disease. However, survival of cancer can depend on things that are wholly out of your control, such as how early it is detected or your gender. Looking at five-year survival estimates compiled by Cancer Research UK, 38% of the men studied had a better than 50% chance of being alive in 5 years. This was true for 50% of women.

The type of cancer is another significant factor affecting survival rates. 95% of men who were diagnosed with testicular cancer survived over 5 years (motivation might also be a factor in recovery), while only 6% of lung cancer patients and 3% of pancreas cancer patients could say the same. For women the list is very similar, the distinct differences being that over 68% of women survive uterus, cervix, and breast cancer, while only 34% of women survive ovary cancer.

For the majority of people, being diagnosed with cancer means death whether you take a course of treatment or not. The overwhelming majority of us choose a traditional treatment, many times a combination of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery. In 2007 the United States spent over $103 billion dollars fighting cancer, but not all of that money is going to traditional remedies.

In the 1960s Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a nutritional scientist at Cornell University, was trying to develop "high quality" animal protein to bring to poor and malnourished areas of the third world. On a trip to the Philippines he discovered that the country's wealthier children, the ones with access to a richer diet of meats, were more likely to get liver cancer.

In the 1980s Dr. Campbell, along with colleagues at the University of Oxford and the Chinese Academy of Preventative Medicine, explored the relationship between nutrition and cancer, heart and metabolic diseases. The study, known as the China Project, discovered that the growing consumption of animal protein and dairy products in the more affluent parts of China were bringing diseases that were previously either unknown or uncommon in China.

This led Dr. Campbell to suggest that reverting to a whole-food, plant-based diet is a possible solution for healing degenerative diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and several forms of cancer. Although diet is not mentioned as a possible treatment on either the American Cancer Society or National Cancer Institute website, it is mentioned as a complementary therapy to the standard treatments.

The idea of completely changing your lifestyle as a preventative measure against cancer is anathema to most people, especially if it means giving up hamburgers. Many people who survive traditional cancer treatment go on to live their lives as if all they had contracted was a common cold, just something out of their control that had to be fixed.

Meat and dairy will always have a place. I must admit that after researching for this article, I have tried to severely cut my intake of animal protein. Although it is not impossible in Central Asia, the food culture here revolves almost solely around meat, and I have been weakened by 29 years of knowing how good it tastes. My wife is a vegetarian, which helps, but she still consumes eggs, cheese, yoghurt, and other animal products that both of us find hard to live without.

I think it would take something like cancer to put me over the edge. For my Aunt Bonnie, as for many others, this is also the case. Her macrobiotic diet advocates many of the same tenants that Dr. Campbell talks about: whole grains, fruits and vegetables, soups, and occasional usage of eggs, coffee, sugar, herbs, meat, and processed foods.

The diet was developed by George Ohsawa, a Japanese philosopher who wanted to integrate Zen Buddhism, Asian medicine, Christian teachings, and some aspects of Western medicine. In this way the macrobiotic diet is just one part of a greater philosophical and spiritual system. In addition to the diet, many advocates of macrobiotics recommend living mentally and physically active, offering thanks before each meal, chewing your food at least 50 times per mouthful, going to bed before midnight and getting up early, avoid wearing synthetic or woolen clothing directly on the skin, walking barefoot on the grass or beach for a half hour every day, keeping your home in good order, avoid taking long hot baths or showers, avoid chemically-perfumed cosmetics, avoid electronic cooking devices, minimize the use of TVs and computers, and sing a happy song each day.

Ready to start today? If macrobiotics does not seem like your thing, you can also try the Gerson Diet, the 3-E program from the German Holistic Cancer Center, the CoDTea and Targeted Nutritional System, Dr. Ken Weizer's Natural Medicine and Cancer Care, Oasis of Hope Hospital, and the Reno Integrative Medical Center.

Here I would stress that I am not a doctor. I got my masters in public administration, so as much as I would like to see health costs decrease, do not skip out on your doctor's recommendations and start one of these programs on account of this article. Definitely talk with your doctor, or better yet several doctors, to find out if these treatments can be alternative or complementary to the course of action presented to you.

Maria and Veta want to use their film to help people learn about these alternative and complementary methods to treating cancer. They are fighting an uphill battle on two fronts. The first is that many people have no idea that these alternative solutions exist. The second is that there is resistance in the medical community, some based on sound science and some based on the fear of having to scratch the last one hundred years of development in cancer treatment.

It is unclear just how many 'patients' there are for alternative cancer treatments. In 2009, according to the CDC, 1.3 million people were discharged from hospitals with cancer listed as the diagnosis. According to the same study there were 567,628 deaths from cancer, ranking second only to heart disease.

Many of the alternative treatment websites that I visited did not give specific numbers, but at least five estimate that between 5-15% of all patients diagnosed with cancer attempt some alternative course of treatment. Many sites suggest this is a low estimate, and I am inclined to agree. As humans, the thing we do best is survive, and if there are alternative ways to do it, we usually adapt quickly.

At 15% of all diagnosed patients, 195,000 people sought an alternative course to treatment, most likely complementing their traditional course. Maria and Veta want to see that number increase significantly. Maria says that although she recognizes that these alternatives put much of the burden on the patient, requiring immense will power and self-discipline, the human desire to be in control of your own body, and the benefit of being able to be a part of the healing process are things that all of us want.

The goal is really to spread this news to people who do not have cancer, so that they can make changes now, and so that when they do get diagnosed, they are on a more level playing field with the physician diagnosing them. Veta’s mother, who actively takes care of her health and lifestyle choices, made dietary changes when learning about the film, and both Veta and Maria hope that by producing their documentary in both Russian and English, they will be able to reach a wider audience.

The second obstacle is in many ways more formidable. For the past century our attitude towards illness and disease has been to find/invent cures whereby we ingest, cut out, beam in, inject, dissect, or amputate the problem. This has led to incredible success, as we as a species have increased our average lifespan more in the past hundred years than in the previous forever.

It has also led us to discount and sometimes outright reject other holistic and even common sense methods of healing. 25.8 million children and adults in the United States have diabetes, with another predicted 79 million at risk according to the American Diabetes Association. This is a disease that can largely be controlled by dietary adjustments, yet in 2009 over 16.3 million adults reported taking some medication for their symptoms.

Maria thinks that the medical industry wants to keep things this way, since it means more reliance on the doctors and the medicines, and in the end, more profits. The interesting part about the cost of cancer treatment is not that we are spending so much, but what we are spending it on. In 1987, cancer accounted for 4.8% of all health care spending in the United States. From 2001-2005 it accounted for 4.9%, but over that period of time the inpatient admissions for cancer dropped from 64% of all cases to 27.5%, meaning that people were spending significantly less time in the hospital. The researchers at the CDC attributed the difference in spending to increasing cancer prevalence, an aging population, and higher survival rates leading people to take cancer drugs longer.

The researchers did not mention the increasing costs of the drugs as a reason, though in the same time period prescription drug spending increased as a proportion of overall cancer costs. The study also did not include newly developed cancer drugs developed since 2006 such as Avastin, which costs $90,000 for a treatment that produces a 1.5 month increase in predicted survival time.

The pharmaceutical companies, ever the villains, are designing more and more of these targeted cancer medications that cost exorbitant amounts but guarantee only a mediocre extension of life. Maria says that when you compare the alternative options already available to the bankrupting treatments on offer, it does not seem like much of a choice.

In terms of research, the American Cancer Society only spends about 7.5% of its research budget on cancer prevention, which includes some research on nutrition and physical activity. When trying to search for reliable studies on alternative treatments, I was quickly met with a barrage of sites, half claiming widespread government collusion with 'big pharma' to keep people pumping 'chemotoxin' into their veins, and the other half saying that the people from the nuthouse have been let off the leash. For reasons I would assume are not sinister, there is very little research and controlled experimentation being done on alternative cancer treatments.

Some alternative providers have attempted to do their own studies, but these have largely been rejected by government bodies. The doubt is never in the veracity of individual success stories, but in the treatment's applicability to a wider population. The main concerns are lack of control groups, limited sample size, and failure to keep accurate data for periods following the treatment. This, says Maria, keeps progress in cancer treatments wrongly focused on 'magic bullet' solutions, rather than casting a wider net.

She thinks part of the problem is that doctors and researchers are simply not trained to look for alternative solutions. Classes have existed for such therapies at many of the top medical schools for some time now, but often just as an elective. The prize for finding 'the cure' is simply too big and alluring, and everyone's focus is pointed in that direction. At her lab in Tallahassee Maria talks with her colleagues about her findings. She told me, "They're mostly nice about it, and then they go back to doing whatever it is they were doing."

Cancer is in many ways an overwhelming condition, the result of the uncontrolled growth of cells that invade and then spread throughout the body. Yet for the last one hundred years we have been basically using the same tools to shoot and slice out the bad cells, and then hope that the good ones are strong enough to survive. The tools have become more accurate and precise, but a cure still eludes.

My Aunt Bonnie touts the she and my Uncle Gus have not had a serious cold in the 22 years since they have adopted the macrobiotic lifestyle. There are hundreds, if not thousands of true stories like my Aunt's, of people changing their lives, overcoming a cancer they were told was either inoperable or at too late a stage to do anything about.

What is heartening about these stories is that they are less stories about beating cancer and more about what people do when they get their life back. My Aunt became a tri-world-intergalactic-blackbelt in Taekwondo (liberty taken with terminology), winning multiple championships in her age group. In September 2011 she was diagnosed with sternum cancer, a result, her Northwestern University doctor believes, of being hit so hard in the chest that dormant cancer cells were activated.

In the fall she performed a course of conventional treatment and followed the macrobiotic healing diet for two months while following the recommendations of her doctor. When I asked her for some advice on writing this article two months ago she answered me in two days with four pages of notes and macrobiotic recipes so that I can share my Thanksgiving Day experiences with my wife. She also has plans for her next Taekwondo tournament, where she will be alive and kicking.

For more information on Maria (mariarechkunova@gmail.com) and Veta (veta_shapkina@mail.ru), and how you can support the making of their film "Effective Non-Toxic Cancer Treatments", please visit their site at www.cancerfreefilm.com, and support their project at http://invested.in/P2041/effective-non-toxic-cancer-treatments.

The magazine is available here

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