The first versions of the drugs were called “nitrogen mustards.” That’s because it was discovered during WWII when a ship carrying sulfur mustards, a nerve agent to be used in chemical warfare, was bombed and the troops on board were exposed to the chemical. Those men affected tested for depleted bone marrow and lymph systems, cells that naturally divide faster than other cells. Scientists, at the time, wondered if mustard gas could be used in the treatment of cancer cells that also divide faster than normal cells in the human body. In 1942, Sloan-Kettering secretly began treating breast cancer with these nitrogen mustards. No one was cured. Chemotherapy trials were also conducted at Yale around 1943 where 160 patients were treated. Again, no one was cured. But, since chemo shrunk the tumors, researchers proclaimed the ‘therapy’ trials to be a “success.” Gradually, synthetic versions of the nitrogen mustards were developed, but they all had one common trait; they are unable to differentiate between “healthy” cells and “cancerous” cells. They kill everything.
As an analogy, suppose you were to tell an exterminator that you have a termite infestation in your home. The exterminator, a professional whom you are entrusting, tells you that the best course of action would be to use a chemical which is known to eat away at both the wood and foundation of homes, as well as cause irreparable damage to furniture and windows. Would you do it?
Decades ago, a pharmaceutical manufacturer would only need to show that a chemotherapeutic agent shrank a tumor or reduce cancer deaths to obtain FDA approval. Manufacturers would market their products under the fraudulent philosophical argument that shrinking tumors or reducing cancer deaths equates to improved survival.1
However, many of the toxic chemotherapeutic agents would destroy vital organs and actually reduce survival while decreasing cancer deaths at the same time. The FDA and comparable agencies around the world switched to “all cause mortality” as the primary endpoint for pivotal cancer drug trails. The gold standard for marketing approval is to show that those receiving a cancer drug actually live longer than those who do not.
Typically, new “miracle” anticancer drugs only prolong survival about 2 months but this added time may be spent severely ill suffering from adverse events caused by the chemotherapy. Application of true scientific principles often severely deflates the hype promoting pharmaceutical products.
The repercussions of chemotherapy on the human body are intense. Some people call them “side effects,” but the truth is they’re “direct effects.”
“As a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good.” ~ Alan Nixon, Ph.D, Past President of The American Chemical Society
Back in September 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health (NIOSH) released a dangerous-drug alert with the title Preventing Occupational Exposures to Antineoplastic and Other Hazardous Drugs in Health Care Settings. The alert warned that working with chemotherapy drugs and other common pharmaceuticals can be a serious danger to your health.
They were right because on July 10, 2010, the Seattle Times carried the story of Sue Crump, a veteran pharmacist of 20 years, who had spent much of her time dispensing chemotherapy drugs. Sue died in 2011 from pancreatic cancer and one of her dying wishes was that the truth be told about how her on-the-job exposure to toxic chemotherapy drugs caused her own cancer. The list of chemicals Crump worked with included cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, fluorouracil, and methotrexate.
Interestingly, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) does not regulate exposure to these toxins in the workplace − despite multiple studies documenting ongoing contamination and exposures. Studies reaching back to the 1970s have linked increased rates of certain cancers to nurses and physicians. Every oncologist knows that chemotherapy drugs cause genetic damage. Due to inadvertent spills, chemotherapy drugs have been found on floors, counter tops, knobs, keyboards, printers, computers, and garbage cans. Most chemo is genotoxic, meaning that it interacts with genes (DNA) and causes mutations. And yes, genetic mutations are a known risk factor for developing cancer, while secondary cancers are a known side effect (actually a “direct effect”) of chemo.
Danish epidemiologists used cancer data from the 1940s through the 1980s to report a significantly increased risk of leukemia among oncology nurses and doctors. In 2009, another Danish study of over 92,000 nurses determined that they had an increased risk for brain cancer, breast cancer, and thyroid cancer.
Most Common Direct Effects of Chemotherapy
- Cognition is affected during chemotherapy. Many patients who have undergone this modality refer to it as “chemo brain” – difficulty with memory, basic thought processes, coordination and mood.
- Peripheral neuropathy is tingling in the extremities and may be accompanied by general fatigue or weakness, shakiness, numbness, or pain. These symptoms also affect basic balance, reflexes, and coordination.
- Xerostomia is extremely dry mouth and can lead to sores in the soft tissues, difficulty swallowing, and make you more prone to bleeding. Patients report that taste is also affected.
- Nausea is one of the most common direct effects of chemotherapy.
- Dehydration as a result of vomiting or diarrhea is a concern and drinking plenty of water is critical during chemotherapy treatment. Adequate hydration may ease symptoms of xerostomia and protect your kidneys (working hard to flush the chemo toxins from your body) as well.
- Anemia occurs when your body can’t make enough red blood cells. Red blood cells carry the oxygen to your tissues and lack of necessary oxygen results in fatigue, dizziness, inability to concentrate, feelings of being cold and overall weakness.
- Neutropenia is what happens when your body doesn’t have enough white blood cells – the backbone of your immune system. This leaves you more susceptible to infection and reduces their ability to fight the residual cancer.
- Thrombocytopenia is caused by a low platelet count. You need platelets for blood clotting and not enough means you are more likely to bruise or bleed. This can cause issues with your menstruation, cause bleeding in your digestive tract that manifests in vomit or stools, and cause you to have nosebleeds.
- Cardiomyopathy is a weakening of the heart muscle. This may cause irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia) which can increase your risk of a heart event.
- Alopecia will affect all the hair on your body and usually occurs quickly when this treatment is begun. Within several weeks after the conclusion of chemotherapy, the hair begins to grow back. Fingernails and toenails may change as well, either turning colors or becoming very brittle.
- Skin Sensitivity is also common and patients report symptoms of irritation, itchiness, rashes, dryness, and burning more easily in the sun.
- Infertility in both men and women can occur with chemotherapy; affecting hormones and sperm count. It may also wreak havoc on menstrual cycles, impact overall sex drive, and cause extreme vaginal dryness. And sometimes it triggers the onset of menopause.
- Osteoporosis is the loss of bone mass. As you age, this is a natural occurrence (women are most at risk). Chemotherapy speeds up the process by lowering estrogen levels rapidly and weakening bone marrow.
As you can see, the impact of chemotherapy on the body can be brutal. It lays waste to your immune system, which is your first line of defense against cancer.
So, as a result, another direct effect of chemotherapy is … ironically … cancer. Yes, it’s printed right on the chemo drug warning labels — in small print, of course. For instance, Doxorubicin may increase your risk for developing leukemia (cancer of the white blood cells), especially when it is combined with other chemotherapy drugs and radiation.
“Doxorubicin may increase your risk for developing leukemia (cancer of the white blood cells), especially when it is given in high doses or together with certain other chemotherapy medications and radiation (x-ray) therapy… Doxorubicin may cause serious or life-threatening heart problems at any time during your treatment or months to years after your treatment has ended…”
You can read the warning label here.
Another common drug, Cyclophosphamide, increases the risk of bladder cancer and ovarian cancer. And the list goes on and on…
So, if you go into a cancer treatment clinic with one type of cancer, and you allow yourself to be injected with chemotherapy, frequently a second type of cancer develops as a result. Your oncologist will often claim to have successfully treated your first cancer even while you develop a second or third cancer directly caused by the chemo used to treat the original cancer.
According to a study conducted by the Department of Radiation Oncology at Northern Sydney Cancer Centre and published in the December 2004 issue of Clinical Oncology, the actual impact of chemotherapy on a 5-year survival rate in American adults is a paltry 2.1%. (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15630849) See the chart below.
Dr. Hardin B. Jones (former professor of medical physics and physiology at the University of California, Berkeley) found that cancer patients who underwent chemotherapy actually died sooner than those who refused any treatment. In his study, he found that people who refused treatment lived for an average of 12 ½ years, whereas those who did chemotherapy (and other conventional treatments) lived only an average of 3 years.
I’ll bet you didn’t hear that on the nightly news!
Sadly, the truth is that many people who “die from cancer” really die from the conventional treatments long before they would have actually died from the cancer itself. To put it plainly, the treatment kills them before the cancer kills them. As a matter of fact, the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorouracil “5-FU” is sometimes referred to by doctors as “5 feet under” because of its deadly side effects. Not to mention that a team of researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) and Harvard Medical School have linked 5-FU to a progressing collapse of populations of stem cells and their progeny in the central nervous system.
For most adult cancers, the typical best case scenario is that the “Big 3” treatment model buys a little time. In a worst case scenario, you will die from the treatment rather than the disease.
“Chemotherapy is an attempt to poison the body just short of death in the hope of killing the cancer before the entire body is killed. Most of the time it doesn’t work.” ~ Dr. John R. Lee, MD
Dr. Glenn Warner (who died in 2000), was one of the most highly qualified cancer specialists in the United States. He used alternative treatments on his cancer patients with great success. On the treatment of cancer in this country he said,
“We have a multi-billion dollar industry that is killing people, right and left, just for financial gain. Their idea of research is to see whether two doses of this poison is better than three doses of that poison.”
Dr. Alan C. Nixon, past president of the American Chemical Society writes, “As a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good.”
And according to Dr. Charles Mathe, French cancer specialist, “If I contracted cancer, I would never go to a standard cancer treatment center. Only cancer victims who live far from such centers have a chance.”
Truth be told, if a person has one type of cancer and allowed themselves to be injected with chemotherapy, this person will later often develop a different type of cancer as a result. The oncologist will likely claim to have cured their initial cancer even though a second or third cancer developed which was directly caused by the chemo used to treat the original cancer.
In the case of the breast cancer chemotherapy drug Tamoxifen, for instance, patients must trade one risk for another, as while it may reduce breast cancer, it more than doubles women’s risk of uterine cancer. Writing in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine revealed that giving chemotherapy prior to surgery for breast cancer may promote disease metastasis, or the growth and spread of cancer to other areas of the body.2 This, in turn, greatly increases a woman’s risk of dying from the disease.
Chemotherapy May Make Breast Cancer More Aggressive and Likely to Spread
Preoperative chemotherapy, known as neoadjuvant chemotherapy, is often offered to women because it may help shrink tumors, which increases the likelihood that women will receive lumpectomy surgery instead of a full mastectomy. After performing tests on mice and human tissue, however, the researchers found that doing so may increase the likelihood of metastasis by increasing what are known as “tumor microenvironments of metastasis.” As Stat News explained:3
“Called ‘tumor microenvironments of metastasis,’ these on-ramps are sites on blood vessels that special immune cells flock to. If the immune cells hook up with a tumor cell, they usher it into a blood vessel like a Lyft picking up a passenger. Since blood vessels are the highways to distant organs, the result is metastasis, or the spread of cancer to far-flung sites.”
When mice with breast cancer or given human breast tumors were given the chemotherapy, it altered the tumor microenvironment in ways that made them more conducive to cancer spread, including, Stat reported:4
- Increasing the number of immune cells that transport cancer cells into blood vessels
- Making blood vessels more permeable to cancer cells
- Making tumor cells more mobile
In mice, chemotherapy treatment doubled the number of cancer cells in the bloodstream and lungs compared to mice that did not receive the treatment. Further, in 20 human patients who received common chemotherapy drugs, the tumor microenvironments also became more favorable to cancer spread. As The Telegraph noted:
“It is thought the toxic medication switches on a repair mechanism in the body which ultimately allows tumors to grow back stronger. It also increases the number of ‘doorways’ on blood vessels which allow cancer to spread throughout the body.”5
Further, researchers wrote in a 2012 Journal of Clinical Oncology editorial, “Unfortunately, neoadjuvant chemotherapy does not seem to improve overall survival, as demonstrated in the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) B18 trial, among others.”6 This means women may be trading a potential increased risk of cancer metastasis for a treatment that doesn’t even improve their chances of survival.
In 2012, researchers found chemotherapy for prostate cancer caused DNA damage in healthy cells and caused them to secrete more of a protein called WNT16B, which boosts tumor growth and may encourage cancer cells to develop resistance to treatment. “WNT16B, when secreted, would interact with nearby tumor cells and cause them to grow, invade and, importantly, resist subsequent therapy,” study co-author Dr. Peter Nelson, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told AFP News.7
The serious toxic effects of chemotherapy have long been ignored by virtually everyone in medicine and the federal government. Chemotherapy drugs have always been assumed to be safe just because they’re used to treat cancer. This is an outright lie! The truth is that chemo is toxic, carcinogenic (causes cancer), destroys erythrocytes (red blood cells), devastates the immune system, and destroys vital organs.
Think about it… a person’s hair falls out, their immune system is destroyed, they are constantly nauseous and often vomit. Frequent dizziness is also the norm as are severe headaches. Are these signs that maybe, just maybe chemotherapy is poison and doesn’t belong in the human body?
Conventional Oncologists Aren’t Likely to Explain the Many Options for Treatment
Upon receiving a cancer diagnosis, many people assume their only options for treatment are chemotherapy, surgery or radiation. Only you and your health care team can make the decision on how to best pursue treatment, but you should know that conventional providers are unlikely to think outside the box.
Oncology is the only specialty in medicine that is allowed and even encouraged to sell drugs at massive profits — typically in excess of 50 percent — and cancer drugs are, as a general category, the most expensive medications in all of medicine to begin with. Oncologists actually get a commission for the chemotherapy drugs they sell, and with that type of incentive, it’s nearly impossible to imagine them actively seeking other alternatives.
Oncologists are further constrained by the “standard of care” prescribed by oncology medical boards and the drug industry. If they go against the established standard of care, they’re susceptible to having their license reprimanded or even taken away. As a result, patients are typically forced to go it alone if they don’t want to go the conventional route, which is unfortunate because there are many promising alternative treatments.
Treating cancer is BIG business. In fact, each year in the USA, allopathic (conventional) cancer treatments generate over $200 billion in revenue. Despite this, cancer is still the #2 leading cause of death in the United States and Great Britain, and the #1 leading cause of death in Canada and Australia. Experts believe these statistics are only going to worsen.
Understanding Your Options for Cancer Treatment
A comprehensive natural cancer-fighting approach would be to make your body as healthy as possible, using detoxification, strategies to boost your immune function, dietary changes and other targeted therapies depending on your needs. For instance, Annie Brandt — a 16-year cancer survivor and author of “The Healing Platform: Build Your Own Cure!” — states products that are helpful against metastatic cancer cells include:
- Berberine / metformin
- Broccoli sprouts
- Burdock root
- Fermented soy
- Intravenous vitamin C
- Glucoraphanin
- Slippery elm
- Fish oil
- Sulforaphane (cruciferous vegetables)
- Myrosinase
- Rhubarb
- Modified citrus pectin (PectaSol-C)
- Curcumin (turmeric)
- Essiac tea
- Sheep sorrel
- Heparin
The point is that there are many anti-cancer strategies overlooked by conventional medicine. Many of them even work in addition to conventional treatment. For instance, vitamin C in combination with nutritional ketosis and fasting prior to administering chemotherapy radically improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy.
Oncologists in Turkey, who aren’t under the same U.S. restrictions, are also using a stacked ketogenic treatment protocol that is showing shocking remissions in many stage 4 cancer patients. The treatment protocol at ChemoThermia Oncology Center in Turkey includes:
- Metabolically supported chemotherapy (applying chemotherapy with a variety of interventions to support its effectiveness)
- Hyperthermia
- Hyperbaric oxygen therapy
- Glycolysis inhibitors, especially 2-deoxyglucose (2-DG) and dichloroacetate (DCA)
- Ketogenic diet with phytopharmaceutical supplements
At the center, all oncology patients are put on a ketogenic diet, which creates metabolic stress on the cancer cells. Then, prior to administering the chemo, the patient will do a 14-hour fast, which further increases the metabolic stress on the cancer cells.
The patients will typically have a blood glucose level around 80 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL) at this point. They then apply glycolysis inhibitors to inhibit the glycolysis pathway in the cancer cells, which creates a terrific amount of metabolic stress, as the cancer cells are already starved of glucose.
Insulin is then applied to lower the blood glucose levels to around 50 or 60 mg/dL, to cause mild hypoglycemia. At that point, chemotherapy is applied, often at a far lower dose than would otherwise be used, thereby lowering the risk of side effects.
In the days following chemotherapy, hyperthermia and hyperbaric oxygen therapy are applied, plus a daily infusion of glycolysis inhibitor therapies with high-dose vitamin C (50 grams) and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). A sampling of other targeted therapies covered in Brandt’s book are below.
- Poly-MVA, a colloidal mineral complex that crosses the blood-brain barrier and helps renourish your body and brain at the cellular level. It also helps replace nutrients lost during chemotherapeutic and radiological treatments.
- AvéULTRA (Metatrol), a fermented wheat germ product.
- Selenium, vitamin D and iodine, as most cancer patients are low in these three nutrients. Since I do regular sauna therapy, I take 200 micrograms of SelenoExcell each day. (You tend to excrete selenium when sweating.) Selenium increases glutathione, an important metabolic antioxidant necessary for detoxification. It also catalyzes the conversion of thyroid hormone T4 to T3, so it can be beneficial if you have thyroid problems.
- Modified citrus pectin (MCP) has been shown to reverse cancer and stop metastatic cancer. Brandt recommends the brand ecoNugenics, as this is the one that has been scientifically studied and verified to work.
- Colloidal silver is a nontoxic, broad-spectrum antimicrobial therapy with no known toxicity and no known mechanism for acquired resistance.
- Salicinium, a plant-based extract that inhibits production of nagalase — an enzyme produced by cancer cells — while simultaneously stimulating innate immune cells.
So as mentioned, there are many promising avenues to target cancer. Even if you’re working with a conventional oncologist, the ChemoThermia Oncology Center has published protocols your oncologist could make use of, regardless of where you live. If your oncologist isn’t willing to integrate these alternative strategies into your care regimen, you may want to consider finding a new doctor.
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