Discussion with a friend about cancer

My friend is pro-medicine and I am pro-holistic. In my opinion there is little argument that traditional western medicine (allopathic medicine) saves life and is successful in treating patients.

 

Science is concerned with universalities, universal truths, laws of how the body or the world behaves. Besides doctors’ ignorance, besides their ineptitude, there is necessary fallibility, some knowledge science can never deliver on. [Why do Doctor Fail? Lecturer:  Dr. Atul Gawande].

 

 

  • Figures below are for 2012 – it is estimated that by 2035 figures will double.

There were an estimated 3.45 million new cases of cancer (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer) and 1.75 million deaths from cancer in Europe in 2012.

 

  • Survival rate is less than 50%. Hence – below 50/50 chance that medicine will simply make a …“guess”

The most common cancer sites were cancers of the female breast (464,000 cases), followed by colorectal (447,000), prostate (417,000) and lung (410,000). These four cancers represent half of the overall burden of cancer in Europe. The most common causes of death from cancer were cancers of the lung (353,000 deaths), colorectal (215,000), breast (131,000) and stomach (107,000). In the European Union, the estimated numbers of new cases of cancer were approximately 1.4 million

 

 

Dr. Allen comments about medical ineptitude…..

  • “Blood pressure too high? Lower it.
  • Have diarrhoea? Stop it.
  • Runny nose? Dry it up.
  • Headache? Kill the pain.
  • Vomiting? Take an anti-emetic.
  • Skin rash? Suppress it.”

[Page 50]

 

 

Dr. R. Francis – writes:

 

  • Narrowly trained, our physicians are taught the art of surgery and the administration of drugs; tools designed to manage and suppress symptoms, not to cure disease. For medicine to recognize disease it must be diagnosable. You are not sick until the day the physician can diagnose something. Modern medicine has no way of recognising or diagnosing disease when your health is in its initial decline. We are considered sick only after the problem has become serious enough to produce symptoms that fit neatly into one of medicine’s disease categories.
  • Physicians have no protocols or established procedures for measuring decline in health for their patients. In modern, technologically advanced hospitals infections are bewilderingly rampant.
  • Many physicians assume that if they don’t understand what is wrong, the patient must be imagining the illness.
  • Patient is “well” until his or her condition deteriorates into symptoms that the doctor recognizes as a diagnosable disease.
  • Medicine has developed few or no protocols for promoting basic human health and immunity.
  • Physicians resort to protocols that merely suppress symptoms. By suppressing symptoms, rather than addressing causes, disease remain chronic.
  • Physicians are unable to effectively diminish disease in our society. Surgery and drugs are virtually the only tools of the physician and they are limited in what they can do.
  • Symptomology is about focusing, identifying and categorising symptoms – the effects produced by disease. The misconception is that thousands of different diseases exist, each with different symptoms, causes and treatments. The modern medical treatment of almost all disease focuses on the management of these symptoms (the effect of disease), rather than eliminating the causes.
  • Symptomology leads the medical profession to look at symptoms individually, organize them into thousands of categories, label them as different diseases and then prescribe a currently accepted protocol to suppress those symptoms.
  • Diagnosis by symptoms – is the process by which modern medicine gives each collection of symptoms a particular name. Medicine views symptoms as enemies and physicians are trained to eliminate them, even if this means aggressively assaulting the body with dangerous toxins, radiation or invasive surgery.

 

 

There were 529,655 deaths registered in England and Wales in 2015, an increase of 5.6% compared to 2014. [Source: Office for National Statistics].

 

 

Celebrities that have recently died:

  • Alan Rickman (69),  Pancreatic cancer
  • David Bowie (69),  Liver cancer
  • Terry Wogan (77),  Liver cancer
  • Larry Steinbachek (56),  ? Cancer
  • Richard Machowicz (51), Brain Cancer
  • Frank Sinatra Jnr (72), Cardiac Arrest
  • Miguel Ferrer (61),  Laryngeal cancer
  • Ed Stewart (74),  Stroke
  • George Michael (53), ??
  • Bill Paxton (61), Stroke
  • David Gest (62), Stroke
  • Victoria Wood (62), Cancer

 

 

Steve Jobs

Wahman said she was ill for seven years before she was diagnosed with a form of neuroendocrine cancer in 2001. Before that, doctors mistakenly told her she had irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease. Steve Jobs died of neuroendocrine cancer of the pancreas. Many doctors don’t understand the disease.

 

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/living/health-family/karen-garloch/article9165605.html#storylink=cpy

 

Jobs had the tumour removed on July 31, 2004, at Stanford University Medical Clinic. He underwent an operation called a modified Whipple procedure, or a pancreatoduodenectomy, which removes the right side of the pancreas, the gallbladder, and parts of the stomach, bile duct, and small intestine, which was a strong suggestion that his cancer had spread beyond the pancreas. Within five years, it was clear that Jobs was not cured. In April of 2009 Jobs flew to Switzerland and underwent an experimental procedure called peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT). It involves delivering radiation to tumor cells by attaching one of two radioactive isotopes to a drug that mimics somatostatin, the hormone that regulates the entire endocrine system and the secretion of other hormones. This treatment apparently failed, as shortly after that he had a liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis.

 

  • Life expectancy in UK rises but so do years spent in bad health. [The Guardian, 2016]
  • Life expectancy 1960 = 71.13
  • Life expectancy 1998 = 77.19