Prevention Step Two: Detoxification
I can’t stress this point enough. Detoxifying your body on a regular basis is, perhaps, the most important cancer-prevention step you can take. It is virtually impossible to keep yourself safe from all carcinogenic toxins and poisons in our modern world. If you live in a city, you’re bombarded with thousands of toxins from car exhaust, chimney smoke, pesticides and herbicides we dump by the ton on our lawns. They keep the lawn green but at what cost to health? If you live in the country and close to farming areas, chances are your air is periodically polluted with pesticides and herbicides.
Fortunately our bodies are hardwired in such a way that they detoxify down to the cellular level. Our job is to help our body do its tasks in the most efficient way possible, and we can do that by taking the time and making the effort to go through various self-cleanses of sorts.
There are very many effective ways to clean out the tissues, organs, and other body parts, especially the internal organs charged with eliminating external poisons, namely the liver, kidneys, the small and large intestines, spleen, the lungs, and the gall bladder. Natural products are available to help you to purify your colon. Detoxifying is not necessarily a pleasant experience, but you will feel marvelous after doing so. Liver cleanses are simple—drinking some sort of monounsaturated oil such as olive oil with lemon juice works quite nicely.
The Gerson Therapy is a procedure I use regularly—perhaps for two days every couple of months. Dr. Gerson recommends imbibing in large amounts (thirteen eight-ounce glasses daily) of carrot juice and
green juices from blended vegetables, plus the self-administration of coffee enemas. (See Appendix A for more information.)
Here are instructions from Max Gerson, M.D. on how to take a coffee enema:
To make enemas most effective, the patient should lie on his right side, with both legs drawn close to the abdomen, and breathe deeply, in order to suck the greatest amount of fluid into all parts of the colon. The enema’s fluid should be retained ten to fifteen minutes. Within twelve minutes nearly all the caffeine from organic coffee is absorbed through the bowel wall into the hemorrhoidal veins and then from these blood vessels it flows directly into the portal veins and then into the liver. Fluid expulsion offers you the feeling of complete cleanliness and good health.
For the best coffee enema concentration, do the following:
1. Drop three rounded tablespoonful’s of organic ground (drip) coffee (never instant) into one quart of distilled water. (The organic coffee won’t contain any adverse additives.)
2. Let the solution boil three minutes in your coffee maker and then simmer fifteen minutes more.
3. Strain the solution though a fine-mesh filter.
4. Fill a quart glass container with the liquid and let cool to body temperature.
5. Use this solution at body temperature for purposes of bowel infusion by application of an enema bucket or bag raised just eighteen inches above the anus.
6. Use a timer for the ten to fifteen minutes you are allowing the coffee to do its cleansing internally.
There’s much more to detoxification than just taking an enema using organic coffee. Visit your local health-food store and ask about the various cleanses available to you. Try one. If it doesn’t make you feel noticeably better, don’t worry. You haven’t wasted your money. You probably just need to detox more often. Whatever you do to detoxify your body will help get rid of those nasty, DNA-destabilizing poisons and toxins from your body. Detoxifying is not necessarily easy to do, and a good cleanse takes discipline. But again, isn’t it better to go through a little discomfort every once in a while, but feel great afterwards, than have to go through the debilitating side effects of conventional cancer treatments?
Chelation Therapy
Chelation therapy is the process of removing heavy metal from the blood stream by various means.
EDTA
(EthyleneDiamineTetraacetic Acid)
chelation therapy
is the best physiological detoxifier of heavy metals and other metallic ions known to humans. It’s administered in three ways: intravenously, orally, or anally. All administrative techniques have been found to be safe, effective, and relatively inexpensive for purposes of removing toxic metals from all parts of the body and restoring blood flow in victims of atherosclerosis. I believe strongly in the efficacy of this treatment. During the
intravenous (IV) chelation process,
the ions of minerals floating in your bloodstream or other tissue fluids are captured and bonded into ringed structures by a chemical agent, usually a synthetic amino acid or weak organic acid that you take into your systemic circulation.
The ions and the agent eventually leave your body through its usual waste disposal system. It is an arterial cleaning process. Strictly for purposes of detoxification of impurities from my body, I have received 566 intravenous chelations to date and anticipate taking more. The protocol followed by my chelating physician for intravenous chelation administration is one that’s recommended by ACAM, the American College for Advancement in Medicine.
Oral chelation therapy
actually is merely a term of reference, longtime used and somewhat misnamed, indicating that certain nutrients taken by mouth are acting as cellular detoxifiers. They tend to clean out waste products, pollutants, heavy metals, foreign proteins, and other toxic substances in the cells, or by diluting the electromagnetic energy stored in destructive free radicals which have been created by combining reactions within the tissues. The so-called oral-chelating agents may include anti-oxidant nutrients, pharmaceuticals, metabolic factors, food substances, dietary supplements, herbs, homeopathic botanicals, nutritional formulations, and other such ingredients, as well as specific exercises promoting a person’s own systemic chelation.
Anal chelation therapy
is the application of a time release suppository into the rectum just before going to sleep for the night. It is comprised of several ingredients including cocoa butter, methocel E4M premium USP, but especially the active detoxifying agent of 750 mg of calcium disodium EDTA.
For a physician near to your location, please see the membership list provided on the ACAM’s website (American College for Advancement in Medicine): http://www.acamnet.org. Please also see Appendix A for more information.)
Prevention Step Three: Using Botanicals for Healing
Prevention, looked at from an alternative view, also incorporates another aspect of self-healing. The body is often in a weakened state long before manifestations of disease, and one of the most effective cancer prevention strategies is to handle the earliest indication before it gets out of hand. Those in the alternative-health community, often referred to as CAIM (Complementary, Alternative, and Integrative Medicine), know that sometimes giving the body a boost with herbal botanicals is exactly what is needed to handle a low-level infection. This way the body can get back to its normal state of health and healing.
Healing
has its roots in the Greek word
holos
, from the same derivation that has given us “whole” and “holistic”. Over multiple centuries, healing has developed its own descriptive language such as “life-force” (English), “
Qi
” (Chinese), “
Prana
” (Indian), “
Ki
” (Japanese), “chakras” (Indian), “emotions,” “spiritual flow,” “mental images,” and more. These terms are as important to health as is the state of organs and tissues within the physical body. Whether we are concerned about remaining healthy, regaining health, or moving to greater health, the whole of the being, physical, mental and spiritual, is involved in the process.
One hundred and fifty or so years ago, before the advent of our overly commercialized pharmaceutical industry and before the outgrowth of modern medical practitioners, Western medicine was not administered by medical doctors. Rather healing botanicals derived from nature were given out by homeopaths and naturopaths. Such naturalists were holistic in their healing techniques and utilized very few drugs, sometimes none at all. Instead, these homeopaths or naturopaths or herbalists were practitioners of botanical medicine who recognized that plant botanicals work on the whole person, not just on specific systems as do drugs or mechanical devices. Herbal medicine recognizes that botanical agents work synergistically to bring about a vastly greater effect than their individual constituents.
Two experts on natural medicine, both faculty members at the Bastyr College of Naturopathic Medicine in Washington State, tend to agree with me and countless others on this topic. In their own published book,
Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine
, a classic in its field, Michael Murray, N.D., and Joseph Pizzorno, N.D., emphasize the healing power of nature or
Vis medicatrix naturae
—. The two naturopaths state that fundamental to the practice of naturopathic medicine is a profound belief in the ability of the body to heal itself, given the proper opportunity.
“The strict corollary of this is, to quote Hippocrates, ‘do no evil,’
i.e.
to very carefully avoid both practices which weaken the body’s ability to heal itself and therapies which take over a function of the body [the usual
procedure in modern medicine]. Needless to say, this philosophy [of do no evil] has limits, and at times the body needs more than just supportive help. . . . Plants have been used as medicines since antiquity.”
Botanical Applications for the Elimination of Illnesses
The folklorian, superstitious, cultural, or religious use of plants and plant substances by humankind for the elimination of illnesses most likely has existed since the dawn of time, but the scientific investigation of herbal botanicals, labeled as
herbalism
or
herbology
, is a relatively recent development.
Herbs are the primary healing tools of naturopathic physicians. A Doctor of Naturopathy [N.D.] graduates after four years of undergraduate college and another four years of health care training in herbology, natural food diets, light therapy, hyperthermia, massage, fresh air inhalation, aromatherapy, homeopathy, exercise training, and the avoidance of drugs. An American N.D. practices under the code of healing which teaches that illness can be eliminated by the application of natural and non-toxic treatments. It’s readily seen that treatment with herbology is the most natural healing science available anywhere.
The term
herb
here refers to a plant used for medicinal purposes and does not include the recent fad of employing “medical marijuana.” Osteopaths, medical doctors, and pharmacists trained in the United States are usually incorrectly taught that the use of herbs is merely a reflection of folklore, outdated theories, and myth. In part that is because the pharmaceutical industry makes its money by manufacturing, patenting, and selling
synthetic
drugs. Their ideas have come to dominate the current culture of healing and tend to dictate how medicine should be practiced in the United States, Canada, and other western nations. No matter what you think about the pharmaceutical industry, it is a certainty that ill Americans receive drugs and hardly ever have exposure to herbs.
It is also a sad but true fact that herbal therapy competes too much with drug sales, so some in the pharmaceutical industry pay multimillions of dollars to support false propaganda about herbal treatment. There is no escaping the pharmaceutical industry’s all-pervasive propaganda against herbal botanicals. Herbal botanicals are almost never mentioned in the mainstream, yet in 2007, the date of the last study done on this matter, consumers spent a reported $15 billion just on nutritional supplements such as vitamins and minerals taken as tablets, liquids and capsules plus a total of $34 billion on alternative health care, including chiropractic and acupuncture.
By now, with the public’s new enlightenment in 2011 and its movement toward green medicine, those figures are likely to have tripled.
The situation regarding herbal medicine in the United States is considerably different in other countries except France, which is even more limiting than the U.S. in terms of governmental restrictions. Most nations around the world have numerous medical doctors and clinics practicing herbology and also homeopathy.
Germany’s herbal therapies match the number of drug prescriptions written in that country. This is an astounding statistic, and it is because in that European country herbal products are marketed with drug claims if they have been proven to be safe and effective. The legal requirements for herbal medicines are identical to those of all other drugs. Herbal products sold in Germany’s pharmacies are reimbursed by health insurance if they are prescribed by a physician.
The proof required by a manufacturer in Germany to illustrate safety and effectiveness for the herbal product is far less than the proof required by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration for any pharmaceutical in the United States. In Germany, a special commission known as
Commission E
developed a series of two hundred monographs on herbal products similar to the over-the-counter monographs in the U.S.
An herbal product is viewed as safe and effective if a manufacturer meets the quality requirements of the monograph or produces additional evidence of safety and effectiveness that can include data from existing
literature, anecdotal information from practicing physicians, as well as limited clinical studies.
In Asia, Central America, and South America, herbs are highly respected for healing of all sorts. I have visited hospitals in Shanghai, Beijing, and Nanking, China, and viewed entire departments administering treatment which took up several hospital floors for the preparation of herbal medicines. In the International Hospital of Beijing, I saw over six thousand drawers packed with botanicals and other ingredients for the preparation of medicines. The herbs are combined together in groups of eight, nine, or ten ingredients, packaged in brown paper bags, and dispensed according to written prescriptions by the patients’ primary physicians. While there is some contention amongst Chinese physicians on whether herbs or acupuncture should be the primary modality of treatment, Traditional Chinese Medicine—the TCM form of herbology— is being administered almost exclusively to millions of Chinese patients each day. In the form of herbs, TCM is enhancing Qi (the life force) for each Chinese citizen who needs assistance with healing.