Breast Cancer: 50 Essential Things to Do (Breast Cancer Gift for Women, For Readers of Dear Friend) - Softcover

Anderson, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573245364 ISBN 13: 9781573245364

Publisher: Conari Press, 2011

Synopsis

A Fully Integrative Approach to Breast Cancer

Your roadmap for facing breast cancer. While recovery and survival rates for breast cancer have improved, the shock and confusion that comes with a diagnosis remains overwhelming, as does choosing a plan of treatment. With so many options out there, each one backed by experts claiming it to be the best, it’s difficult to know the best option for you. This is where an integrated approach comes in, and Greg Anderson, founder of the Cancer Recovery Foundation, is here to help.

A combination of healing tactics. In utilizing a variety of tools for healing, you maximize opportunity for healing. As someone who has been a cancer patient himself, Anderson knows the feeling of being overwhelmed by the possibilities. Because of this, he helps readers form a plan that combines the best of the best: nutrition, exercise, mind/body approaches, and social support along with conventional medical care.

Implement a recovery plan. As a recognized pioneer in the field of integrated cancer care, Anderson offers critical information and advice to readers about the major issues they will face as a patient following a breast cancer diagnosis. Knowing the uncertainty that accompanies the journey, Anderson doesn’t just offer his readers advice, he guides them toward making a concrete, comprehensive recovery plan.

Read Breast Cancer: 50 Essential Things to Do by Greg Anderson and discover:

• A guide to health and healing from one of the world’s leading wellness authorities
• An approach to recovery that calls into question Western medicine’s tendency to overtreat
• Advice for cultivating physical, emotional, and spiritual health

Readers of books such as Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, Radical Remission, and Heal Breast Cancer Naturally will find a further source of hope and healing in Breast Cancer: 50 Essential Things to Do.

About this title

About the Author

Greg Anderson is a recognized pioneer in the field of integrated cancer care, and founder and CEO of Cancer Recovery Foundation International, a global affiliation of national charities now operating in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, and Australia.

Anderson is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading wellness authorities. He is the author of eight books which have been translated into 29 languages.

Visit him at: www.CancerRecovery.org

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

BREAST CANCER

50 Essential Things You Can Do

By GREG ANDERSON

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Copyright © 2011 Greg Anderson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57324-536-4

Contents

Foreword by Christiane Northrup, MD
Getting the Most from This Book by Erica A. Harvey
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part One: Understanding the Incredible Journey
Chapter 1 The Emerging Model of Breast Cancer Care
Chapter 2 Sources of Health and Healing
Chapter 3 Medicine: Consider the Whole
Chapter 4 Caution Signs on the Incredible Journey
Chapter 5 The Vitamin D Promise: Actual Prevention, Not Early Detection
Part Two: Integrated Breast Cancer Care
Chapter 6 The Holistic Model
Chapter 7 The 50 Essential Things You Can Do
The First Step on the Incredible Journey: Understand Your Diagnosis
#1 Focus
#2 Put Yourself in Charge
#3 Ask Your Doctor These Questions
#4 Obtain a Second Opinion
#5 Become an e-Patient
#6 Reframe the Statistics
The Second Step on the Incredible Journey: Plan Your Treatment
#7 Understand Your Conventional Treatment Options
#8 Gauge Your Confidence in Your Medical Team
#9 Seek Conviction versus Wishful Thinking
#10 Reflect on the Treatment Decision
#11 Decide!
#12 Give Only Informed Consent
The Third Step on the Incredible Journey: Manage Your Treatment
#13 Believe in Your Treatment
#14 Overcome Fatigue and Nausea
#15 Make the Most of Your Appointments
#16 Monitor Your Progress
The Fourth Step on the Incredible Journey: Heal Your Lifestyle
#17 Live Well
#18 Operate Under New Assumptions
#19 Schedule Your Wellness
#20 Eliminate Active and Passive Smoking
#21 Adopt This Nutritional Strategy
#22 Purchase Real Food
#23 Hydrate
#24 Know Why You Eat
#25 Determine Your Nutritional Supplement Program
#26 Take One Low-Dose Aspirin Each Day
#27 Make Exercise Part of Your Recovery Program
#28 Sleep More
#29 Find Positive Support
The Fifth Step on the Incredible Journey: Heal with Your Mind
#30 Analyze Your Beliefs
#31 Reframe Breast Cancer
#32 Evaluate Your Self-Talk
#33 Choose a Daily Affirmation
#34 Manage Your Toxic Stress
#35 Visualize Health and Healing
#36 Maximize Mind, Body, and Treatment
The Sixth Step on the Incredible Journey: Embrace Your New Life
#37 Understand the Message of Illness
#38 Live Now
#39 Take Time to Play
#40 Laugh to Foster Healing
#41 Evaluate Your Relationships
#42 Get Beyond "Why?"
#43 Practice Gentle Self-Discipline
#44 Choose Your Emotional Style
The Seventh Step on the Incredible Journey: Nurture Your Spirit
#45 See Life through Spiritual Eyes
#46 Value Personal Spiritual Growth
#47 Make Forgiveness a Way of Life
#48 Exude Gratitude
#49 Practice Unconditional Loving
#50 Share This Hope
Epilogue: You Have a Future
Appendixes
Food as Medicine Appendixes
Appendix 1: Sample Menus
Appendix 2: Clean Out Your Pantry and Refrigerator
Appendix 3: Cook and Shop Healthfully
Appendix 4: The Real Food Shopping List
Complementary Treatment Modalities Appendixes
Appendix 5: Meditation and Visualization
Appendix 6: Yoga
Appendix 7: Bodywork
Appendix 8: Energy Work
Appendix 9: Naturopathic Medicine
Appendix 10: Traditional Chinese Medicine
Resources

CHAPTER 1

The Emerging Model of Breast Cancer Care

It's not all about the treatment.

Several years ago, I received a call from Ruth, a medical doctor who was part of a familypractice based near Chicago, Illinois. About two years earlier, she was diagnosed withbreast cancer. Things were not going well. "I need other options," she said.

As we talked, Ruth first shared how she'd recently become exceedingly depressed andquit her work to have time to heal. However, she was now stuck, overwhelmed by thethought that she may not live to see her two children become adults. She hoped I mightshare with her more details of the recent findings I'd reported at a conference she'dattended.

From the perspective of orthodox medicine, Ruth was strictly following protocol, doingeverything perfectly. This included a mastectomy followed by both chemotherapy andradiation. She'd recently switched from tamoxifen to raloxifene because the reduced risksof adverse effects, especially blood clots, seemed to dictate that change to her. Aftertalking for about twenty minutes, Ruth agreed to complete the Cancer Recovery Group'sstandard intake form and email it back to me. A follow-up appointment was set for twoweeks.

Except for too much refined sugar in her diet, Ruth's responses to our questionnaire werestandard. Our second phone call was anything but.

She first needed to talk about her surgeon, a man to whom she had often referred her ownpatients. They were professional colleagues, and their spouses even knew one another,she told me. Then Ruth angrily and tearfully unloaded.

"After my diagnosis was confirmed," said Ruth, "our entire relationship changed. Now Iwas told exactly what to do, to share the intimate details of my life, to describe mysymptoms and even my monthly menstrual cycles and private sexual behavior. I wasstripped naked, both physically and emotionally. I was just another patient. I saw theprivileged status of doctor ripped away from me. To the medical system, I was nowreduced to just another Stage II infiltrating ductal carcinoma. I was expected to do as Iwas told. And beyond genetic mutations, my doctors could provide no insights into why Icontracted this god-awful disease."

The Question of Cause

There is no one cause for all breast cancers. Nor is there just one treatment for all breastcancers. Many factors contribute to cancer development, and many factors help preventits development. This includes diet, exercise, toxin exposure, vitamin D levels, hormones,certain medical tests and treatments, as well as gender, age, genetics, race, and more.These factors, interacting together, impact breast cancer development and prevention. Foreach woman, the combination will be different. The emerging model of breast carerecognizes this complexity.

In a sense, Ruth's doctors were correct. On the cellular level, breast cancer is anexpression of genes that have mutated, resulting in cells that have gone awry. But badgenetics are not the cause of 90 to 95 percent of breast cancers. An unlucky draw fromthe genetic pool explains just 5 to 10 percent of the factors involved in the development ofbreast cancer.

Genes gone bad are actually the result, the outcome, of many other factors. Your genesturn off and on in relation to the environment in which those genes live. The good news isthat even if we do have a gene that potentially predisposes us to cancer development,lifestyle factors can and will impact the degree to which that gene is expressed.

Dr. Dean Ornish, one of the world's most esteemed pioneers and integrated healthcarerevolutionaries, stated, "People should realize that genes may be our predisposition, butthey are not our fate. The fact is, massive positive changes in genetic activity aregenerated through lifestyle choices. Our choices are as powerful as our strongest drugsand occur rapidly in most individuals."

How powerful? Among the researchers who study lifestyle's impact on health, there is aconsensus that 50 to 75 percent of cancers are totally and completely preventable.Excellent and compelling scientific evidence shows that eight of ten breast cancers couldbe prevented, actually stopped before diagnosis. I ask you to pause to consider thesepoints for just a moment. Isn't that a startling revelation?

There's more. Prevention can be accomplished by minimizing or eliminating factors thatpredispose one to cancer development. These include reducing the consumption ofanimal fats, avoiding inactivity, eliminating the use of tobacco, and moderating theconsumption of alcohol. Prevention of breast cancer is also accomplished by addingnutritional supplements that reduce genetic expression. We will have much more to sayabout this later in the book.

There's even more good news. If breast cancer can be prevented through thesemeasures, common sense tells us that these same healthful self-care measures will alsobe of value in both the recovery process and in reducing the risk of recurrence. Happily,there is excellent emerging science to support the huge role that self-care plays inrecovery.

There is significant resistance to these natural-healing ideas in much of the orthodoxoncology community. Even though Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, said, morethan 2,500 years ago, "Let food be thy medicine and thy medicine thy food," manyWestern-trained doctors have little tolerance for such ideas. "Eat whatever you want" iswhat both my surgeon and my radiation oncologist told me. They were more concernedthat I ate anything and everything, sugars and fats included, in order to keep my weightup.

Like most of us, doctors are busy people. Most do their very best to keep apprised ofeverything that is going on in their field. The good ones constantly read new scientificstudies published in professional journals, attend conferences, and see pharmaceuticalrepresentatives several times a year. But as a result, there is a pervasive attitude thatsays, "If it were true, I would know about it." But clearly, this is an incorrect assumption,especially when it comes to more natural approaches to breast cancer.

Nutrition, exercise, social support, and mind / body / spirit matters are barely, if ever, onthe curriculum in medical school. Following a talk I gave at the world-famous MDAnderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, a medical oncologist pulled me aside andsaid, "You must stop spreading these unfounded statements about diet." She went on toinsist that double-blind studies were the gold standard by which to measure all cancerinterventions. This is an accurate illustration of the state of mind in which most doctors liveand work. There is a profound medical culture bias that dismisses natural approaches infavor of pharmaceutical solutions. She concluded by saying, "Patients don't want tochange what they eat. And they sure don't want to exercise. They want to receive theirtreatment and then forget about it."

Some oncologists have also said to me, "Even if we lower the [research] standards, youexperts can't even agree among yourselves. There's just no consensus in the naturalhealth field." My response was that patients should do everything possible to help preventand control cancer in ways that do not harm the body. Predictably, I was asked to provideproof there would be no harm. The demand for hard science stands in the way of commonsense-it's the state of oncology in America and much of the world today.

That said, it is important to note that people who exercise regularly and eat healthfully canstill develop breast cancer. Remember, breast cancer is not a single-cause disease. Andfor each person, the combination of causative factors is different. However, we can alllearn to take better care of ourselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually. A diagnosis ofbreast cancer is the signal to do so, providing an opportunity to fully love and care foroneself. That truth stands as the premier attribute of the emerging model of breast care.

The History

Conventional Western breast cancer treatment is exclusively focused on the disease. It'sthe tumor model. Following a myriad of tests, a diagnosis is made. Once diagnosed, thetumor or the blood-based cancer is attacked with surgery, chemotherapy, and / orradiation. Medical expertise is required to prescribe and administer these treatments, andthus a different specialist is necessary to implement each treatment type. The entireprocess is all about the tumor and precious little about the person.

For Ruth, walking through the gates and into the cancer treatment terrain started poorly.Prior to her initial surgery, she was told she needed a CT scan to determine if the tumorhad attached to the chest wall. Ruth knew CT scans were not routinely used in a Stage IIbreast cancer diagnosis. But the surgeon was insistent. He said, "I need to know whetheror not the tumor can be removed with mastectomy." Reluctantly, Ruth agreed.

The test did not go well. CT scans, also called CAT scans or computed tomographyscans, require a dye, which acts as a contrast solution, be injected into your arm throughan intravenous line prior to the test. "The technician who tried to insert the IV," said Ruth,"knew not what the hell he was doing. First, he couldn't find a vein. Then he dropped theentire IV kit on the floor. Instead of throwing it away and securing a new one, he picked itup and was about to use this now unsterile apparatus on me. I yelled at him, 'Stop it!' AndI walked out the door.

"he didn't know who I was," continued Ruth. "He cared only about the procedure andnothing about me, his patient. There I sat in that god-awful gown in that cold exam room,afforded no human comfort, no respect, and no acknowledgment that I was a living andbreathing human being let alone a medical professional. At that moment, I had this sinkingfeeling. I realized the system in which I was trained, and in which I practiced, wouldeventually fail me."

Breast cancer patients most often turn to the Cancer Recovery Group after the systemhas in some way failed them. Perhaps these women are concerned about the tests usedto arrive at their diagnosis. Or they feel as if they are being rushed, even forced, intotreatments without understanding their options. Many breast cancer patients reach out tous only after traditional medical treatments have failed and they've heard the frighteningwords "Your cancer is back."

Overtreatment

Much too often, these brave women turn to us when they are physically so weak andfragile that they fear they can withstand no more treatment. "Radiation has me so fatiguedI can't function," they say. Or "I cannot go through another round of chemotherapy." Thesad fact is we spend a great deal of time and effort helping cancer patients deal withovertreatment.

I first became vividly aware of the problem of overtreatment in the early 1990s. A youngCalifornia mother by the name of Nelene Fox turned to us for guidance. She had anadvanced invasive ductal carcinoma. Her first words were surprising: "Can you help meraise the $250,000 I need for a bone marrow transplant?" Her insurance provider, HealthNet, refused to cover the procedure because they considered it unproven andexperimental.

Those were brutal days in breast cancer treatment. Oncologists boldly proclaimed thathigh-dose chemotherapy followed by bone marrow transplant offered the cure foradvanced breast cancer. And medical journalists, especially in the major weekly newsmagazines, blindly fanned the flames of this optimism. Many in the breast cancercommunity proclaimed high-dose chemo and bone marrow transplant to be the Holy Grail.

The procedure was exceedingly dangerous. I retain a newspaper clipping in which onedoctor describes the process. "We bring the patient to death's door through an intensivepretransplant regimen of chemotherapy and radiation. Our treatment involves a four-drugregimen and is 35 to 40 percent more intensive than the regimens used in the recentlyreported studies. We administer our regimen in a highly specialized transplant unit, not inthe outpatient setting. Although the treatment itself is associated with a 21 percentmortality rate, the payoff may be a higher proportion of women surviving and being cancerfree." Brutal by any standards.

While trying to persuade Health Net to pay for the bone marrow transplant, Nelene Fox didraise the funds to have the procedure. But eight months later, she died. Her brother, MarkHiepler, is an attorney, and he brought a lawsuit against his sister's insurance company.He won, and the jury awarded the Fox family $89 million. Although the settlement wassubsequently negotiated down to smaller sum, the case is considered a watershedmoment in that thereafter most health insurance companies began approving high-dosechemotherapy with bone marrow transplant for advanced breast cancer.

This era spawned a desperate flurry of activities attempting to position this procedure asthe quintessential answer to breast cancer. With the financial help of the biggestinternational pharmaceutical companies including Amgen, Aventis, Pharmacia, andWyeth, the procedure was researched and promoted. Transplant doctors testified beforeCongress and appeared in the media. Breast cancer advocacy groups like the Susan G.Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, now called Susan G. Komen for the Cure, lobbied bothfederal authorities and state legislatures to mandate insurance coverage for theprocedure. Hospitals from coast to coast proudly rushed to equip their facilities with bonemarrow transplant units, encouraging their physicians to learn the procedure. Providingtransplants for breast cancer patients was good business.

At that time, the Cancer Recovery Group was based in Southern California, where we ranthe largest cancer support group in the nation. We always built our message around lesstoxic and least invasive prevention and treatment options. But in the early 1990s, ourmessage was drowned out. For nearly five years, the number one request from patientsand their family members was information on high-dose chemo and bone marrowtransplant.

New drugs were introduced that made it possible to harvest marrow cells from bloodrather than having to extract it from a woman's hip. And soon it was possible to administerhigh-dose chemo and transplant on an outpatient basis. It was all systems go to makehigh-dose chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant the new standard of care. Itsefficacy was accepted as an article of faith.

It wasn't until 1999 at an American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting thatresearchers presented four studies that showed women did no better with the high-dosechemotherapy and bone marrow transplant treatment than those who received only lowdosechemotherapy. From that point forward, the procedure was discredited and today islargely abandoned.

More Is Not Better

The beliefs behind the more-treatment mindset die hard and are the reason so muchunnecessary care is still delivered by doctors and hospitals. In the world of breast cancercare, it is widely agreed that surgery is the most effective treatment, contributing more tohalting the progression of the disease than the other treatment modalities combined. Yetbeyond surgery, there is little certainty about which drugs or which procedures actuallywork best.

Our culture seeks cures. Most people in developed societies believe fervently in thedoctrine that modern medicine cures. Cure-it's almost a statement of faith, pervasive onevery continent. And most breast cancer patients look to its high priests, the oncologists,as their saviors. We seldom question the ongoing march of science. In fact, we expect it,taking scientific progress as a given. Both patients and healthcare professionals aredeeply in need of believing that medicine cures.

That belief fosters a more-treatment-is-better-treatment sentiment that is deeply imbeddedin conventional Western oncology. It is driven by physician-specialists who don't reallyknow which of the major treatment modalities are truly the most effective. It leads tomassive overtreatment.

This is exacerbated by the hammer syndrome, something I first explored more than twentyyears ago. The syndrome looks like this: If you are a surgeon, every answer looks likesurgery. If you are a radiation oncologist, all your answers point toward radiation. And ifyou are a medical oncologist, every answer involves drugs. I'll have more to say aboutchemotherapy later. The point is, if you are trained in a narrow subspecialty, that's whatyou see as the answer. If you're a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

But there is much more to this overtreatment warning. Most oncologists lack thespecialized training needed to independently interpret the evidence that is available tothem. This leads even well-intentioned physicians to treat patients out of anunderstandable altruistic and humanitarian motive to help, even when they may not knowwhat is the best thing to do.

Medical oncologists are famous for statements like "We will never know if this drug canhelp you unless we do just one more round." There is a vast array of evidence thatsuggests the last round is often the fatal round. The Cancer Recovery Group's work hasled me to believe that thousands of patients die each year not from cancer but fromcancer treatment.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from BREAST CANCER by GREG ANDERSON. Copyright © 2011 Greg Anderson. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Conari Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1573245364
• ISBN 13: 9781573245364
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 276