The Cancer Solution

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There will be a major change in the way cancer is treated over the next ten years. If you or a loved one is receiving cancer care, you can take charge of your cancer treatment now by complementing it through diet and natural supplements that have been shown to prevent cancer and reverse its growth and by having knowledge about your cancer that you can share with your doctors.

My beloved wife Nancy’s 34 years of life with cancer and ultimate debilitating process of dying from cancer in 2012 compelled me to learn all that I could about cancer research and treatment. The appearance of cancer in two relatives and the urging of friends clinched my determination to share what I have learned with persons affected by cancer and with other health care professionals.

Cancer inevitably will affect your life directly or through those close to you as it has mine. This book will give you a perspective on the world’s most devastating disease that will be the cause of death for one of three of us in the United States. I have written this book to be readable for lay persons and yet contain useful technical details for health care professionals. This book is a handbook to be skimmed at first reading and used for later reference as needed.

A growing body of evidence shows that patients who are more inquisitive about, and actively involved in, their health care have better health outcomes and incur lower costs. As a result, many public and private health care organizations are educating people about their conditions and involving them more fully in making decisions about their care. I am following this trend.

I wrote this book with four aims. The first is to give you a broad overview of the different forms of cancer treatment and cancer research in simple terms. The second is to provide enough technical details so that you can use this book as a reference for questions about specific aspects of cancer. The third is to stimulate your interest in complementing your cancer care. The fourth is to encourage you as a layperson or as a professional to become an informed advocate for federal and private funding of research that focuses on preventing and treating the underlying causes of cancer.

I am a psychiatrist, not an oncologist. I am an academic physician who has written eight professional books and four books for laypersons. I do my own background research to be as sure as I can that my writing is on solid ground. For this book, I have obtained critical reviews of its technical contents by oncologists and cancer researchers.

I believe that my perspective on oncology from the outside and as a firsthand observer of the best that oncology has to offer gives me the advantage of being free from biases that inevitably accompany being an insider in any field. In this respect, I always have appreciated the views that outsiders have of my own field─psychiatry.

Intriguingly for me, when I talk with oncologists, I find that they turn to me as a psychiatrist and share their frustrations. You can imagine what it is like to be in a medical profession in which the most you can do is try to prolong lives in the face of a lethal disease. Fortunately, they find enough rewards in the patients they treat successfully to keep them going. My overall intent is to support their efforts to improve the outcomes of the patients they serve.

My hope is that my perspective as a person who lives with cancer and as a physician will be useful to you. As a caregiver, I know the ins and outs of receiving the diagnosis of cancer and all that its treatment involves. I know the relief that comes from success and the grief that comes from failure. I know what it is like to go through the process of dying from cancer. I know firsthand both the strengths and the weaknesses of our health care system in general and of cancer care specifically.

I wish that I could be writing about how we are winning the War on Cancer. Unfortunately, I must join the ranks of objective observers of the current state of cancer research and care and acknowledge that we have not yet won that War.

Why Aren’t We Winning the War on Cancer?
The sun rises and the sun sets. It seems like the sun rotates around the Earth. Cancer cells rise and are killed by surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. It seems like cancer is a disease.

The sun does not rotate around the Earth, and cancer is not a disease. The many forms of cancer cells are the products of the disease neoplasia, the process in the body that turns normal cells into cancer cells.

When the normal life and death cycles of our body cells go awry, unruly cells undergo neoplasia and become cancer cells. Although the forms of cancer cells vary widely, the underlying disease…neoplasia…is the same throughout the body. Neoplasia occurs when your body's immune system fails to recognize and destroy aberrant cells.

If the “War on Cancer” had become a “War on Neoplasia” when the latter was clearly identified as the process that produces cancer in the 1970s and 1980s, we could have had life-saving treatments for the many forms of cancer today.

For this reason, in 2011 the American Society of Clinical Oncology declared in its report Accelerating Progress Against Cancer that “cancer research and patient care could be vastly more targeted, more efficient and more effective. But this vision is possible only if we transform the way cancer research is conducted.” The National Cancer Institute Annual Plan and Budget Proposal for Fiscal Year 2012 was titled Cancer: Changing the Conversation.

On March 23, 2013, twenty-one oncologists pointed out in a New York Times editorial that “more than 1.6 million Americans will receive a diagnosis of cancer this year. The costs of their treatment are growing faster than all other areas of medicine. Doctors and patients recognize that this is unsustainable and that we need to change the way we deliver care.”

After decades of neglect, immunotherapy that strengthens the immune system finally was recognized appropriately at the 2013 American Association for Cancer Research meeting. Dr. Suzanne Topalian of Johns Hopkins University said that, despite the current dogma that cancer is a genetic disease, it also can be viewed as an immunologic disorder. She said, “In many ways the adaptive immune system is an ideal anti-cancer therapy.” She affirmed in 2013 a concept first advanced in 1957 by Dr. Frank Burnet and reiterated in the 1980s and 1990s.

The general public is not served well by those who point to increased five-year survival rates as indicating major progress in the cancer field. Millions of lives have been lost because of decades of misdirected and underfunded research.

A paradigm shift in the cancer field is needed based upon two fundamental principles of medicine: 1) do no harm (chemotherapy destroys normal cells and suppresses the immune system with debilitating and lethal side effects) and 2) base research and treatment on diseases not on their symptoms or signs. Cancer cells are signs of an underlying disease: neoplasia. The variety of factors in cells and their microenvironments that induce and that fail to block neoplasia should be the focus of research and treatment. Simply fighting cancer by killing cancer cells is not enough and is gravely misleading.

This book provides a comprehensive list of things you can do to take charge of your life with cancer, including complementing your cancer treatment and advocating adequate funding of cancer research and treatment focused on the underlying disease neoplasia.