Terminal Cancer Patient Blogs His Own Death from Chemo and Radiation Hell

If you want a very real, very sad look into what it's like to live with, and die from, cancer, take a look through Derek Miller's blog, which recorded his four-year battle with colorectal cancer, including his struggles with chemo and radiation.

I will warn you, it's very difficult to read.

Like Diane Sadovnikov, who undertook the unthinkable task of arranging adoptive parents for her own two children for after her death, and Leah Siegel, who tried to pack a lifetime of memories into the two years she had left, Derek Miller is another tragic example of the pain and sorrow that cancer continues to cause to millions of U.S. families.

Even with the latest technology and "advances" in medicine, cancer continues to kill people far before their time. And the current medical paradigm remains essentially clueless about the underlying causes of cancer, along with how to effectively treat them.

As a result, cancer rates are still on the rise and the disease is expected to kill more than 13 million people a year by 2030, almost double the number who died from the disease in 2008. Cancer has now surpassed heart disease as the number one killer of Americans between the ages of 45 and 74. The odds are now very high that you or someone you know has cancer, is dying or has already died from it.

Why Does Modern Medicine Largely Ignore the Underlying Causes of Cancer?

Cancer is, by and large, mostly a man-made disease, the tragic result of humans veering too far off course and avoiding health-sustaining diets and activities, while embracing a highly unnatural sedentary, stress-filled lifestyle with exposure to excess chemicals around every corner.

Among the primary culprits fueling our cancer epidemic are:

Pesticide- and other chemical exposures	Processed and artificial foods (plus the chemicals in the packaging)	Wireless technologies, dirty electricity, and medical diagnostic radiation exposure
Pharmaceutical drugs	Obesity, stress, and poor sleeping habits	Lack of sunshine exposure and use of sunscreens

This is clearly not an exhaustive list, as such a list would be exceedingly long. For more specifics on consumer products implicated as contributors to cancer, please review the Cancer Prevention Coalition's "Dirty Dozen" list.

I strongly believe that cancer rates are escalating because modern medicine is in no way, shape or form addressing these underlying causes of most cancers. Instead, most of the research is directed toward expensive drugs that target late stages of the disease and greatly pad the drug companies' wallets -- but simply do not prevent or "cure" cancer.

If ever there was an area in which an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure it is cancer. I strongly believe that if you are able to work your way up to the advanced health plan, you will virtually eliminate the risk of most cancers.

American Cancer Society Has Reckless, Perhaps Criminal, Record on Cancer Prevention

A lot of people put their faith in the American Cancer Society (ACS) and dutifully participate in its highly publicized National Breast Cancer Awareness Month campaign each year, which includes the widespread promotion of mammography screening.

Little do they realize that the ACS is doing precious little to combat cancer at best, and may actually hinder real progress at worst.

In a report titled AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY—More Interested In Accumulating Wealth Than Saving Lives, Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, plainly lays to bare the many conflicts of interest that hamper the effectiveness of this organization.

For example, the ACS has close financial ties to both makers of mammography equipment and cancer drugs. But that's just for starters. Other conflicts of interest include ties to, and financial support from, the pesticide-, petrochemical-, biotech-, cosmetics-, and junk food industries—the very industries whose products are the primary contributors to cancer!

Once you realize that these conflicts of interest are there, it becomes quite easy to understand why the ACS never addresses the environmental components of cancer, and why information about avoidable toxic exposures are so conspicuously absent from their National Breast Cancer Awareness campaigns.

The ACS, along with the National Cancer Institute, virtually exclusively focus on cancer research and diagnosis and the chemical treatment of cancer. Preventive strategies, such as avoiding chemical exposures, receive virtually no consideration at all.

Modern-Day Treatments Often Add More Pain and Suffering to Cancer Patients

Drugs, surgery and radiation are typically the primary recommendations offered by conventional physicians to treat cancer, and upon receiving a cancer diagnosis most people are willing to do just about anything to get better. This includes taking outrageously expensive and dangerous medications that offer little, if any, benefit.

One of the most recent glaring examples of this is Avastin, a drug used for metastatic breast cancer. Avastin, which costs about $8,000 a month and is one of the best-selling cancer drugs in the world, is now being phased out in the U.S. due to lack of effectiveness and dangerous side effects.

Chemo is another cancer treatment that frequently does more harm than good, although I doubt we'll see recommendations changing on its use anytime soon. Despite its reputation as the gold-standard in cancer treatment, chemotherapy has an average 5-year survival success rate of just over 2 percent for all cancers, according to a study published in the journal Clinical Oncology.

Another study, The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD), found that more than four in 10 patients who received chemotherapy toward the end of life experienced potentially fatal effects. And after reviewing data from over 600 cancer patients who died within 30 days of receiving treatment, it was found that chemotherapy hastened or caused death in 27 percent of those cases.

Chemotherapy drugs are, by their very nature, extremely toxic and typically do not work with your body to modulate and normalize its response to allow the cancer to resolve normally. And, they do absolutely nothing to address the cause of the cancer.

A typical, and potentially deadly, side effect of chemo is the destruction of the rapidly multiplying and dividing cells found in your:

• Bone marrow, which produces blood
• Digestive system
• Reproductive system
• Hair follicles

Natural approaches simply do not have the types of fatal side effects common with conventional cancer treatments because they work by optimizing your body's own natural healing capacities. If you or a loved one is currently struggling with cancer, I strongly suggest you watch my recent interview with Dr. Nick Gonzalez, a physician focused on alternative cancer treatment using a three-pronged nutritional approach.

But remember it is exponentially easier to prevent cancers than it is to treat them.

3 Must-Know Tips for Cancer Prevention

In the last 30 years the global cancer burden has doubled, and it will likely double again between 2000 and 2020, and nearly triple by 2030—unless people begin to take cancer prevention seriously. We CAN turn this trend around, but to do so the medical community must stop overlooking the methods that can actually have a significant impact.

For an in-depth discussion of cancer prevention tools that deserve your attention, be sure to read The War on Cancer: a Progress Report for Skeptics. I highlighted three advancements that have not yet been accepted by conventional medicine, but are extremely powerful cancer preventive tools nonetheless:

1. Avoid Fructose and Sugar

It's quite clear that if you want to avoid cancer, or are currently undergoing cancer treatment, you absolutely MUST avoid all forms of sugar -- especially fructose -- and this is largely due to its relation to insulin resistance.

According to Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, as much as 80 percent of all cancers are "driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells," Gary Taubes reports, adding:

"As it was explained to me by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it.

The more insulin, the better they do.

Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Some do both.

Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren't being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it."

Some cancer centers, such as the Cancer Centers of America, have fully embraced this knowledge and place their patients on strict low-sugar, low-grain diets. But conventional medicine in general has been woefully lax when it comes to highlighting the health dangers of this additive.

As a standard recommendation, I strongly advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day including fruits.

But for most people it would also be wise to limit your fructose from fruit to 15 grams or less, as you're virtually guaranteed to consume "hidden" sources of fructose if you drink beverages other than water and eat processed food.

2. Optimize Vitamin D

There's overwhelming evidence pointing to the fact that vitamin D deficiency plays a crucial role in cancer development. Researchers within this field have estimated that about 30 percent of cancer deaths -- which amounts to 2 million worldwide and 200,000 in the United States -- could be prevented each year simply by optimizing the vitamin D levels in the general population.

On a personal level, you can decrease your risk of cancer by MORE THAN HALF simply by optimizing your vitamin D levels with sun exposure. And if you are being treated for cancer it is likely that higher blood levels—probably around 80-90 ng/ml—would be beneficial.

If the notion that sun exposure actually prevents cancer is still new to you, I highly recommend you watch my one-hour vitamin D lecture to clear up any confusion. It's important to understand that the risk of skin cancer from the sun comes only from excessive exposure.

3. Exercise

If you are like most people, when you think of reducing your risk of cancer, exercise doesn't immediately come to mind. However, there is some fairly compelling evidence that exercise can slash your risk of cancer. One of the primary ways exercise lowers your risk for cancer is by reducing elevated insulin levels, which creates a low sugar environment that discourages the growth and spread of cancer cells.

For example, physically active adults experience about half the incidence of colon cancer as their sedentary counterparts, and women who exercise regularly can reduce their breast cancer risk by 20 to 30 percent compared to those who are inactive.

It's important to include a large variety of techniques in your exercise routine, such as strength training, aerobics, core-building activities, and stretching. Most important of all, however, is to make sure you include high-intensity, burst-type exercise, such as Peak 8.

These exercises activate your super-fast twitch muscle fibers, which can increase your body's natural production of human growth hormone. For detailed instructions, please see this previous article.

10 More Ways to Help Keep Cancer Away

Cancer is devastating far too many families and taking many way before their time. It's time to fight back and take control of your health by following the cancer-preventive lifestyle changes below.

1. Get appropriate amounts of animal-based omega-3 fats.
2. Get appropriate exercise. One of the primary reasons exercise works is that it drives your insulin levels down. Controlling insulin levels is one of the most powerful ways to reduce your cancer risks.
3. Eat according to your nutritional type. The potent anti-cancer effects of this principle are very much underappreciated. When we treat cancer patients in our clinic this is one of the most powerful anti-cancer strategies we have.
4. Have a tool to permanently erase the neurological short-circuiting that can activate cancer genes. Even the CDC states that 85 percent of disease is caused by emotions. It is likely that this factor may be more important than all the other physical ones listed here, so make sure this is addressed. My particular favorite tool for this purpose, as you may know, is the Emotional Freedom Technique.
5. Only 25 percent of people eat enough vegetables, so by all means eat as many vegetables as you are comfortable with. Ideally, they should be fresh and organic. Cruciferous vegetables in particular have been identified as having potent anti-cancer properties. Remember that carb nutritional types may need up to 300 percent more vegetables than protein nutritional types.
6. Maintain an ideal body weight.
7. Get enough high-quality sleep.
8. Reduce your exposure to environmental toxins like pesticides, household chemical cleaners, synthetic air fresheners and air pollution.
9. Reduce your use of cell phones and other wireless technologies, and implement as many safety strategies as possible if/when you cannot avoid their use.
10. Boil, poach or steam your foods, rather than frying or charbroiling them. Better yet eat as many of your foods raw as you can.