natural remedies a miracle????

[MJo]

Maybe it was a miracle for your sister, but I would hate to see desperate women turn down chemo aor rads and count on natural remedies for a miracle.

[Christine MH-UK]

Doh! Sorry, must be the herceptin brain thing. For some reason I thought that the turmeric and flaxseed had been instead of the taxol/herceptin. It could very well be the conventional treatment. Sometimes the conventional treatments work really well. I know someone with IBC who had a total response from just one round of FEC75, which is much weaker than the FECs they use now.

I know that there are concerns about combining turmeric and anthracyclines.

And I do worry about her2-positive patients who reject the standard treatment for their primary, treatable cancer. With recent studies showing that FEC halves the risk of recurrence over an older chemo and herceptin at least halving recurrence versus just FEC, the odds are that her2 positive cancer patients benefit from standard treatment.

[R.B.]

Risk reduction strategies.

Both "drug" treatments and risk reduction through diet have their place.

There are a significant number of trials (some of which I have posted on this site) that suggest very high levels of synergies between particular dietary factors in particular omega three (that is a part of my own wanders) and particular treatment regimes.

Fats are deemed of sufficient interest for a number of trials to be in process looking at DHA with various agents including low level COX as part of a "chemo" treatment.

When you start reading in depth you quickly come to realise how much inflence dietary factors have including the ability to alter the way we "express" our genes (if it were a receipe genes would be ingredients - it would be the quantity of ingedients available to you that you use to bake a perticular type of cake and depending how you use the ingedients you can get a huge variety of tastes textures etc), which genes can have very substantial impact in the body.

A very very great deal is still unknown on the impact of diet and drugs.

It is important to realise both the power of diet as a long term preventative, and the need for drugs to try and shock things back into shape, BUT it is important to ensure that we dont loose sight of trying to find out why we are seeing these dreadful increase in a range of "auto immune / inflamatory related" diseases at the expense of concentrating on the new and sexy and human constant weakness trough the ages to think this cure is it based on then perpective and knowledge - from mercury, aresenic, radium to restore male virility interferon... in retrospect they may all have a relevance but are not the ultimate answer.

Do not misunderstand me I amazed at what has been acheived, the huge mass of effort and work that is going on, the increases in terms of knowledge and treatments, and particularly of conditions caused by external agents, but everyday become aware how complex it all, is how interrelated, and how much we equally do not know particularly about the long term be that diet or drugs. Every day or so one is seeing new reports of long term consequences of diet and drugs.

There is no question diet is linked to health.

There is no question that medical advances have been of huge benifit.

RB

[julierene]

I hate to be rude, but things like this annoy me to no end because the poster has inadvertantly put so much emphasis on the alternative, that they seem to be claiming that these two natural ingredients have done all this miraculous work, rather than the wonderul chemo combination! This is one of the reasons I look at alternatives with a VERY skeptical eye.

My HER2 positive er/pr- very aggressive cancer was COMPLETELY disappeared from my liver, which had 3 lesions in it - after only 3 months. I didn't take flax seed and turmeric, it was the cisplatin/taxol/herceptin! It's a winning combination. As a matter a fact, one liver lesion came back after only being off of the combo for 3 months. It's a terrible thing. But the chemo treatment works. I have tried all the balancing act with my diet, and it just makes me mad that NONE of it works for me. I could give you my cancer history story, but it's too long, and none of it matters anyway, cause I have learned the hard way that the diet balancing act doesn't work for me.

I absolutely have a genetic issue. I have been told by one of the top specialists at St. Jude's that the gene problem can not be fixed yet. Until they can, I am at the mercy of my genetic faults.

It's almost like trying to tell people they can cure a person of Down's Syndrome if they just eat right.

[chrisy]

Laura,
I'm glad to hear your sister is doing so well and hope she continues to do great! You didn't say, but I assume that your sister is getting the chemo Taxol/Herceptin? This is a really powerful combo and, for me, delivered great results. So that was a good start in itself - my oncologist was certainly delighted, but not "astounded" when I had similar results.
It's tough for doctors to communicate a serious prognosis without sucking all the hope out of the patient. In your sister's case, how could the doctor put a time limit on it before she even began treatment??? In fact, women are living longer with such diagnoses and if things go well and you respond to treatment, you can increase survival by "a lot" over the statistics. Most stats do not even reflect the effect of newer, target treatments such as Herceptin.
That said, I also believe that the HEAVY dose of prayers has a lot to do with my response. Also, there is a lot of strong data on curcumin and Omega-3 fats, flaxseed, and other natural compounds, showing strong anticancer properties, so I do use these supplements and include such foods in my diet, hoping that these, along with Herceptin, will keep the beast at bay!
Thanks for your post, and I hope your sister continues to "astound" her doctor!

[heblaj01]

I do not know if curcumin is effective for breast cancer since only a few anecdotic cases have been reported.
One problem is poor absorption even when combined with Bioperine (an extract of black pepper) & short half life (about 2 to 4 hours).

Dissolving curcumin in fat or oil may improve absorption.

I am aware of one case of a women who was advise by Dr Bharat Aggarwal of MD Anderson to take 5g of curcumin three times a day.

He is one of the main researchers on curcumin.

MD Anderson has also undertaken the only trial on humans I am aware of for pancreatic cancer:



http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct/show/NCT00094445?order=2

Trial of Curcumin in Advanced Pancreatic Cancer

This study is currently recruiting patients.

Verified by M.D. Anderson Cancer Center June 2006

Study start: November 2004; Expected completion: June 2007

Last follow-up: June 2007; Data entry closure: June 2007

[R.B.]

I think it is important to keep things in perspective.

Cancer of all sorts involves many pathways.

A great deal is not know.

Some agents like fats work at very fundmental levels.

Curcumin is reported to be an anti inflamatory (COX blocker). Like many food it may have multiple effects.

COX 2 pathways are reported to have a role in cancer. The COX pathways are very complex and what are are often commonly referred to as COX blockers may and do work on different areas within that frame work.

A number of studies are looking at low level cox blockers as part of a risk reduction treatement strategy.

BUT it is equally important to look at those things in our diet that were around a very long time before plant and date back to the veyr begining such as intake of fats and sugars (see posts on omega three sixes and sucrose) as well as the more commonly discussed topics.

From everthing I have read our departure from our dietary roots in very large margins in tems of fat intake amount and balance, refined sugars particularly fructose, along with other often cited factors are magors factors to be considered in terms of a risl reductio strategy.

This is an abstract from an exellent article which I recommend as a read.

Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century1,2
Loren Cordain, S Boyd Eaton, Anthony Sebastian, Neil Mann, Staffan Lindeberg, Bruce A Watkins, James H O’Keefe and Janette Brand-Miller

"In the United States and most Western countries, diet-related chronic diseases represent the single largest cause of morbidity and mortality. These diseases are epidemic in contemporary Westernized populations and typically afflict 50–65% of the adult population, yet they are rare or nonexistent in hunter-gatherers and other less Westernized people. Although both scientists and lay people alike may frequently identify a single dietary element as the cause of chronic disease (eg, saturated fat causes heart disease and salt causes high blood pressure), evidence gleaned over the past 3 decades now indicates that virtually all so-called diseases of civilization have multifactorial dietary elements that underlie their etiology, along with other environmental agents and genetic susceptibility. Coronary heart disease, for instance, does not arise simply from excessive saturated fat in the diet but rather from a complex interaction of multiple nutritional factors directly linked to the excessive consumption of novel Neolithic and Industrial era foods (dairy products, cereals, refined cereals, refined sugars, refined vegetable oils, fatty meats, salt, and combinations of these foods). These foods, in turn, adversely influence proximate nutritional factors, which universally underlie or exacerbate virtually all chronic diseases of civilization: 1) glycemic load, 2) fatty acid composition, 3) macronutrient composition, 4) micronutrient density, 5) acid-base balance, 6) sodium-potassium ratio, and 7) fiber content. However, the ultimate factor underlying diseases of civilization is the collision of our ancient genome with the new conditions of life in affluent nations, including the nutritional qualities of recently introduced foods."


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...&dopt=Abstract