Comment by Aphool Imnaught on 29th May 2010
Bear with me. I speak as a cancer survivor who chose as my option to turn away from modern medicine. I weighed the odds. It was easier to opt to tap into the collective wisdom of many thousands of years of observation by ancient traditional medicine, versus a couple of hundred years of conventional medicine, which freely admits it cures almost nothing. To me there was no contest. My problem with the western approach to cancer is what I call the "time share" approach. One is expected to strike a deal with the pharmaceutical model, to "buy more time" from one's so called "inevitable" end, a trade off rife with decided risks. One is asked to trade in the current condition of cancer for the increased risk of secondary conditions caused by the treatment.
But is cancer necessarily a death sentence? Maybe in the west, where the pervasive meme is that the "C" word means terminal. Not in China, however. China has millions of cancer veterans who meet at anti-cancer "Paradise Clubs" regularly. This way those newly diagnosed with cancer may mingle & talk with those who have survived for many decades.
Read "Building A Jade Screen" by Victoria's gifted TCM doctor, Dr. Zhu, who is trained in Western medicine but prefers the TCM approach.
Suzanne Somers' book "Knockout" is a must read as well for anyone who knows anyone with cancer.
And the best video around is Crazy Sexy Cancer, which gives one a real sense of grounded optimism about one's cancer management options.
All of these sources are enlightening & change one's entire perspective completely. Not for nothing did the Somers book climb to the top of the New York book sales list. People are literally dying to hear what is out there besides western standard-of-care, one-size-fits-all treatments.
Doctors are legally, if not morally, obliged to offer a pharmaceutical based, assembly line approach, one which almost invariably ends with that by now infamous obituary line "s/he lost his battle with cancer....".

My own personal experience has been that cancer seems to be a very serious infection, likely fungal in nature. Blood slides for candida, for instance, are indistinguishable from blood slides for cancer.
While western medicine largely tends to view cancer as an invading enemy, TCM apparently sees cancer as a logical manifestation of one's own systemic imbalance which in turn invites dis-ease.
I also noted that my own cancer responded dramatically to what was once called by intuitive western 19th century doctors a "medical miracle", namely plain ordinary garden variety iodine or even simple seaweed, which has created extraordinarily low rates of cancer in Japan. I refer here not to drugstore tincture of iodine, but rather to a compounding pharmacy bottle of Lugol's 5% iodine. The recommended approach (iodine4health,com) is to paint one's lymph nodes daily & drink one drop in 8 oz water (through a straw to avoid teeth stains), 5 days a week, rest for 2 days. Iodine insufficiency is epidemic, a condition underlying many illnesses. The thyroid is not called the master gland for nothing.
This is done in complimentary conjunction w/ a anti-candida diet, & w/ a balanced diet of non processed (& at least half raw) food, blending fruit & green vegetables in a whole food blender (rawfamily.com), + Chinese herbal treatment + regular acupuncture. This approach gives one energy & changes everything about how one feels. It makes solid sense, is affordable & effective &, at least in my own case, truly paid off. Better still, this support approach is completely non invasive. Western medical research has known since 1985 that many invasive procedures, even simple diagnostic ones, can metastasize cancer. From my perspective, western medicine tends to examine the wrong end of the creature, so to speak, using a "war" model involving aggressive "attack", rather than using an immune system support model involving gentle balance, natural, unprocessed, SUGAR FREE food as medicine, simple meditation & truly gifted treatment TCM doctor skills. Sadly, many either see this as frighteningly foreign &/or wait until such common sense alternatives are much slower to turn around the imbalance that is cancer. An ounce of prevention can correct cancer. So can green smoothies!
Perhaps it might be better to raise money directly for cancer patients themselves, instead of for those official agencies which have been collecting money which mostly seems to have found no cure and made no discernible change in decades using allopathic one-size-fits-all pharmaceutical methodologies. That way this brave woman, like many others, if so inclined, could exercise the option to seek out much needed antidotes offered by knowledgeable complimentary medicine, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM. This offers support to the immune system. Otherwise patients can become compromised by chemicals like chemo, which can create sensitivities to the chemical or resistance to its usefulness with repeat use.