On palliative chemotherapy and "false hope"

Almost a year ago I posted an Open Letter to Oncologists in which I detailed our experiences with energy healing and terminal cancer and advocated offering patients who could not be cured with conventional methods the energy healing option. My reasoning was that in our experience bioenergy healing was better at palliation than chemo, offering improved quality of life without any debilitating side effects.

There are many cancer patients who come to the point in their treatment where their doctors tell them that they have run out of curative options and that further chemotherapy and radiation would only serve palliative ends. In other words, when the cancer gets bad enough, treatment is offered to shrink the tumour to make it interfere less with the body's functioning.

But now comes research from the Dana-Farber Cancer institute that shows that patients who receive such treatment are more often than not unclear about its purpose. A research article published in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled "Patients' Expectations About Effects of Chemotherapy for Advanced Cancer" shows that a large percentage of terminal cancer patients surveyed (69% of those with lung cancer and 81% of those with colorectal cancer) were not aware that the treatment they were receiving was meant to be palliative and not at all likely cure them. The rate of misunderstanding was higher among patients who rated their communication with their doctor very favourably.

I find it highly ironic that the same medical establishment that accuses alternative therapists of selling "false hope" and "snake oil" finds itself in the position of inadvertently doing just that. At the same time I can see the difficulty of making clear to patients that the treatments they will be receiving, which will likely make them feel quite awful, have no curative purpose. But perhaps it is time for the medical establishment to take off its blinkers and start looking at other therapies that may serve this patient population better than chemo.

Update November 13: Just ran across an informative article entitled "Palliative Chemo: When Enough is Too Much" in Clinical Oncology. Well worth the read on this topic.

Follow up to "Open Letter to Oncologists"

Recently I received an e-mail from a fellow energy healer, Reiki Master Alice Langholt. She and a colleague have been treating a woman with inoperable breast and bone cancer who had been bed-ridden for six weeks. The patient was exhausted and in pain, unable even to sit up on her own. With treatment she sat up, experienced more energy, developed better colour, then was eventually able to get up and to get around with a walker and even walked downstairs with the help of her physical therapist for the first time since July. She has been receiving bioenergetic support in the form of Reiki, Quantum Touch, or cranio-sacral therapy three to four times a week. Alice has also taught both her and her husband Reiki so they can do treatments on their own. While Reiki will likely not halt her cancer, for now she is feeling better.

In an earlier post I spoke directly to oncologists advocating bioenergy therapies for patients who in their view have come to the end of the road of curative treatment and were now looking at hospice and palliation. I pointed to our experience which showed that with energy healing the qualitative daily experience of life could be considerably improved for such patients, sometimes even bringing physical improvement.

Bioenergetic support makes sense for cancer patients in any phase of their illness. Many hospitals now offer Reiki or Therapeutic Touch, in most cases free. In most cities there are competent Reiki practitioners and teachers and there is now a growing number of Bengston Method and Domancic Method practitioners throughout North America. One single appointment can show a cancer patient what these therapies can do for his or her well-being.

"Iatrogenic disease": the view from up close

Here is a frightening statistic: an article published in the year 2000 in the Journal of the American Medical Association calculated "that between 230,000 and 284,000 deaths occur each year in the US due to iatrogenic causes, or physician error, making this number three in the leading causes of death for all Americans."* That's a quarter million Americans dying each year due to hospital mix-ups, adverse drug reactions from prescriptions drugs, hospital-acquired infections and botched surgeries. Quite a number to swallow: the equivalent of about five hundred 747s crashing every year, killing all passengers on board. And this number does not even included those are not killed by the error, but "only" maimed.

[Now you can also read "Iatrogenic disease - Part 2"]
My mother was only 51 when she died a few short hours after her first radiation treatment for a recurrence of breast cancer. Her tests showed her to be cancer free when her oncologist, whom she said she "trusted with her life", suggested "prophylactic radiation". She was on Tamoxifen, implicated in causing blood clots, and had to have the radiation rescheduled because her chest cavity had been "mismeasured". A second such mismeasurement could have led to radiation burns in her lungs, edema, and death. Yet there was no inquest into her unexpected and untimely death.

The mother of a friend of mine has had repeated, and devastating, experiences with iatrogenic disease. She was already suffering from Alzheimer's when she was diagnosed with a particularly deadly form of lung cancer. Her doctors were 99% sure she had this cancer and recommended surgery. So deadly was the cancer believed to be that they recommended against doing a biopsy. She had the "cancerous" lung removed. She then went into full-blown dementia as a result of the stress of this horribly invasive surgery. When the lung was sent to the lab, it turned out that what the doctors believed to have been cancer was in fact scar tissue from a bout of pneumonia. There was no cancer.

Fast forward a few years. Once again a doctor saw something he suspected to be cancer; this time skin cancer. He proposed doing multiple biopsies. The woman's daughter raised objections, which the doctor overrode. Two days after the biopsies were done, the elderly patient became septic. No antibiotic seemed able kill the bacteria raging through her system. By the time the infection was finally brought under control, the patient had lost the will to live and passed away.

Not all these patients die; some are "merely" maimed for life. While they don't become part of the statistics on medical error causing death, these instances cost untold amounts of money to an already overburdened system. First there is the cost of the initial, often unnecessary, intervention, then there is the cost of trying to fix the mistake, and then there is, in the case of younger patients, the economic loss when the victim becomes so disabled that he or she is no longer able to work.

And more important than cost is the burden of suffering, borne largely by the elderly. In my mother's case the judgment of a doctor ended up costing her her life, but at least her death was quick and relatively painless. My friend's mother's case became a textbook example of what Bill Bengston bluntly calls "torturing [the elderly] on the way out."

Simply put, what is the benefit of doing a biopsy for basal cell carcinoma on an elderly woman suffering from Alzheimer's? What is the benefit of doing a double mastectomy on an 86-year-old patient with a slow-growing cancer who then dies of a stroke less than a year later? How many painful procedures should the elderly have to endure? Shouldn't we ask, how necessary is this? Shouldn't we do a humane cost/benefit analysis as in "how much suffering is this going to cause? how likely is this to harm/benefit the patient?" This is a discussion that should take place in every single case, possibly in the presence of a medical ethicist or a professional who specializes in elder care. Many doctors are way too "intervention happy". If the only tool you have is a hammer, then you see everything as a nail. If intervention is the only tool in your toolkit, that's all you will do. Family members can also buy into the medical mystique and believe that more intervention is better, until their loved one comes to harm. In many cases palliation and alternative therapies offer better outcomes.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010 showed that lung cancer patients who received palliative care along with conventional treatment lived longer and had better quality of life than patients who received conventional cancer treatment alone. The study "showed that people who received the palliative support services were less likely to choose aggressive, and often futile, measures to prolong their lives." In contrast I recently heard a doctor say in an interview on CBC that he sees more and more advanced cancer patients going from chemotherapy straight to the ER, and then from there to the morgue, as many doctors prescribe more and more aggressive treatments. This is definitely "torturing them on the way out", and it's questionable how necessary it is.

Obviously no doctor or other medical professional does a procedure with an intent to injure. But the truth of the matter is that cookie-cutter medical protocols applied or mis-applied to unique human bodies will result in at least some of them being harmed when things go wrong. Should we continue to accept this "collateral damage" as part of the business of practicing medicine in North America?

Postscript Sept. 26: And now see this NBC article, which estimates that only about one percent of events that cause harm to patients are reported by hospitals and asks why patients themselves are reluctant to report medical errors.

And also this: The Drugs Don't Work, an alarming expose of how drugs are approved.

And now the medical perspective:

Bioenergy therapies and mainstream medicine

Two news items came my way recently offering encouragement that bioenergy therapies are gaining acceptance in the mainstream.

The first was a headline in Science News proclaiming that "Touch Therapy Helps Reduce Pain, Nausea in Cancer Patients, Study Suggests". The study, conducted by the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center and involving 159 patients, showed that Jin Shin Jyutsu, a form of acupressure similar to shiatsu, lessened the side effects of treatment, with patients reporting significant decreases in stress, pain, and nausea.

The second news item came from the Columbia University Department of Surgery no less, announcing that Dr. Sheldon Marc Feldman, Chief of the Division of Breast Surgery in New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, would be participating in an upcoming Reiki conference. Dr. Feldman (like his famous colleague Dr. Mehmet Oz before him) introduced healers into the operating room and has seen first hand the benefits that Reiki offers to his breast cancer patients.

This is huge news. I've been advocating for this kind of integrative approach for the benefit of patients for a while now (see my "Open Letter to Oncologists", posted last November).

Cats and the Domancic Method of Energy Healing

The last time I wrote about cats and energy healing, I raised the ire of some skeptics on Twitter, who proceeded to poke fun at me about the cosmetic effects of the treatment not offering any kind of proof for the efficacy of energy healing. This time I have something more concrete to offer: two cats, one with a case of hyper-thyroidism and the other with uncontrollable diabetes due to a benign pituitary tumour.

I treated both cats with the Domancic Method. Cat number one, the one with hyper-thyroidism, doesn't like energy healing. Aim it her way, and she'll be gone in a flash. Her response to the Domancic Method was interesting, to say the least. She growled. The first session she started growling the moment I began. She bristled and growled like a dog but stayed put. The second session she started growling a little later. The third, she didn't begin growling until towards the end, and the fourth, she didn't growl at all. What amazed me was that she stayed put. She didn't like it, but didn't run away, even though she had the option.

Two weeks after the fourth session, her owner called me to tell me that her thyroid had normalized. All her symptoms (over-vocalizing, excessive grooming, not eating) cleared. The improvement was lasting.

Cat number two apparently developed diabetes, which could not be controlled with insulin. His blood sugar was all over the place. I tried the Domancic diabetes protocol on him, and it didn't work. Although this would not in the least surprise the skeptics, it surprised me: Domancic protocols are usually quite effective on pets. Then the cat's vet finally came up with a diagnosis: the irregular blood sugar was caused by a benign pituitary tumour. She said the only way to control the condition would be radiation, which the cat's owner opted not to do. I then switched the cat to the Domancic protocol for tumours, and four series of treatments later, his blood sugar stabilized. This was about two months ago and it's still holding.

Years ago I worked on a cat that had a brain tumour that affected her nasal passages and caused her to sound like Darth Vader as she breathed. I treated her with the Bengston Method. After every treatment her breathing was normal for about three days. It quite amazed me. Animals don't do "placebo effect". If something works on them, it's not because they have some kind of magical belief in its effectiveness but because it really works.

An update about the Domancic Method

Zoran Hochstatter, Zdenko Domancic's authorized representative in the West, has been quite busy in the three years since I first learned the method from him. He has taught students in the U.S., in London, England, and in Toronto, Canada. He has authorized a level-3 student in Toronto and another in London to hold Domancic clinics. He has also written a book entitled Three Chairs about the method and is now working with Dr. Craig Oster, an 18-year ALS survivor and supporter of alternative healing, who has a website called The Healers that is a veritable who-is-who of the future of healing.

This is what Dr. Oster had to say about his experience with the Domancic Method:

The world needs to know that IT IS ABSOLUTELY NONSENSE & FALSEHOOD TO CLAIM THAT PEOPLE DIAGNOSED WITH ALS DIAGNOSIS MAY NOT HAVE REMARKABLE IMPROVEMENTS!

My work with Zoran this week using the Domancic Method of Bioenergy Therapy has been remarkable, with improved speech and my breathing best over the last 3 1/2 years.

"Has cancer been misunderstood?"

I just ran across a brilliant article entitled "Has Cancer Been Completely Misunderstood?" It cites a relatively recent hypothesis which postulates that cancer cells are not random genetic mutations, but evolutionary throwbacks to a time when cells were undifferentiated and when the only available survival response for a colony of cells was unchecked growth. According to the researchers,

Cancer is not a random bunch of selfish rogue cells behaving badly, but a highly-efficient pre-programmed response to stress, honed by a long period of evolution.

In short, if you stress the human organism sufficiently, you will awaken primal genetic programming that causes cancer to develop in individual cells as a survival adaptation. This programming developed about a billion years ago, at a time when the earth was experiencing much harsher environmental conditions than we have today, so these cells can survive in low-oxygen environments and ultimately thumb their noses at anything medicine can throw at them in the way of chemotherapy or radiation.

This new hypothesis completely reverses the current view of cancer. Rather than being an unhealthy occurrence within a healthy body, it is an archaic survival response to conditions that threaten the body, i.e., an effort to reestablish health. The author of the article concludes

we need to shift our thinking away from the view that cancer is something unnatural that happens to us, to one where we see that cancer is something natural our body does to survive unnatural conditions. Change and improve those conditions, and you do more to change cancer than [by] attacking it as if you were fighting a war against an enemy.

As my summary is quite sketchy, I heartily recommend reading the article in full.