Every time you see a conventional doctor, ask questions on prevention, nutrition, and lifestyle. Tell your doctor that you expect him or her to take the time to get to know you and discuss your health goals. A quote attributed to Hippocrates says, “It is more important to know what kind of person has a disease than to know what kind of disease a person has.”
We have a right to self-determination. You may ask your doctor what the alternatives are to conventional treatment. Your doctor should assist you with reviewing all the options that science offers. Ask your doctor for a synergy of action between natural and conventional treatment to reduce the toxicity associated with chemotherapy. If your doctor says that such a thing does not exist, give him or her a copy of this book.
Ask how normal cells will be protected from the side effects of your treatment. Ask explicitly how the removing or killing of cancer cells will affect normal cells. If the doctor measures success by the size of the tumor with CT scans or PET scans and offers a chemotherapy treatment, ask for studies showing an overall improvement of length and quality of life. According to the final results of a large, randomized clinical trial presented at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), patients who received the chemotherapy drug Gemcitabine after surgery for pancreatic cancer lived two months longer than patients who had surgery alone.
Ask about cancer stem cells, those 1 percent to 5 percent of cancer cells that will resist conventional treatment and can metastasize. If cancer stem cells resist chemotherapy and radiation, what will destroy them? Ask about the foreseeable consequences of killing “regular” cancer cells, while leaving out cancer stem cells. Doing so merely kills their competition and allows them to flourish.
Ask your doctor how to protect your healthy tissues during radiotherapy, and how to maintain your platelets during chemotherapy. If you are advised not to take supplements during chemo or radiation treatments, be specific and ask your doctor for scientific evidence of any negative effects of those supplements when taken with these therapies.