“I don’t believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance human life. As, fast as we find ways to extend it we are inventing ways to shorten it.”
Christiaan Barnard
Low Expectations?
After a life’s journey, a career, family, children and now, grandchildren. You have looked forward to a time where you could take the time to do the things that have been put aside, to pursue dreams that were not possible before retirement. Now, having finally reached the time to pursue those dreams, you are struck down by a menacing disease, a disease that has silently progressed, undiagnosed, for many years.
Your body has betrayed you. Years of chronic inflammatory injury has manifested into a debilitating disease, or worse, a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Regardless of your physician’s good intentions, he or she must conform the rules established for his or her specific specialty. These practice guidelines are established by organizations established for each medical specialty. The guidelines conform to standards and recommendations consistent with government oversight organizations. Additionally, your physician’s decisions are limited by approved treatments and medications that are reimbursed by government programs (Medicare, Medicaid, Veteran’s Administration) and private insurance companies. If you physician strays from accepted norms of medical practice, he or she can by sanctioned and disciplined by their own medical association, not receive payment for services, be exposed to litigation or be audited and fined for improperly billing for unapproved procedures.
So, when you receive the bad news from your physician, understand that your physician is a product of a well-established culture, a hierarchy of authority. For far too many diseases and cancers, your physician will tell you that there is not much hope for controlling your disease, the prognosis is not good, your life will be shortened, quality of life diminished. There is really nothing medicine can do to cure your disease. You can only hope to extend your life or attempt to reduce symptoms.
Regarding cancer, it is obvious that when “hope” is the most common word heard, we truly exist in a world of medical failure.
You deserve more. You deserve your life. Your family, your friends, the people that depend upon you, that love you, do not deserve to have you taken from their lives. The question is, knowing what we now know about disease and cancer, can you, perhaps, expect more than “hope” for extending survival, or to retain a minimal quality of life?
In the last several years, not hundreds, but thousands of peer-reviewed research articles have been published that have redefined our understanding of chronic diseases and cancers. Genetic research has discovered and validated cell signaling pathways, the cellular mechanics of disease processes. These processes are adaptable, reversible. And the mechanisms of disease are now more clearly understood. Cancer is no longer a mystery. Its signature is altered cell metabolism.
“Recently, it has been shown that resveratrol prevents the recruitment of DNMT1 to the BRCA-1 promoter and induces silencing in MCF-7 breast cancer cells (48).”
Epigenetics: A New Link Between Nutrition and Cancer, G Supic, et al., Nutrition and Cancer, 2013
“Rather than being participators in these processes, as are genes and proteins, the metabolites produced are sentinels of “what is happening” in normal physiology or pathophysiology (disease), for example the metabolite changes that occur in response to cancer or toxicity.”
New Opportunities from the Cancer Metabolome, OA Aboud, et al.,Clinical Chemistry, 2013