The Intelligent Treatment Approach For The Patient Diagnosed With Any Cancer – Part 2

By:  Carlos M. Garcia, M.D.

Rules of Medicine:

1. Do no harm!
2. Doctors cannot cure, but patients can heal
3. A physician’s function is to help the patient’s innate ability to heal
4. A successful bond between practitioner and patient facilitates the desired outcome
5. Medicine is an art not a science because people are unique
6. Medical treatment approach should be designed for the individual patient, not vice versa

Have you ever wondered why traditional medicine needs to have a diagnosis? The reason is that doctors are not trained to treat patients, they are trained to treat a diagnosis. Thus, the focus of traditional medicine is the diagnosis and that dictates the protocols used and that is determined by the billing codes.  The problem here is they are not addressing the underlying cause that resulted in the diagnosis.

In Part 2 of this series, we are going to look at how traditional medicine approaches cancer and why I believe it is not the best approach for patients.

My Observations: Medicine is the second largest industry in America. Ever since medicine was permitted to direct market to the American general public, there has been a slow, methodical, targeted indoctrination of the general populous that illness is normal and to be expected.  Additionally, I believe the idea of cures is being shelved in exchange for the belief that only chronic consumption of pharmaceuticals is the path for longevity. It is almost un-American to be healthy.

There is a push to limit and control our choices, but let us take a deep breath and look at some interesting observations.  When I was conceived in 1954, pregnant women drank, smoked, and partied and the vast majority of these babies were unaffected. People survived infections and illness without drugs, vaccines or technology. People actually interacted with one another without washing their hands and applying hand sanitizer.  These practices are virtually unheard of in today’s world, treatment approach.  We have been effectively programed to fear everything as a potential threat to our health and, as a result, our bodies have been exposed to nothing.

Your immune system is what keeps you healthy, not the traditional doctors or the drugs and vaccines they push.  When you are exposed to bacteria, viruses and germs, this is a chance for your immune system to attack it.  In doing so, you build up immunity to it in the event you are exposed to it in the future.  If you don’t allow your immune system to do the job it is designed to do, you leave it and yourself defenseless.

You probably have realized by now that I am not your traditional medical doctor nor do I believe in treating a diagnosis, especially when it is cancer.  The following is my view on traditional medicine.  I come to these conclusions based on my medical training, my traditional and holistic medical background, on my personal experiences and through my patients’ experiences.

1. Treatment Approach Focus: diagnosis based protocol – mainstream medicine, through billing codes, does not value the patient’s participation. Correction, the patient’s participation is limited to arriving on time and doing what he or she is told to do, preferably with little questioning. What the patient thinks or does is marginalized in this treatment approach since the sole focus of mainstream medicine is the eradication of cancer at all cost. Additionally, the keystone narrative is that the doctor through drugs (chemotherapy), procedures (surgery) or technology (radiation) is the patient’s only hope for a cure. Nevertheless, advertisers are now beginning to push narrative that cancer is a chronic, incurable, malady, for which chronic use of chemotherapy is the only way to prolong your life.
2. Diet: Eat whatever you want and consume as many calories as possible. They feel that caloric intake is more valuable to treatment approach outcome than a quality diet of organic whole foods. It is common for patients treated in world class cancer institutions to be counseled on the erroneous belief that diet, including the consumption of sugar, will not affect their ability to conquer cancer. Nothing could be further from the truth! A simple question to any oncologist will prove this point. Why does the P.E.T., positronic emission test, scan use a glucose based molecule as the carrier to light up cancer cells so they are visible?  The answer is that cancer has an affinity for sugar but they will not tell you that. It is not uncommon for oncology services to offer cola, candies, donuts and other simple sugar laden food products and snacks to their patients who are receiving chemotherapy. Treatment Approach.
3. Hospital-based nutritionists: While hospitals do employ nutritionists, I believe they do not offer sound recommendations to the cancer patients. Certain pharmaceutically sourced oral nutrition products that are billable, i.e. Boost and Ensure, are provided to patients. These products are very high in simple sugars, thus harmful to the patient as it feeds the cancer. It appears to me that their nutritional advice is limited to insurance reimbursable products versus introducing and educating them to organic alkaline meals. I suspect that if there was a reimbursement code for nutritional education, hospitals and private clinics would jump on that as well.
4. Surgery: regrettably an all too common story is that a full body work up is done postoperatively. There appears to be a rush to ‘cut body parts’ when a cancer is diagnosed. Let’s take an example: a lumpectomy is recommended for a woman with a malignant breast lesion. Breast cancers regrettably have a propensity to metastasize, spreading to bones, lungs, liver and brain. However, often a lumpectomy is performed prior to a full body P.E.T. scan that can confirm the extent of the disease progression. A full medical history is imperative before undergoing surgery. There is a measurement for this activity, the higher the S.U.V., standard uptake values, the more activity. I normally order a P.E.T. scan from the skull to mid-thigh, this provides a base line which I think is important for most patients. For my wife, I would order the P.E.T. scan prior to any intervention. Why? What is the purpose of the lumpectomy if there is/are metastasis? If lymph nodes are involved, or positive, i.e. elevated SUV, you are stage four (iv) and a lumpectomy will not benefit her but may, instead, aggravate the growth rate of the other sites.

When it comes to pancreatic cancers, pancreaticoduodenectomy or Whipple procedure, is the intervention most often discussed. This procedure involves the removal of part of the stomach, duodenum, gallbladder, and part of the pancreas.  The stomach is then reattached to the small intestine and the remaining part of pancreas to another part of the small intestine, as is the common bile duct. The procedure completely alters the patient’s ability to digest food properly. Normally the amount of pancreatic secretions as well as bile is determined at the junction of the stomach, pancreas, liver and gallbladder in the duodenum. The Whipple places the liver and pancreas at a different location from the emptying of the stomach contents. The addition of acid neutralizing and, digestive enzymes and bile to the stomach treated food is out of sync with the digestive sequence.

There are natural ways to mediate this problem, however, most patients are unaware of them. I have met many patients who underwent this procedure and neither the surgeon or the G.I. doctor informed them about these consequences or how to manage them. This is what I often reference as body part medicine.  Traditional medicine is compartmentalized and disjointed. Each doctor addresses his/her organ or system and ignores the rest.

In Part 3 of this series, I will discuss how I approach cancer and why I believe it offers the patient real and lasting results.