Breast Cancer - A Miracle Journey

~ Dr Doris Brownlee, Katoomba, NSW, Australia ~

I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in July 2003. From the outset, I have pursued a treatment path based on the principle “first do no harm”, focusing on fixing the underlying contributory factors, such as hormonal imbalance and strengthening my immune system. I was already into supplementation in a big way and in the week of diagnosis found out about bio-identical hormone therapy. So I have been using progesterone cream and more recently estriol cream.

The original breast lump was quite small so I had a lumpectomy and axillary clearance - 1 out of 22 nodes was affected. I decided not to have chemotherapy or radiotherapy at that stage. 15 months later I discovered a lymph node in my neck. For the last 2 years I have been dealing with this supraclavicular node recurrence. I did have a course of chemotherapy when this first appeared - this put me into remission but only for 4 months, and it supressed my white cell count for over 12 months. I also took Arimidex for 2 months on two occasions but had side effects and no apparent benefit, and have decided not to use any synthetic homrone products anymore.

Since April 2006 I have been working with Dr Joachim Fluhrer at ‘Your Health’ in Manly. ‘Your Health’ also have a clinic in Melbourne . Dr Fluhrer and his colleagues are integrative medical pracitioners - they combine conventional with complementary therapies, and their focus, like mine, is on supporting the body to restore itself to health. Most conventional cancer treatments negatively affect our own repair and healing mechanisms and fail to address the underlying cause of the cancer. Integrative practitioners focus on the whole system, not just the cancer - in my case for example, I had to sort out my allergy problems an indication that my immune system was focussing in the wrong place.

Dr Fluhrer started me on intravenous vitamin C. This brought my white cell count to normal for the first time since chemo and helped me to feel a lot better. However, I think I started this a bit too late and between May and July this year the tunour mass in my neck doubled in size and started to cause circulation problems. So Dr Fluhrer recommended that I consider hyperthermia. I went to Germany in August and spent 4 weeks at Klinik St Georg. I had hyperthemia, electrochemical therapy, and lots of iv therapy to stimulate my immune system. This stopped the tumour in its tracks and restored my circulation but on CT scan the tumour size had not changed. Dr Fluhrer recommended that I continue with the hyperthermia until we get tumour size regression. So in November I went to another clinic in Guangzhou China and had two weeks of treatment. I have only just returned. In Guangzhou I also had local and whole body hyperthermia, various iv therapies (including with traditional chinese medicine herbs) and I also had whole body ozone therapy.

Both facilities are excellent. The doctors in Guangzhou have less experience (they have only recently started hyperthermia) but they seem to be very knowledgeable and I felt that their local hyperthermia machine (made in China) was more effective that the one in Germany (Oncotherm). From hygiene, medical treatment perspective, the Guangzhou facility is impeccable. The whole body ozone therapy (which I was reluctant to have at first, and only agreed to after quite a lot of research) has been particularly effective I think. It’s too early yet to know if the tumour mass has shrunk but I had started getting some lymphedema in the left arm and breast before I went, and these have settled.

Obviously I don’t know exactly where you are at in your thinking about your treatment, so perhaps it would be helpful if I just share some of the principles I have used to deal with this condition, and that might give you an idea about next steps for yourself.

Principles

• First do no harm - to this end, I would suggest that you work with an integrative medical practitioner (apart from the doctors at Your Health, you can find other doctors who practice in this way by going onto the website of the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association at www.aima.net.au). Also most of Cath’s doctors would be at least partly integrative, that’s why they use bio-identical hormone therapy, not synthetic.
• Restore the body’s natural defence and healing mechanisms. This may involve sorting out gastrointestinal issues (80% of our immune system cells are in the gut and any gastrointestinal problems are likely to be affecting the immune system); reducing inflammation; dealing with allergies; and stimulating the right kind of immune system function eg natural killer cell function.
• Dealing with emotional distress. This is allied to immune system function but it is bigger than that and deserves separate consideration. I would never have described myself as “dis”stressed, but I have finally realised how driven I was. I always felt I had to do more, achieve more, make my life worthwhile. I also had big issues from childhood and my first marriage which I thought I had handled but have only recently recently realised that I just buried them. In this context, one of the most useful resources for me has been Dr Shivani Goodman’s book ‘Nine Steps For Reversing Or Preventing Cancer And Other Diseases’ published by New Page Books in 2004. Dr Goodman (who is a psychologist) also had breast cancer, and she put herself into remission after the third recurrence with bone metastases. She has remained in remission for over 10 years so far, when she was told by conventional practitioners that she was terminal in 1995. The material she teaches is based on mind-body medicine and helps people address subconscious and unconscious issues. This is critical. As she says: cancer is a signpost that means things need to change.
• Address the underlying cause(s): breast cancer is a hormonal tumour. In most cases the contributing cause is an imbalance between estrogen and progesterone. If you have not read the book ‘What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Breast Cancer’ by Dr Lee and Dr Zava, then I would certainly recommend that you do this and that you have a urine test done to check your 2:16 hydroxy estrogen metabolite ratio. If the 16 hydroxy is too high then your underlying hormonal environment is still promoting breast cancer. That is one of the main reasons the disease recurs. Other hormonal problems often include low DHEA and low melatonin. I supplement with both of these - I take 20mg of melatonin per day (the side benefit is excellent sleep!) and I take 17-keto DHEA which is safe in breast cancer because it won’t affect your 16 hydroxy metabolites.

I guess the message I am trying to convey is that breast cancer (any chronic disease) requires a whole person approach. The above is just an overview and I would love to hear whether any of it is any help and how I can help you further.

Hyperthermia and ozone treatments I think are excellent because they cause no damage to normal tissues and they are effective against tumour cells. The main difference between Germany and Guangzhou is cost (and environment!). In Germany I paid about AUD$37,860 for 20 days of treatment over 4 weeks (even with becoming an outpatient after the first two weeks, which signficantly lowered the daily charge). In Guangzhou, it cost just under AUD$8,600 for two weeks - and they work on weekends also, so it was 14 days of actual treatment - as a VIP patient, VIP patient means airconditioned private room with ensuite bathroom, regular bed (not hospital bed), filtered water on tap, flowers, fresh fruit, a la carte menu, television, fridge, and nursing escort to all appointments!

In Germany, you are in the middle of a gorgeous Bavarian town, with forests, parks, mountains - I spent any non-treatment time exploring eg travelling to Salzburg, Munich and into the mountains. The air is clean and the whole environment feels very healthy. In Gunagzhou, the Clifford Hospital is part of Clifford Estates which is an upmarket area of Guangzhou. It’s all very safe and enough people speak some English to make it manageable (some things get lost in translation but not the important ones!). But the air pollution is terrible. I spent the last week in Guangzhou entirely in my room because the air was so bad and still came home with full blown asthma which I have not had since I started nutritional therapy 5 or so years ago.

I hope this helps. The most important thing to know is that you can heal this. You must believe this with every cell in your body, no matter what anyone else says. This has been the case with everyone who has “spontaneously” remitted advanced cancer.

While in Guangzhou, I met Dr Eckhard Roerich (an Australian integrative medicine doctor) who was doing a 4 month stint at Clifford. Eckhard told me that Ian Gawler had metastatic bone disease when he went to visit the Indian guru Sai Baba who had produced many amazing healings. As Ian approached Sai Baba, the guru called from a distance: “stop worrying, you are healed”. Ian had a large metastasis growing out of his breast bone at the time. He said: “it was that easy. I stopped worrying, had faith that I would be OK”, and the rest is history.

Of course he completely changed his lifestyle, and that is the other requirement - we must be prepared to make the changes that the healing requires. Sometimes that seems almost impossible because we have made ourselves indispensible in so many ways, but as soon as the decision is made, the universe will bring amazing serendipities into your life and what seemed impossible will come about.

www.clifford-hospital.org.cn/Hospital_eng/intro/a2.htm
www.klinik-st-georg.de/e/
www.aima.net.au
www.yourhealth.com.au