Originally Written by: Black, Dean, Ph.D.
Dr. Dean Black is a graduate of Penn State University and has taught at the University of Southern California. He is a well-known lecturer, consultant and author in the area of natural healing. He is president of The Bioresearch Foundation. He writes and publishes “Healing Currents”, a monthly newsletter on natural healing. He is listed in “American Men and Women of Science” and is an associate member of the Society of Sigma Xi.
I would like to show you an article published by the Associated Press. The title of the article is, “Amish Father Jailed for Refusing Son’s Cancer Therapy”. Have you heard about the story? The father of the boy argued that chemotherapy was not helping his son, Amos, who had abdominal cancer. He stated that the boy had done much better on natural medicine such as herbs and vitamins. The court said he was not a fit father and sent him to jail. They gave his son chemotherapy by power of the law. The man’s lawyer told me that the boy subsequently died. While this law suit was going on, there was literature available in medical journals which demonstrated that herbs can reduce cancer, and chemotherapy can make the cancer worse.
SOME MEDICAL LITERATURE ON CHEMOTHERAPY:
There was an article published in the journal Cancer, which is the most eminent of all cancer journals. It was a presentation given at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In the U.S., you can’t get a much more prestigious location than that. This was an award-winning lecture given by Robert T. Shimky when he was given the Alfred P. Sloan Jr. prize for his research. In the first paragraph of his talk, he states, “The phenomenon of resistance to cancer chemotherapeutic agents, whether occurring spontaneously or subsequent to therapy, is a common and vexing problem for the clinical oncologist and a heart-breaking event for the patient and his family. One can consider drug resistance and cancer as an analogous process”. In other words it is the same process. He goes on to say, “The therapy that we are using for cancer causes cancer.” In his conclusion, he says, “Might such treatments, meaning chemotherapy treatments, not convert relatively benign tumours into a state of malignancy and progression to a more lethal form? Indeed, that would seem to be the case.” If you give chemotherapy to someone whose tumour is relatively benign, that person will attain a more malignant state. Other scientists have tested his proposition. A study was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigations called “Oncogene: Amplification in Tumour Cell Lines Established from Small Cell Lung Cancer Patients and its Relationship to Clinical Status and Course”. This study was done on lung cancer patients. The oncogene is the tumour gene, the gene they believe provokes tumours. Amplification of the oncogene means that the number of oncogenes multiplies. Where a cell once had only one oncogene, now it has many more, 15, 20, lO0. This is what happens with chemotherapy. This is the process of resistance. So they said, “Let’s look at this and its relationship to clinical status and course” (in other words, the survivability of the patient) when the patient experiences this resistance to chemotherapy?. They concluded that resistance to chemotherapy (that is, this particular genetic change that makes cancer worse) is more common in tumour cell lines established from treated than untreated patients’ tumours. In other words, if you get chemotherapy, you increase the risk of this particular genetic change, and this genetic change is associated with shortened survival. Now isn’t that interesting? You take chemotherapy, and you run the risk of physiological changes within your body that shorten your life.
SOME MEDICAL LITERATURE ABOUT HERBAL CANCER TREATMENTS:
An article in the Los Angeles Times, October 6, 1989, states: “Chinese derived cancer treatment from ancient herbal tonics and common plants strengthen the immune system”. This article reports research published in the journal Cancer, the exact same journal which described chemotherapy as being harmful. The researchers discovered that the herbs actually strengthened the immune system. They studied cancer patients. They measured their immune strength and compared them to normal people. Of course, the immune strength of cancer patients is much lower than normal. They then gave them Chinese herbs and measured their immune strength again. They found that in 90% of the patients, the immune strength went from below normal to above normal. This research was done at the M.D. Anderson Hospital at the University of Texas in Houston. One of the senior researchers stated, “We have something that works or at least seems to”. So there it is. These herbs work against cancer. Chemotherapy makes it worse. And yet an Amish father can be jailed for not subjecting his son to chemotherapy but preferring herbs.
THE DIVERSE ROLES OF MEDICINE AND NATURAL HEALING:
Why do people oppose natural healing? I am not saying that the medical principle is incorrect. I once went into anaphylactic shock from eating strawberries. Had I not been in the hospital and received a shot of adrenaline, I would have died. My son had acute pneumonia. Had it not been for my physician, he very likely would have died. My other son had an ear infection which had disintegrated his ear drums. He was a boy from Vietnam we had adopted. Now, antibiotics could have prevented that, but when we discovered he was deaf, a surgeon put a muscle membrane from the temple area back over his ear canal, replaced his eardrum, and my boy hears today. All of these are the products of medicine. What I am suggesting is that medicine is being used out of its place. It is a correct principle for certain things, but when we use medicine out of its place, it becomes harmful and dangerous. We now have laws that hold medicine in a wrongful place, and prevent what rightfully belongs there, and that is natural healing.
I would like to share with you two definitions which will explain the difference between natural healing and conventional medicine. Medicine is the science of replacing body functions. Natural healing is the science of restoring bodies. That’s the difference. Medicine replaces. Natural healing restores. There is a limit to the degree of health we can achieve by replacing body function. Replacing body functions means artificial hearts, dialysis, and drugs which also replace body functions. For example, insulin replaces the function of the pancreas, and cortisone replaces the function of the adrenal glands. An antibiotic replaces an entire system, the immune system. Chemotherapy also replaces the immune system. It’s the immune system’s job to get rid of the tumour. We bring in chemotherapy and do the immune system’s job. What effect does that have on the immune system? It weakens it. Medical science knows that, but it is not relevant because chemotherapy replaces it.
THE BODY’S RESISTANCE TO DRUGS:
The resistance to chemotherapy is not unique to chemotherapy. It is a general principle of all drug use. Drugs are of two kinds, mimickers and blockers, also called stimulants and inhibitors, agonists and antagonists. A mimicking drug is like insulin, estrogen or cortisone which mimics the body chemical. Medicine developed with the notion that there is no such thing as an adaptive power in the body; they envisioned that you can give the body any drug and the body will not adapt to it. When you give a mimicking drug to attempt to increase the level of a chemical in the body, the body responds by lowering its production of that chemical. When you give a blocker to try to get rid of a chemical, the body responds by overproducing it. This is called drug resistance. The anabolic steroid, for instance, is a mimicking drug. It mimics testosterone, which is the male reproductive hormone, and testosterone is what synthesizes muscle protein. If the athlete takes extra testosterone because he wants to synthesize more muscle protein, it will increase his muscle size, but because the testosterone is artificially introduced, on the surface, he becomes more masculine and physiologically he becomes more feminine. His body says, “Where is this coming from? I did not make this.” And his body, in order to compensate, begins to underproduce testosterone and internally he has atrophy of the male reproductive organs and breast development. When you use a drug in an acute fashion, you don’t provoke this resistance. But when you repeatedly use a drug, you provoke a resistance that mimics the disease.
PUBLIC OPINION ABOUT MEDICINE AND NATURAL HEALING:
If you were to survey people and ask them their opinion about natural healing and certain natural healing issues, such as organic food, what percentage do you think would support it? A Lewis Harris poll in the U.S. asked the population, “Do you prefer organically grown food, or food which is grown with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and would you be willing to pay more for organically grown food”. They found that 90% of people preferred organic food. Fully 50% said they would pay more money for it.
Now, suppose you were to separate people who prefer natural healing and people who prefer conventional medicine into two groups to determine in which ways they are different. This study has actually been done by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center, and the article was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They studied 300 of their own patients, cancer patients going to their center for chemotherapy and other medical treatments, and 300 other patients going to practitioners of natural healing methods. They wanted to know why these people go to ‘quacks’ and what difference there is between the two groups. They surmised it would be education, and that people going to the quacks would be the uneducated, the gullible. They also believed it was a desperation that caused people to resort to quacks in the last throws of their illness. The results showed that the difference was education, but it was the patients who preferred natural healing who were more educated, and they were substantially better educated. As a matter of fact, one out of five of these patients had either a master’s or a doctoral degree. These patients were twice as likely to have a college degree, and more likely to have gone to college. Sixty percent of those who preferred conventional medicine had never gone beyond high school, whereas 40% of those who went to quacks had never gone beyond high school. So they were surprised that all these educated people were going to quack therapists whom they considered fraudulent. When they were asked, they said, “We want something, and medicine does not offer it to us. Since we can’t get it from medicine, we go to where we think we can get it”. You know what they wanted? They said, “We want to restore our immune systems, because we know that people with strong immune systems don’t get cancer. We are educated. We have enough sense to know that. And medical literature does not offer us that opportunity, because it is the science of replacing body functions, not restoring body functions.” Natural healing is literally credible scientifically for chronic disease. Orthodox medicine is credible scientifically only for acute disease and traumatic conditions, and the bulk of scientific evidence supports this idea.
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