What type of cancer did you have and when were you diagnosed?
Colon cancer. December 22, 2003. Stage IIIC T3 N2 M0 adenocarcinoma.
What were your symptoms?
Sharp and aching abdominal pain a few times per day, low energy, slight anemia, some rectal bleeding, dark stool. I didn’t feel well.
Did you have surgery?
Yes. I had surgery on December 30th, 2003. I had a right hemicolectomy and resection of terminal ileum. 18 cm of my ileum and colon was removed along with a golf ball sized tumor (4.5 x 4 x 2 cm) and 49 lymph nodes. Four lymphs nodes tested positive for adenocarcinoma. I did not need a colostomy bag.
Didn’t surgery cure your cancer?
Colorectal cancer is the #2 cause of cancer death in the U.S. today. In the vast majority of cases, surgery does not cure any type of late stage solid-tumor cancer, because cancer is a systemic disease affecting the entire body, and circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and circulating cancer stem cells (CSCs) are already in other parts of the body. This is why new tumors form after surgery, and why doctors recommended chemo and radiation after surgery. They recommended 9-12 months of chemo for me. My surgeon and my oncologist didn’t think surgery cured my cancer, and I don’t either.
According to one study, published the same year I was diagnosed, the recurrence rate of cancer after curative colon resection was 100% after 4 years.
The 5-year relative survival rate for stage IIIC colon cancer is 53%. Young adult patients (under 40) also have a 28% higher risk of cancer progressing and spreading during a one-year follow-up, and are 30% more likely to die from cancer. Many 5-year survivors still have cancer and eventually die, which is why the 10-year survival for stage IIIC colon cancer is less than 20%.
Multiple randomized trials have found that the adjuvant chemo recommended to me (5-FU-leucovorin) only increased 3-year overall survival by 4-6%. Translation: Between 71-74% of patients are still alive (not necessarily cancer free) 3 years after surgery. With 5-FU-leucovorin treatments that percentage increases to between 75-84%.
According to the National Cancer Institute, stage III colon cancer patients with one to three involved lymph nodes have significantly better survival than those with four or more involved nodes. I had four.
Furthermore, a meta-analysis of studies found that colon cancer patients with tumors on the left side, have better survival rates. Mine was on the right.
So the odds were stacked against me in every way possible.
I did not end up in the 10+ year survivor group because I am “lucky”.
I got here because I radically changed my diet and my life. I removed all the toxic inputs of the Western diet and lifestyle, and replaced them with whole food nutrition. I corrected all my nutritional deficiencies and in the process strengthened my immune system and changed the internal terrain of my body– making it inhospitable to cancer. Most importantly, I put my trust in God to lead me in the path of healing.
Surgery can also cause cancer to spread, which I explain in this video.
Did you have any chemotherapy or radiation treatments?
I was told I needed 9-12 months of chemotherapy. The first oncologist I saw told me I was “insane if I did not do chemotherapy”, but I chose nutrition and natural therapies instead.
Why did you decide not to do chemotherapy?
Chemotherapy is toxic poison, and the idea of poisoning my way back to health did not make sense to me. Chemo destroys your immune system. It makes cancer stem cells resistant and more aggressive. It causes secondary cancers throughout the body. It also can cause permanent damage to your brain, nerves, hearing, heart, liver, kidneys, bladder, and more. And it has a convoluted and exaggerated success rate. That’s the short answer… There’s a much longer answer here
A 2015 study of stage II colon cancer patients found that the patients who were treated with chemotherapy had worse quality of life (no surprise there), and were on average nearly three times more likely to have a cancer recurrence, and two times more likely to die within two years of their diagnosis than those who did not have chemo. I was stage IIIC, even worse off than those patients. No doubt I made the right decision.
Also read this post about radiation
What was your diet like before cancer?
Processed food, fast food, and junk food every day. I did not party, or smoke, and rarely drank alcohol, but I ate whatever I wanted. Because I was thin I thought I was healthy. I was exposed to toxic chemicals. I was also in a high stress work environment, and had a lot of negative emotions in my life. Those are major contributing factors to disease in the body.
What was your anti-cancer diet exactly?
PHASE ONE:
I adopted a raw vegan diet beginning in January 2004 after reading God’s Way To Ultimate Health by George Malkmus.
Upon rising I drank 12-16 oz of purified water. I used a distiller for many years, now I use a Berkey.
Here are 5 reasons why I love the Berkey water filter
Then I juiced enough organic carrots, celery, beet and ginger to make 64 oz of juice, and I drank eight 8oz servings throughout the day, nearly every day, for several years. Read my juicing post here.
If you’re wondering what kind of juicer to buy, read this post.
Sometimes I ate a piece of fresh organic fruit mid morning. Usually a green apple or a grapefruit.
I ate a giant organic salad for lunch every day. Read about my giant salad here
I drank a coconut berry smoothie every afternoon. More about the coconut berry smoothie here
I ate super healthy nuts for snacks
I ate a giant salad again for dinner every day.
Before bed I drank another 12-16 oz of purified water.
I also did periodic juice fasts during this time.
PHASE TWO:
After 90 days on the raw vegan diet, the clinical nutritionist I worked with recommended adding some cooked food back to my diet because I was not able to maintain a healthy weight on a 100% raw diet. I was 6’2″ 135 lbs! He also recommended 2-3 servings per week of either organic lamb or wild-caught Alaskan salmon.
The raw vegan diet is a very powerful detox and healing diet in the short term, but was not sustainable for me long term, because I am an ectomorph (skinny frame) with a very high metabolism. As a result of these factors, my body needed more calories than my non-starchy, vegetable-based raw vegan diet could realistically provide. At the time I was convinced that the raw vegan diet was the best thing for me, but when your life and health are at stake, it is important to set aside any preconceived notions and dogma you have about diet and health, and be open to give your body whatever it needs to thrive.
I followed his advice and added wild-caught salmon or organic lamb to my dinner 1-3 times per week along with my giant salad, and some cooked food like sweet potato, brown rice, lentils, quinoa, spinach, asparagus, squash, Brussels sprouts, etc. Cooked vegetables are good for you too. Organic is optimal.
For the next two years, my diet was consistently 70-80% raw, and about 95-98% plant-based. I kept it simple and basically ate the same thing everyday with a little variation of cooked veggies at dinner and a serving of meat occasionally.
So that’s the diet plan I followed along with supplementation and other natural therapies detailed on this site.
What else did you eat?
Not much else. The point was to keep is as simple as possible and follow the KISS (Keep it Simple Sweetheart!) model. Many raw food recipes are very time consuming, and I don’t really enjoy cooking/food prep, so I didn’t experiment with many raw recipes. Giant Salads, Veggie Juice, and Coconut Berry Smoothies all have a quick prep time, and I knew exactly what to buy at the grocery every week. No meal planning necessary. There is no better way to get a complete spectrum of nutrients in your body than what I did. Period. So Keep It Simple!
How did you monitor your progress?
I had blood work done every month for the first two years, and a few CT scans spaced 6 months apart. This was done by an integrative oncologist, the late Dr. Roy Page MD, who worked in conjunction with my nutritionist. I now have blood work done about once a year and I also have a colonoscopy every 5 years. Dr. Page also administered IV Vitamin C and glutathione treatments.
I have cancer, what should I do?
I strongly urge you to take control of your health by radically changing your diet and life immediately, before rushing in to conventional therapies. Chemo, radiation and some surgeries can have irreversible consequences, and may make your situation better in the short term, but worse in the long term. You must educate yourself in order to make an informed decision.
Read my posts on chemotherapy here
Read the books and watch the movies listed on my resources page.
Are you a Christian?
Yes I am a Christian. I give all praise and glory to the Lord Jesus Christ for my life and health. He is my savior and my healer.
“I sought the Lord and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears.” -Psalm 34
Did you see that article attacking you?
Yes, so far there are three. All written by the same guy, David Gorski (aka ORAC), an atheist surgical oncologist who specializes in breast surgery, and is now a self-appointed defender of “science-based” and “evidence-based” medicine. Considering the fact that breast cancer is the #3 leading cause of cancer death, he’s got a lot to be defensive about.
Maybe if I attack alternative therapies no one will notice that my colleagues and I are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year not curing cancer…
In between breast surgeries and cancer research, Gorski somehow finds the time to write giant blog posts criticizing people who’ve used (or promote) nutrition and natural non-toxic methods to heal. If you enjoy reading arrogant, condescending, critical posts about people like me, who believe in a holistic approach to health, and favor nutrition and non-toxic therapies over conventional ones, then he’s your man.
And despite all those wonderful qualities, it’s hard to take someone seriously who got my diagnosis wrong in his attempt to discredit me, calls me “lucky” multiple times, and literally calls nutrition “quackery”, despite the thousands of published peer-reviewed scientific studies demonstrating the powerful anti-cancer compounds that abound in plant foods, and the many epidemiological studies demonstrating that diet and lifestyle choices have a dramatic impact on cancer rates in large populations of people. South-East Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean and large swaths of Africa have HALF the cancer rates of the U.S. and Europe. (Dr. Denis Burkitt’s African research papers from the 60’s and 70’s are life-changing).
It’s weird to me that someone who claims to be all about science and evidence would ignore the vast body of science and evidence from nutritional science and functional medicine. There are over 40 scientific journals devoted to nutritional science!
Bottom line: I believe that the body can heal cancer, and that nutrition is the foundation of health and healing. I experienced it personally and I’ve met (and interviewed 50+ people) who have healed cancer as well. Even terminal stage 4 cancer. If you think that’s quackery, then you should surf on.
It’s nice to know that not all doctors agree with David Gorski. There’s a strongly worded criticism of him by neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor here.
For anyone who says, “You can’t use anecdotal evidence” or “You were just lucky”, or “How dare you question science-based medicine” or “Shame on you for telling people not to do chemo” etc.
The human body, just like nature, is Intelligently Designed to work in perfect order.
You have trillions of cells in your body, each cell is more complex that anything man has made!
Do you think that these trillions of cells work together in perfect harmony on accident, by chance?
It is the body’s brilliant attempt to save your life.
Everything the body needs to thrive and heal can be found in nature, specifically whole plant and animal foods from the earth.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.That’s a SCIENTIFIC LAW OF NATURE, just like gravity.
Only by working WITH gravity can man fly. Any attempt to ignore or defy gravity will result in failure.
When you abide by the Laws of Nature you give your body the ability to heal.
If you do even the smallest amount of research you will find that chemotherapy is for the most part ineffective in curing most epithelial (solid-tumor) cancers. The cancers that it does work pretty well for are childhood leukemia, CLL, testicular cancer, and lymphomas. This information is on my site and it abounds in hundreds of published medical industry studies. Go to pubmed and learn something from the scientific evidence that you have not seen.
When an oncologist tells a patient that their particular cancer has been shown to “respond” to a particular drug, what that really means is it that the drug has shown to shrink tumors. That’s it. No remission. No cure. Just tumor shrinkage. That’s what the industry calls “responding”. Look it up!
Every oncologist knows this, but most are trapped in a system that pays them HIGH six figures to keep doing exactly what they are doing, despite the dismal results.
There are many courageous MDs just like him who have left the brutal and barbaric “cut poison burn” cancer treatment and are getting phenomenal results. Dr Nicholas Gonzalez, Dr. James Forsythe, Dr. Leigh Erin Conneally, and Dr. Rashid Buttar, just to name a few.
Nutrition and natural therapies will NEVER be used instead of pharmaceutical drugs. For one simple reason: They cannot be patented and are not profitable. Wake up ! There are over 1,000 drug company lobbyists in Washington DC alone. It’s a conspiracy of greed with continued concerted effort to maintain control over a trillion dollar medical industry.
With the exception of trauma cure, the entire medical industry is built on three lies: that you have no control over your health, that you are essentially a victim of good or bad luck, and that you cannot heal yourself.
“Think about what your blog is doing”
I know exactly what it’s doing. It’s waking people up and giving them the power and information to heal themselves. Read the natural survivor stories and comments on my site. They are incredible!
The medical industry has a term for cancer going away without medical intervention.
They call it “spontaneous remission” and shrug it off as unexplainable.
Hello? It’s called HEALING.
The body created cancer and the body can heal it, if given the proper nutrients and care.
I’m definitely not a genius and I haven’t discovered a miracle cure, because there never will be a “cure” in the pharmaceutical sense. That’s the biggest lie of all.
I’m just a regular guy, but I’m one of thousands of regular people who have rejected health-destroying cancer therapies, taken control of their health, radically transformed their life, and healed.
Anyone can do what I did. Including you.
(((c)))
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