A cancer diagnosis is terrifying and life-changing. As Dr. Block writes in Life Over Cancer, “‘you have cancer’ are three of the most dreaded words you can hear.” For many patients, as they begin the process of becoming “a cancer patient,” the fear of chemotherapy becomes all too real. In fact, many patients report that their fear of treatment is greater than the fear of the disease itself. This has prompted many patients to question if the use of chemotherapy is still justified.
According to Dr. Block, yes, it is, and, in fact, science demonstrates that patients who don’t complete their chemotherapy regimen have reduced survival. However, he also has some concerns about chemotherapy, including how it’s used and how it’s administered.
Chemotherapy has long been thought to be the “magic bullet,” the single treatment that’s going to take down cancer, which we know to be a complex, multi-faceted disease. As Dr. Block explains, “The science tells us that any one or two or even three “bullets” alone (conventional treatments) are not enough to hit the 50 or 100 or 500 bullseyes that make up the biology that’s driving malignancy. Our medical model has been fixated for way too long on this idea that we’re going to find a magic bullet, a silver bullet, that’s going to knock down just the right bullseye and everything else is going to follow.
“The only exception to what I’m talking about is immunotherapy and some of the newer drugs and newer approaches to immune treatments. In these cases, a single drug can have a multi-targeted impact; it’s working with multiple arms of the immune system that can have a rather profound effect. But the problem here is that though the results can be impressive, this has only been the case in a relatively small number of patients.”
We believe this speaks even more aggressively to the importance of integrative care. As just one example, we know from a number of randomized controlled trials that if we use nutraceuticals and strategies that get the microbiome diverse, if we get those bacteria having dozens and dozens of cousins, that diversity will markedly drive up the effectiveness of immunotherapy. Conversely, if we actually narrow the diversity of our microbiome, it does just the opposite, decreasing the efficacy of immunotherapy.
In addition, we can’t constructively speak to the use of chemotherapy without mentioning the importance of a patient’s biochemical environment (the “terrain”), both during and after treatment. Overlooked in the conventional oncology world and generically addressed in the alternative medicine community, Dr. Block and his research staff have spent a great deal of time developing and evolving diagnostic laboratory testing and treatment options that can transform the biochemical environment from one that is cancer-promoting – commonly found in cancer patients – to one that is cancer-inhibiting. A patient’s terrain plays an integral role in determining whether a tumor will respond to treatment and how well a patient will tolerate care. In addition, optimizing a patient’s biochemical terrain helps reduce the side effects of treatment, combats treatment resistance and even helps boost survival!
In our next blog we’ll talk about chronomodulated chemotherapy, what it is, why Dr. Block brought it to this country from Europe over 2 decades ago and how it’s different from conventionally-administered chemotherapy.