NOTES ON CANCER TREATMENTS

Here is the story of my experience with cancer and cancer treatments.  What follows is pretty serious material, because cancer is serious business.  I know exactly how it feels to have a medical doctor say, "You have cancer."  Of course, some of what follows is my opinion, but most is factual.  I think you can tell the difference.

Most of this page was written before I learned about The China Study. Now I can say with confidence that I got my cancer from too much dairy products. Although otherwise vegetarian, I was consuming plenty of cheese, yogurt and ice cream. Please check out the story of Jane Plant's experience with breast cancer, and compare it to the experiments with mice detailed in The China Study. Jane Plant cured herself multiple times of advanced breast cancer, but each time grew lax from her discipline. When she finally did die, it was from a blood clot - not cancer.

I used to say the biggest problem regarding cancer in the United States is that so many people are making a living from it.  Now I realize there is a much more serious underlying problem, and that is the mindset or paradigm concerning the establishments that are supposed to educate us and provide for us. Our people are very effectively brain-washed to believe that our medical doctors always know what is best for us, and that the doctor is going to cure us.  All the doctor can do is help, because healing comes from within.  This brain-washing comes mainly from the pharmaceutical and food production industries, aided by the Government which is strongly influenced by lobbying.

The next biggest problem is that people are unwilling to accept the idea that, in one way or another, we bring all misfortune onto ourselves and we all have the option of turning our lives around.  We can't go back and recover body parts lost to cancer surgery, burned away by radiation or poisoned to death by chemotherapy, but in most cases we can recover nicely from cancer if we begin soon enough, before all these really bad things have happened.  Also, we can - almost to 100% extent - prevent cancer from occurring in the first place. Read The China Study.

The third biggest problem is that when it comes to nutrition, medical doctors are probably the least informed professional group you can name.  And when you tell a patient about something different, the first response is very often, "I'll ask my doctor."  When they do, they get a pooh pooh.  From a 1990 report I read that out of 125 medical schools in the United States, only 30 have a required course in nutrition, and the training in nutrition received during four years in medical school by the average U.S. physician is 2.5 hours. Although the figures may be somewhat different in 2015, it's basically the same.

You may find it hard to believe that, generally speaking, medical doctors don’t know much about nutrition.  I will admit that the situation seems to be improving, but have you ever had one ask what you eat?  I’m now in my 90’s, and I’ve encountered only one - the Seventh Day Adventist doctor, C.W. Lynn who supervised my recovery from cancer. Shortly after I had my cancer, I was privileged to be a guest at the home of Dr. Ernst T. Krebs, Jr. in San Francisco, and during dinner he commented on an article that had just appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (peer of JAMA).  I decided that when I returned home I would check this out at the medical library of the Navy Orlando Hospital where I had been treated just a few months before. To my great surprise, they said they had never heard of it. Well, I happened to know the head dietitian at Florida Hospital in Orlando, which is a large hospital run by the Seventh Day Adventists (nutrition-oriented people), so I asked her about it.  She told me she had heard of the Journal, but had never seen one!  In a lecture by Dr. Robert H. Mendelsohn, M.D., he said, "Doctors don’t believe in nutrition.  They believe in better living through chemistry."  Millions of dollars are spent on research into nutrition, but who reads it?

One especially bad thing about cancer is that it can be "insidious in onset," that is, it may sneak up on you when you think you are perfectly healthy. This happens to many, and it happened to me.

In my case, I lost one testicle to cancer back in 1972.  Not knowing anything whatever about alternative therapy for cancer, I submitted to surgery, then an initial round of chemotherapy.  My treatment was at the Navy Hospital in Orlando, Florida. Actually, I had two surgical operations — first to remove the testicle, then, after a lymph angiogram, a major operation to remove lymph nodes on one side of my torso, leaving a 12-inch surgical scar and a slight bulge on the right side where they did not get everything back in the correct place.  On my way to the hospital for the beginning of all this, a friend gave me my first hint that there were alternatives, but evidently my karma  prevented me from learning anything in time to avoid the surgery and chemotherapy.  What my friend gave me was a copy of Prevention  magazine containing the story of laetrile up to that point. From my hospital bed I tried in every way I could to learn how I could get this treatment, but with no success. For the two operations I was hospitalized for about 6 weeks, and on the next day after release, all the "doors" immediately opened up. I was supposed to go back for periodic injections of chemotherapy every three months for two years, but I simply did not go back. The five one-a-day injections of chemotherapy given just before I was released were devastating; the urologist told me it would take from six months to a year to recover from those five injections, and he was right! It may be that I never got completely over that, because I never regained all the weight I lost, and my digestive system seems to have been permanently damaged. When I was released from the hospital after those five injections, my alimentary canal was a mass of sores from my mouth to my anus (using a mirror, I could see the sores in my mouth), and the doctor told me I was extremely anemic, but did nothing about it. However, within a couple of days, I found a civilian doctor who immediately gave me a shot of vitamin B-12, and that helped. You may know that, for those who continue on this type of treatment, one's hair falls out, and generally it's the beginning of a long, painful, expensive spiral to death.

Here's a parenthetical note: See the mainstream magazines today, hawking all sorts of drugs so dangerous that the warnings far exceed the ads themselves.  From the June 2004 issue of Readers Digest advertisement for Procrit: "PROCRIT is for chemotherapy-related anemia in patients with most types of cancer. PROCRIT is proven and safe.  PROCRIT is available by prescription only and is injected by your doctor or nurse.  In studies, diarrhea, edema, fever, vomiting, shortness of breath, tingling, and upper respiratory infection occurred more often with PROCRIT than placebo."  That's safe, they say!  If you read the complete advertisement, you will see that it doesn't mention recovering from the cancer.  And notice that the anemia is caused by the cancer treatment.

I said above that I tried to learn anything I could about alternatives.  My friend, as I said above, gave me a copy of Prevention magazine that contained an article about laetrile, and that's all I had to work with.  I was personally acquainted with several of the doctors and nurses at the Navy hospital because I had been giving them sailing lessons in the Navy Orlando Sailing Club.  So, when one of the doctors came to visit me, I asked him what he knew about laetrile.  He said he had heard of it but had heard that it was no good.  I asked him, "What about later research?" Remember, this was in 1972.  He said he would check it out.  So he sent off somewhere and soon received a copy of the "latest research" which was the 1953 report by the California Cancer Commission denouncing laetrile as worthless.  He gave it to me, so I still have it.  What he was not told was that this report had long ago been shown - from public records - to contain false statements and was in no sense a scientific examination of the subject.

Just to be a little more specific about the horrors of chemotherapy, when the physician's assistant came to give me my first injection, I noticed that the material was in a small vial, seeming to be 1 cc or less.  It was first mixed with what appeared to be 1 liter of other liquid (probably saline solution) and hung on a stand, as for any "I.V."  I bared my arm for the injection, as I would normally do for any ordinary injection or drawing of blood.  However, the man wanted to use a lower part of the forearm, and I asked him why.  "Because this destroys blood vessels," was the answer.  The next day he put it in the other arm, then the third day back to the first arm, but further up, etc.  My doctor told me the chemotherapy "kills cancer cells faster than it kills normal cells."  But what he didn't tell me was that there are lots of normal cells in the body that are also rapidly proliferating, and these get blasted along with the cancer cells.  It's a "shotgun" approach, still used in cancer treatment.  Because this was also expected to make me vomit, I had huge stitches across my abdomen, and I was told I could "take a day off" if I felt I needed it (after the fourth injection I took one day).  Months later, on a commercial airliner, I picked up an issue of Scientific American and happened to see an article on this substance, actinomycin-d, which had been injected into my body.  It was described as one of the most toxic substances known to man.  My doctor had described it as a promising new cancer drug.

The alternative that I was introduced to was laetrile and all that goes with it.  During the following few years, I became very active in The International Association of Cancer Victims (now called Victors) and Friends (IACVF).  My civilian doctor who supervised my recovery introduced me to IACVF, and I asked him if there were any chapters in the local area.  He said "No," and "Why don't you start one?"  So that's what I did, and that's how I got involved.  It was the first chapter east of the Mississippi, and soon there were 10 chapters in Florida.

Two other organizations I have been involved with are The Committee For Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy, set up to defend doctors who were being oppressed by the Government, and the National Health Federation (NHF).  I met many of the big names in these movements, and I saw lots of people getting remarkable relief using laetrile.  I met people who successfully used laetrile in cancer of the bone, the eye, the tongue, lung cancer, the colon, etc.  I also visited some of the cancer clinics in Mexico, and talked to doctors and patients, and twice I toured the laetrile factory in Tijuana.

I used laetrile myself immediately after getting out of the hospital, and for about a year afterward.  First I had the injections for about three months, then tablets for some more months, and for about 40 years thereafter, ate laetrile on a daily basis, getting it from apricot kernels. It was about 2012 that I read The China Study, learning that the primary cause of cancer is animal protein.  Now I try to avoid all animal protein. It's important to note that any type of therapy for cancer may be futile if you continue to cause it.

All of the metabolic treatments for cancer involve cleaning out the body, restoring the immune system, and providing adequate nutrition.  The body is so well adapted to dealing with diseases, that it can recover from almost anything if given a chance.  For specific diseases, there are usually specific food substances or herbs that are useful in dealing with them.  In the case of cancer, laetrile is a specific, but laetrile alone is often not enough, especially if the cancer is advanced.  However, Edgar Cayce*, in one of his readings said that if a person eats half a dozen almonds per day, he will never have to worry about cancer.  What was not clear is that he should have said "natural (bitter) almonds."  If I remember correctly, Edgar Cayce was never shown to be wrong in any of his readings.  Bitter almond, I have read, is the source of laetrile in Europe, whereas apricot kernels are the favorite source in this part of the world.  In Germany or Austria, you can walk into a health food store and buy bitter almonds.

You may remember that in the Bible, Jesus is quoted as saying it's not what you eat, it's what "comes out of the mouth that defileth the man." From this has come, in our culture, an almost complete disregard for what we eat.  But we should understand that Jesus was speaking a relative truth.  What we say and think may be more important than what we eat, but what we eat (or fail to eat) can still kill us.  Jesus also spoke of the day when we could handle snakes and drink poison, but we aren't there yet!  Another part of the cancer mystery is the power of prayer and of our mental and emotional activity, but I'm not dealing with those in these notes.

When one gets cancer, one should look around to see what he's doing wrong.  After I had mine, I learned that a co-worker (another military retiree) had exactly the same thing I had, at nearly the same time, so I asked him, "What have you done to change your lifestyle?"  He said, "Nothing; the doctor got it all."  A year later he was dead, probably from continued chemotherapy.

I don't know of any doctor or clinic that uses laetrile alone, but laetrile alone will often "hold the fort."  My father was a good example of this.  For as long as I knew him, including when he got cancer in his tongue, he never paid any attention to the subject of nutrition, and he sucked on a pipe or cigar for decades, until a tumor appeared on his tongue where the smoke, nicotine and tars had irritated it for so many years.  This condition occurred after I had my experience with cancer, so I immediately got him on the laetrile.  When I found out about it, he had already had a big notch cut out of his tongue, and the tumor was back with a vengeance.  His doctor wanted next to cut the whole left half of his tongue out, down to the root, but my father refused, saying, "At my age, no more surgery" (he was 79).  The doctor wrote a letter to him (which I still have), saying that if he didn't have the operation, the pain from the advancing cancer would be unbearable.  I think my father benefited from my experience and from what I told him I had learned, because he agreed to use the laetrile, but he didn't do anything else.  The result was that the tumor shrank appreciably in size, and my father told me the only pain killer he ever used during this treatment was an occasional aspirin, not for the tongue but for headaches.  We had no doctor involved in this; the injections were given by an ex-Army medical technician.  Living alone, my father died in his sleep from cardiac arrest at age 80, and the previous day he had been out to a laundromat washing his laundry.

I knew another case of a man with lung cancer who used to go to the same doctor where I got my laetrile injections.  He died, but his wife told me that at least he died without pain.  I knew still another case of a young lady with bone cancer — an extremely painful type of cancer.  She testified that her pain was immediately relieved with laetrile, but she and her Navy husband soon moved away, so I didn't get to follow her case.

The reason I tell about these cases of relief from pain is that in the video World Without Cancer, this is mentioned, but not emphasized as much as it might be.  See elsewhere on my Health Notes page for information on this video.

I've seen some remarkable cancer cases come out clean using laetrile and other aids.  One lady had a melanoma in her eye, and when it was diagnosed, her doctor got all excited and told her the eye had to come out, like yesterday, or it would kill her quickly.  The lady refused, and not only beat the cancer, but recovered part of the vision in the eye.  The doctor was angry with her for this decision, and refused to provide any more service, so she had to "go it alone" — took care of it by herself without any doctor at all!  I had the privilege of driving her to our state capital for hearings on a proposed new law to make laetrile legal in Florida (which was done).  I also met the man in the video who had the reverse colostomy.  I first met him shortly after his operation, and then again about a year later when he seemed completely recovered.  I spent an afternoon with him and Dr. Dean Burk, who had just retired as number two man at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.  We were all at the home of Dr. Ernst T. Krebs Jr. in San Francisco (see World Without Cancer).

Incidentally, the purpose of getting state laws passed to make laetrile legal for cancer treatment was not for the patients, but to protect the doctors from the Government.  The last I heard, 23 states had passed these laws.

The political battles to protect the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the "cancer establishment" have been horrendous over the years.  I attended part of the trial of one doctor (James Privitera) who was convicted of using laetrile in his practice in California where it was illegal.  The doctor went to prison for trying to help his patients.  Later the law was repealed, and I understand the doctor's name was cleared by a Governor's pardon.  Still, and through it all, our national Food and Drug Administration declares that laetrile must not be used, and continues to wage war on anyone who dares to use it.  When a U.S. Court of Appeals ordered the FDA to cease and desist, the FDA took the case to another district where it had a sympathetic judge, and got the order reversed.  This is why it is safest for people in the United States to go to Mexico if we need this treatment.  However, one can find doctors in this country who are willing to use laetrile and other nutritional factors "off the record."  When I lived in Georgia in the 1980's I had a local doctor ready to do this for me if I should ever need it again.  In the 1970's Dr. Lawrence MacDonald used it in his practice in Marietta, GA. (Later, as a US Representative, Dr. MacDonald was among those killed when the Russians shot down the Korean airliner that strayed off course in the Pacific.  A section of the highway through Marietta is named after him.)  Our FDA has always spread lies about laetrile; every day for about three years after my initial cancer treatment, I took by mouth what the FDA called a lethal dose of laetrile (this dosage was calculated using information provided by Dr. Krebs).

A little more about the video called World Without Cancer.  I've met several of the people in the film, which was produced in 1973.  The politics and the science are about the same today, but our cancer rate has increased from 1 in 4 to 1 in 3.  As far as I know, to get the injectible form of laetrile in the U.S., one still has to order it through the mail, and it is smuggled into our country (we don't know or ask how this is done — it just arrives in the mail, and years ago I saw a memorandum from the FDA which stated they would not pursue individual consumers, but only dealers).  Tablets can be ordered with no problem, or at least I see them openly advertised for sale in the U.S.  Initially, I was given two vials at a time, three times per week for about two weeks, then decreasing doses.

In the video World Without Cancer there is a statement: "The science of cancer therapy isn't nearly as complicated as the politics of cancer therapy."  In 1974 or thereabouts, the FDA gathered up some news people with cameras and made a raid on the offices of Tree of Life, a well-known natural foods wholesaler in St. Augustine, Florida.  There they confiscated 400 pounds of apricot kernels, without citing any law violated by Tree of Life, and the illustrated story by the news media gave the implied message: "See how we are protecting the public from these dangerous people and this foolish business of trying to maintain health through special foods."  Tree of Life didn't fight it, but gave right in and quit handling the kernels.  I visited their offices shortly after this happened and talked to them.  The Government action also had another effect that FDA desired: the owner of the largest health food store in Orlando (whom I knew) called a meeting of store owners from around the state, and they (or most of them) stopped handling apricot kernels for fear of the Government.  But Sears Roebuck was too big to be treated this way; in the health food section of their store in Orlando, they continued their sales of apricot seeds without incident.  All this is a good illustration of the Golden Rule: "Who has the gold makes the rule."

One thing the "establishment" likes to say to people who want to use an alternative therapy is that it is unproven, that it's quackery.  And when some doctor or clinic tries to prove it, the Government does everything in its power to prevent, delay or skew the study.  Why do they do this?  It's all about money!  Our Government and its agencies are effectively managed by special interest groups (the pharmaceutical industry in this arena) who fund the election campaigns and lobby Congress.  The pharmaceutical industry cannot patent these natural substances.   Some years ago our Government, only after many years of demands, agreed to a laetrile test, but then used a product that they had been assured was the wrong molecule.  That is explained and documented in Maureen Salaman's book, mentioned below.  In a lecture by Dr. Harold W. Manner, then Head of the Biology Department of Loyola University in Chicago, he described his completely successful animal study with laetrile used in treating breast cancer.  That's the only well-documented study I know of.  Dr. Manner also discovered and explained why all the common animal experiments with cancer drugs are wrong. His book The Death of Cancer, although out of print, may be available on-line from http://www.barnesandnoble.com.  The lecture summarizes what is in the book.  In it he said that the experiments prove beyond any shadow of doubt that Dr. Krebs' hypothesis is completely correct. At the bottom of this page you can listen to the lecture here on this web or download it. The length is slightly more than one hour.

As to "unproven treatments and quackery," I have a quote from Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn who answered that charge in court.  Among many other distinguishing qualifications, Dr. Mendelsohn, a pediatrician, was head of the Admissions Board of the State of Illinois for his specialty.  As a witness for the defense in a case in which the State wanted to take custody of a child away from the parents because they refused the deadly chemotherapy in favor of using special nutritional methods, he testified that for cancer, all treatments are quackery, because there has never been a double-blind study on humans to test any modality or drug.  When asked by the judge, "Then what's a person to do?" he replied, "Well, your honor, I've been thinking about that.  And my conclusion is, that a reasonable person, faced with an array of unproven remedies, would behave prudently by choosing that remedy which is least likely to kill him."  The judge said, 'That makes sense.' and he refused to take custody of the child away from the parents."

Usually, the best procedure with cancer which, after all, is a life-threatening disease, is to go to one of the Mexican or European clinics where one usually spends two or three weeks getting the cancer under control, then return home and continue on the regimen which was developed at the clinic. The last time I checked, some, but not all, insurance companies will pay for this treatment.

World Without Cancer was originally produced in a strip film format, and later put on video.  This is the reason for the peculiar shape of each frame on the video.  I bought the original strip film version, and I have shown it more times than I can remember — many dozens of times.  And I have met the author, Ed Griffin.

A good book on this subject is one by Maureen Salaman, called Nutrition: The Cancer Answer.  She put out a revised edition, but I haven't seen it. One of my problems is that I get this good stuff and lend it to others and never see it again.  In that way I lost her (autographed) book and one by Dr. Harold W. Manner called The Death of Cancer (finally recovered the former).  Dr. Manner was honored by having one of the clinics named after him when he retired from Loyola, but he has since died (heart failure, I believe), and the name of the clinic has been changed again.  Maureen (whom I have also met) began her work with "The Committee," and served many years as President of NHF.  Several of the big names in this field have passed on: Ernst T. Krebs, Jr., John Richardson, Dean Burk, Harold Manner, Robert Mendelsohn, Hans Nieper, Michael Culbert, Maureen Salaman, and probably others.

If you want to order some injectible laetrile, you can find the information on the Internet by searching on "laetrile."   However, I think any cancer patient should try to get competent medical help in Mexico or some other country.  I don't think there's any good reason for buying the tablets, because one can more easily and cheaply buy apricot kernels from which the laetrile is normally extracted.  If you want some and can't find them in a local health food store, I can tell you where your local store can order them wholesale.

I am giving you what is probably an overwhelming dose of information.  My purpose is partly just to help overcome any tendency to say, "This is incredible; it can't be this bad!"  But it is, and maybe even worse than I have depicted.  I knew one local couple a few years ago who not only suffered horribly, but after the husband died, the hospital tried to take the widow's house away from her to pay the bills.  The medics had used up all the insurance, and wanted the last ounce.  When I was involved in this movement, the average cost of dying from cancer was said to be $35,000.  That was more than 40 years ago, so you can imagine what it's like now.  (Today the cost of a hospital room is about $3,000 per day, and that does not include the doctor bills.)  There was one study by a professor at the University of California (Dr. Hardin Jones, I think) who, using the Government's own data, showed that statistically a cancer patient would live as long with no treatment at all as with the treatment being given, and in the case of breast cancer, four times as long.  That study was long ago, and might not be true now.

If you would like further documentation on the general nature of this governmental atrocity, there is plenty of it.  You could begin by reading AIDS: What the Government Isn't Telling You, by Dr. Lorraine Day, MD.  Dr. Day was on the faculty of The University of San Francisco for fifteen years, and was chief of Orthopedic Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital.  She quit because the Government refused to allow doctors to protect themselves from the AIDS virus.  In her case, she said that often she had to place her unprotected fingers inside a person's spinal column and use her finger as a shield against accidentally cutting the spinal cord, and thereby sometimes stuck herself, thus being exposed to whatever might be there.  But the government did not (probably still does not) allow the doctors to find out ahead of time if the patient had AIDS, and therefore she was put into a very dangerous position.  Dr. Day has also produced a video titled Cancer Doesn’t Scare Me Any More.  See http://www.drday.com/.  When you visit her website, you will see how vicious and desperate the attacks get when big business is threatened.  Another source of information on this is to do an internet "search" on laetrile, and follow the links to World Without Cancer.

HOW ABOUT SKIN CANCER? I have used dimethylglycine topically (applied to the skin) to quickly cure at least four (4) confirmed skin cancers. They included both squamous cell and basal cell carcinomas. If you want to learn about this, contact me using the "Contact" link provided.

I hope this information will be helpful to you, and if I can help in any way, please don't hesitate to ask.

* Edgar Cayce - If you're not familiar with the life and work of Edgar Cayce, you've missed a lot!  Begin by reading Edgar Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet.  You should find this in public libraries and on the Internet.

L. Miles Standish