Anyone Stage IV Doing Complementary Therapies or Holistic along with Medical Therapies?

more cowbell,

I didn’t want to leave your post unanswered. Other than a brief foray into juicing shortly after my dx, de novo, I pretty much went back to an all things in moderation diet. Now, I eat whatever I want, when I want since I’m just trying to keep weight on. I do use cannabis, high THC, in the evening so I can get a solid meal in. I’ve had 12 progression free years (single bone met) so whatever is keeping my disease at bay, I can safely say it isn’t my diet.

We have had stage IV members try a wide variety of diets, protocols, regimens, etc. though I am not aware of who is doing what currently. You can try the search function to see posts about anything you’re specifically interested in.

Nope, my reply was to you, more cowbell. Not sure about tagging. Do we do that here? Sounds as if your diet/lifestyle takes many things into account. Take care

Nutrition… I believe it does play a role in our health but , in terms of disease, it guarantees nothing. Folks are often upset when after years of clean living and eating, they are dx’ed with cancer or other diseases they believed their diet/lifestyle would prevent. I think cancer is unbelievably complex and although there are things, some proven but many not, we can do to lessen the chances of disease, those things are just pieces of a bigger puzzle that is still incomplete.

Tougholdcrow, I also come from a family where alcohol was rarely consumed. However, it had no preventative effect as we have many family members with cancer. It’s tempting to try to come up with pat explanations and clear connections between lifestyle and cancer but cancer itself seems far too complex to be reduced to something that happens or doesn’t happen based on diet/lifestyle. Yes, you can try to tip the odds in your favor but it seems that it is far more than diet/lifestyle.

Please note that I am not advocating for a wildly unhealthy lifestyle. I am simply saying that special diets, protocols, and regimens are not proven nor guaranteed to prevent or cure cancer. We had some stage IV members who were into Jane Mclelland a while back. You can search this site to read about their experiences

@luvdbyhim, Chris had colon cancer that was “cured” by surgery. He turned down chemotherapy and did his diet stuff. He encourages people not to get chemo. I don’t think he’s had any special training to speak with such authority

threetree,

Your comment was interesting and brings up something to think about.
I have 12+ progression free years with mbc (de novo), never had chemo, drugs like Ibrance and Verzenio had yet to be approved and am currently on no treatment at all after over 11 years on one AI or another! Would I recommend this course of treatment to others, advise them to follow my path, write a book? Oh, heck no! My experience is mine alone and even the best oncologists can’t say why/how I have done so well. Top that off with my stunning lack of medical training and no clinical expertise (I’m a retired teacher) and it would be arrogant of me to claim I had figured out a way to beat my stage IV cancer ( Caryn Beats Cancer!). One person doing well does not equal beating anything .

I believe that many complementary practices can enhance overall well being but I have never seen any substantive data to support alternative cures for cancer. There is anecdotal evidence a plenty but an anecdote is just that. I am not opposed to the the idea of alternative tx but there would need to be clinical trials to prove both its efficacy as well as any side effects before I considered it. I was steeped in the world of educational research for many years so although medicine is a different field, I’m still pretty data driven in terms of tx decisions. I also understand that some people are not and that’s fine too as there are multiple approaches to almost everything in life.

@luvdbyhim @exbrnxgrl @AJ @threetree I think you are all very wise about this and I'm with you. At this point, I'm putting my faith in medical science even if it's not perfect. (In fact, there was a rather major error made in my case which hopefully didn't do me any great harm, but could have.) I spent some time reading back through people's stories on this site, and I can't say that those following special diets or seeking alternative treatment seemed to fare any better. (Some of these stories were so sad that I cried—the hopes, the fears, and the tragedies.) This is an extremely small sample, of course. I'm not going to take up a two-pack a day habit just because gramma lived to 86, but on the other hand, moderation in all things is a pretty good principle, physically and spiritually, as the sages have told us for thousands of years. The Middle Way. There is a lot of interesting preliminary scientific research on diet, circadian rhythms, cannabis, etc etc, but I always ask myself, does this person or group have something to gain (ego? profit?) by promoting these findings? I know from my own habits of mind that I feel somehow in control of a situation if I read a ton of stuff, as if somehow I'll be the master of the universe and defeat my own death if I know everything, but of course this is an impossible dream, an illusion. There are some good scientific indicators of why some people do well: oligometastatic, HER2+, de novo, post-menopausal, etc., but at the same time, so much is unknown. The great unknown, where we all live, but here is a beautiful day.

I get very angry when I see people making money from other desperate, scared people. In Australia we had an infamous case of an individual saying she had cured her brain cancer through diet. She sold books about it and people followed her recommendations. Some even left their medical treatments. It turned out she never had cancer and was convicted in court. I must be very naive because I cannot comprehend how someone can do that to other people. I know everybody needs to make their own choices about treatment, but they should be informed choices, not choices made because of a scammer.

Long ago, I volunteered with an organization that helped AIDS patients. Often, they'd have cupboards filled with alternative medicines that didn't help at all. There was a lot of woo woo medicine sold to desperate people, sometimes doing more harm than good. What helped was activists who demanded government action and a big scientific effort to cure that complicated disease. And now HIV can be really well controlled with antiretrovirals and it happened pretty fast. That's science, not woo woo. I think that is where we are heading with breast cancer research. Unfortunately, we also live in a world where many distrust medical science.