Alternative Therapies
Last October, just after we were told my chances of surviving the Stage IV cancer that was attacking my body were less than slim, I sent a note to friends that said I was now ready to consider alternative therapies. After all, the medical options were becoming limited.
“Bring on the crazies,” I wrote, tongue-in-cheek. “I’m now ready for dandelion therapy, for a steaming bowl of rare herb soup, for that secret pill doctors ‘don’t want us to know about.’ I’m now ready to dance the hulabebang naked at midnight in the light of a full moon at Stonehenge, to rub cocoa butter on my chest in the desert sun, to shower in holy water from a distant artesian well, to eat fig leaves from Argentina. Shoot, I’ll even listen to what Dr. Phil has to say, so long as it doesn’t conflict with Dr. Seuss.”
If this brought on laughter, as intended, I cannot say. But it sure brought out the crazies, my intentionally ambiguous term for way-out-there ideas from possibly way-out-there people.
In the weeks after that entry appeared on my website (www.jimchastain.com), I’ve been given so many alternative therapy suggestions it would make your head spin. Secret teas. Strange herbs. Oxygen treatments (breathing is apparently not enough). Fermented wheat germ extract. A creamy soup. A cancer-killing mushroom from Japan.
“Man believes eating plankton stopped his cancer,” touts one ad I was sent. In the photo accompanying that ad, you see a picture of a guy who looks like the sort of guy who would believe plankton stopped his cancer. His testimony, like so many others of this type, demonizes doctors and their chemotherapies and radiation treatments. They only made his condition get worse, the man proclaims. But when he took a nutritional supplement containing marine phytoplankton, “the highest quality plankton available,” his terminal lung cancer vastly improved, he says. He urges readers to “contact these guys” because something that works so well shouldn’t be “kept secret.”
At the bottom of the ad is a rather ironic disclaimer indicating that the miracle pills are not FDA approved, are not intended to treat or cure any disease, and that no scientific evidence supports the claims made. I wonder what Plankton man thought about that.
“Cancer is a fungus,” proclaims one group, so you must fight it with baking soda, blended with a certain type of water or, even better, pure maple syrup. Something about the chemical reaction in baking soda and maple syrup is doggone miraculous. (”I suspect you know this, but cancer isn’t a fungus,” one of my oncologists quipped.)
One note I received speaks of a nutritional combo that Pfizer allegedly studied, found effective, but turned down because they couldn’t make any money on it. All you do is purchase this particular “super oxidizer” and an herb from the Amazon that is supposedly 10,000 times more powerful than chemo, and, voila, life is good.
I’m not making this stuff up.
One suggestion came from a forwarded email. As it always goes with suggestions like this, somebody knew somebody else who went to church with somebody who knew a doctor who was receiving an experimental therapy to battle his Stage IV brain cancer. The results had been, supposedly, miraculous. I was given the doctor’s contact info, so I could schedule a “consult.”
After I failed to immediately respond to the email (due in large part to the fact that I was still recovering from the bad news I’d been given), I received a note from the doctor himself, who confirmed that he had been given little chance to live, but had been responding positively to an FDA approved product. (A visit to that product’s website, by the way, confirmed that is in fact approved by the FDA–as a nutritional supplement, but not, unfortunately, as a treatment for any stage of cancer, especially stage IV).
The doctor had scheduled me for a meeting with the doctor who administers this nutritional miracle cocktail (it isn’t a drug). You might think this doctor who was holding the cure for cancer would be working at some prestigious cancer clinic in Spain or some famous hospital’s lab. But no, he was a g.p. who shared office space in Bethany.
Should I stay or should I go? That was the obvious question. Without some crazy long shot like this, my chances of survival were approximately zero. Of course the odds might be the same if I went and chose to take this stuff they were offering. But who knows? What did I have to lose?
This is the continuing mind game that is stage IV cancer.
Going against my normally skeptical approach to anything that’s too good to be true, I scheduled the consult, the thought being that this was simply more information, another option to consider. I decided to go it alone, however, because I was embarrassed by my decision and I was unwilling to ask a friend or family member to join me on this pie-in-the-sky excursion.
My consult was scheduled for 5:30 p.m., i.e., after normal business hours, which was rather odd, I thought. It was raining as I left, natch, and the sky was as dark and gloomy as my own brooding mood. I followed the directions I had received to a commercial district in Bethany, the sort of place where you’re more likely to find hardware stores and used car lots than a medical clinic.
Be that as it may, I finally located the place, which was one of those buildings that houses a variety of businesses. In order to find the doctor, I had to walk through a pharmacy and be granted admission through a locked door.
I was greeted by an exuberant doctor’s assistant, who introduced herself, then handed me a bunch of paperwork. (They had waived the normal consult fee, incidentally, because I had been referred to them by the doctor I did not know.) The paperwork consisted of a series of CYA disclaimers and legal boilerplate, the gist of which was that this treatment was not FDA approved for cancer, that it could result in all sorts of problems, including death, that my insurance would probably not pay for it, and that I would be on the hook for the bill.
I’m a lawyer, so these papers did not surprise me. They were a bit bold, however, and receiving them up front did not produce a calming effect.
I was then ushered into a rather shabby private room, not unlike most of the g.p. rooms I’d seen during my forty-five years. I had consulted with some of the best doctors in the world in an effort to rid myself of cancer, but here I was in Bethany meeting with what seemed, at the time, the equivalent of a witch doctor.
The doctor entered a few minutes later. He didn’t really look like a doctor, in my opinion. To me he looked more like a used car salesman or perhaps the “local pro” at a small town golf course. We shook hands, and he introduced himself. He had a certain nervousness about him, and he appeared unwilling to look me in the eyes.
“So Mr. Chastain,” he began. “You’re probably asking yourself what a general practitioner here in a little town like Bethany can offer you that a world famous cancer institute like MD Anderson cannot.”
Yes I was.
He proceeded to lay out his treatment plan, an FDA approved nutritional supplement infused intravenously three times a week, along with vitamin therapy (omega 3 and vitamin D3), and a strict diet. The treatments could be given in addition to my normal chemotherapy treatments or in place thereof, should I decide to forego those standard treatments.
He could make me no promises, however. The treatments, which he only gave to stage IV people like me, completely failed one third of the time, he said. Another one third went into a sort of holding pattern, while another one third showed dramatic reductions in the cancer, some to the point of total remission. (These stats are similar to the ones you get when using standard chemotherapy, one of my doctors later told me.)
But he could show me no official studies to back those numbers up. In fact, he couldn’t show me any evidence of how this product had ever been used to fight cancer or had helped anyone in my situation. There was, instead, a lot of hearsay and innuendo. A study was “about to happen” here or there. “Call this Doctor,” he said. “He’s gotten some great results, which have been documented.” “Go to this website, it has some stuff about some tests that were done in Arizona.”
“Do your due diligence,” he encouraged, before telling me how someone had gotten into trouble with the FDA by making unsubstantiated claims about the product.
“So how much are we talking?” I asked, bluntly. For that was the bottom line, wasn’t it? These alternative therapies generally come with a rather steep price tag.
The answer was $7,500 for a six week cycle, and two cycles were to be expected. So 15k, about the cost of a new car.
“That’s a lot less than one chemo treatment,” he told me. Yes, that was true, but chemo was covered by insurance.
“Think about it,” he said. “Let me know if you want to proceed. At the very least, this stuff will help you feel better.” He then introduced me to another smiling assistant, who was the licensed dietician and infusion specialist.
After that, we parted ways. And I drove home crying.
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